Eulogy: Funeral of Frank Doran MBE July 26th, 2022 St.Bartholomew’s Church, Rainhill. Given by David Alton – Lord Alton of Liverpool
Within a few minutes of Frank’s death on June 23rd Sandra telephoned me from the hospital where, at his bedside she had faithfully kept him company though the last days of his final campaign, his last battle.
As an encouragement to Sandra, I sent her some words from the final C.S.Lewis Narnian Chronicle, “The Last Battle” : “Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy…. I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”
Exactly ten years before Frank’s death I had stood as Frank’s best man with Sandra and Frank at their wedding – just as he had been my best man in 1988.
June 23rd was also the birthday of Mabel, his late mother, and Sandra told me she could see him in the company and embrace of his parents with the suffering of his last battle now behind him.
It was only a year into his marriage when, at my university office, Frank showed me test results indicating the onset of Posterior Cortical Atrophy a rare dementia which would include the loss of his sight.
5% of people who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s get this rare dementia leading Frank to challenge the Alzheimer’s Society to talk about the rarer dementias, not just Vascular Dementia.
He joined a group to raise awareness and funds for the Alzheimer’s Society, saying he would not be defeated by Alzheimer’s and wanting to encourage others not to be defeated either.
Characteristically he insisted:” I have Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t have me”, later remarking “I am fighting it with the same vigour I needed 100 miles behind enemy lines in Iraq.”
Throughout all the unwelcome illness which followed, Frank was blissfully happy and blessed to have met Sandra – and, right to the very end, she, Bev and Paul, strengthened his determination that his rugged spirit would not be defeated.
We first met as teenagers, in 1969.
I was Chair of South Liverpool Young Liberals and Frank’s cousin, Eddie Bestwick, suggested going to talk to Frank about politics.
Turning up at their two-up two-down terraced home, in Flaxman Street, an Edge Hill neighbourhood still lit by gaslight and facing demolition, I was greeted by his widowed mother and their very large black cat.
Frank had been born on November 19th, 1950 – a classic post-war baby boomer – when food was still rationed, poverty omnipresent, war damage still visible everywhere.
He went to Cardinal Newman School and the nearby St. Sebastian’s Catholic primary school, in Holly Road. Its motto “Only the best will do. Be kind to one another” – could have been written in Frank’s DNA.
That childhood home was just a stone’s throw away from where, ten years earlier, a German bomb had hit an air raid shelter in Durning Road killing 166 people with the bombing raid leaving 2000 people homeless.Winston Churchill described the tragedy as “the single worst civilian incident of the war.”
This is the context in which Frank was formed and leading him to serve that community and to serve his country.
For three decades, with great commitment and courage Frank served in the TA, in the Parachute Regiment and Military Intelligence, seeing action in Iraq. He also became involved in the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies.
A few weeks before his death, during a visit to Broughton House, the Veterans Home where he lived out the last part of his life, we had a long and remarkably lucid conversation.
Needless-to-say, he wanted to know what was happening in Ukraine and wanted reassurance that Putin would be defeated. He also predicted that our Prime Minister would be gone by the summer.
On a lighter note, we recalled how, when a young man, on a training week on the Salisbury Plain, he and his band of brothers, had somehow managed to misread their orders and, instead of merely laying explosives under an ancient village bridge, they had managed to blow it up.
The orders may have gone awry, and some cross words had followed, but his commanding officers didn’t let a mere village bridge come between Frank and a commitment to the army which stretched over four decades.
In 2016, Frank went to Buckingham Palace to receive his MBE from the Prince of Wales. His Royal Highness noted Frank’s Parachute Regimental tie.
The first thing Frank told me when he, Sandra, and the family, then came over to Westminster: “Prince Charles shook my hand. When he saw my regiment tie, he said ‘Oh, I see you are a Para, it’s great to see someone from the Paras here today’
But he didn’t just wear the tie.
He risked his own life and knew that in every generation our freedoms and liberties must be defended.
Like the Prince, his Colonel Commandant, he understood and cared about the aftereffects of conflict on soldiers and their families.
Frank was passionate about helping ex-servicemen cope with the aftermath of conflict –asking me to become Patron of Restore, which he chaired, saying “The project’s remit is to give back their lives to service personnel who often feel they have left their lives behind.”
It was a privilege to open its Liverpool counselling centre. And in Frank’s memory, Sandra is encouraging donations to Beacon Counselling Trust.
During that first conversation in Flaxman Street, and as I enthused about community politics, neither of us would have guessed that three years later he would be driving voters to the polls in a very dubious broken down car helping me to be elected as a City Councillor in Low Hill; that one year after that he would be elected as a City and County Councillor for neighbouring Kensington Ward – which he represented from 1973-2008 ; and that 10 years later he would be accompanying me to take my seat as Edge Hill’s MP – famously arriving late at Lime Street Station, and grabbing the headline in the Liverpool Echo as he vaulted down the platform and pulled the door off the departing train to London.
It earned the headline Alton Stopped In His Tracks and Frank the amusing Scouse sobriquet – Frank DoorOff.
Frank became my constituency chair, my eyes, and ears on the ground – and it wasn’t just because we enjoyed each other’s company that every Sunday evening we would take in two or three pubs for a quiet drink: he knew how important it was for people to stay close to those who had put their trust in us.
As a Councillor he served on a variety of Committees, was Secretary of the Clint Road Residents Association, and represented his trades union on the Liverpool Trades Council.
For 40 years Frank worked as a teaching technician at Liverpool University’s Chemistry Department – a job that invariably led to Frank having plasters on fingers and thumbs which had got too close to the ammonia.
Plasters around the fingers, late night curries at Mr. Choudhury’s Kismet, and green ink, to which I will return, were all legendary.
One day at Westminster, I received an urgent call from the Liverpool Royal Hospital to say that during an accident in the lab Frank had been seriously poisoned by inhaled chemicals.
When I arrived at the hospital there were a group of his Kensington constituents anxiously gathered wanting news. It said a great deal.
Within a few days he was back at his Brae Street school “surgery” sorting out housing problems.
During that time, we both got to know Graham Burgess, who led the housing renewal programme in Kensington. Graham says “I’ll never forget his large wavy handwriting, and the use of bright green ink. Like Frank, unique.”
It was a private joke between Frank and I that the use of green ink was part of an MI6 tradition established by a Royal Navy officer more than 100 years previously.
Graham and Frank were both Proprietors at the Liverpool Atheneum. Frank had been a Proprietor since 2005 and between 2017 and 2019 Frank he was elected to its main Committee, caring deeply for the Club and determined to ensure its future.
It was Graham who introduced Frank to his work with Wirral Archaeology, researching the Great Battle of Brunanburh, fought in 937 by Æthelstan, King of England, against an alliance of Viking and Celtic armies. The battle brought England into existence. The importance of the lost site of the battle was something on which Frank could hold forth for hours.
He had a great and deep love of local history and family genealogy and had tracked the origins of the Dorans to Leinster. The Doran Irish family motto is “Hope is the anchor of life” – and despite what life had thrown at him Frank never lost hope. His belief in hope, faith, and charity never deserted him.
I once told Frank that his faithfulness as a friend was like that of Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings. Sam famously tells Mr. Frodo “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” Frank was always up for that fight.
Tolkien said he modelled Sam – the ever-faithful friend – on the English soldiers he had fought alongside in the Lancashire Fusiliers, who he said, “I recognized as so far superior to myself.”
After the Battle of the Black Gate, the last battle in The Lord of The Rings –Sam is elected Mayor of the Hobbit’s Shire for seven consecutive 7-year terms.
And in Liverpool Frank, too, became Mayor and later an Alderman.
When in 1996 he was elected Lord Mayor he asked Rene Norville, his 80-year-old aunt, to be his Lady Mayoress. It was a tribute to his late mother, who had succumbed to Alzheimer’s two years before.
As Lord Mayor Frank promised to promote greater respect for the elderly, and he chose as his mayoral charities The Forget Me Notappeal, a charity I chaired for women with breast cancer, and Zoe’s Place, the LIFE charity’s hospice for dying of seriously disabled babies.
Never one to do things half-heartedly Frank famously abseiled down the Liver Buildings to promote his charities and to raise awareness of the hospice movement.
He was especially proud that work he had undertaken between 1998 and 2008 – had helped develop Liverpool’s bid to become Capital of Culture.
He was on active service in Kuwait when he learnt that the bid had been successful.
Today, with respect for politicians having reached such a depressing nadir we could do with more of Frank’s qualities and attributes.
Joanna Hannam described those qualities to me as lovable and deeply affecting “Dear old Frank was the person who welcomed me from my arrival at Lime Street, aged 18, in a car he wasn’t licensed to drive and took me to a Chinese restaurant with food I had never heard of, let alone eaten. He was such a big part of my life there and a friend throughout.”
In the last days of his life Frank was anointed by the hospital chaplain and in our last conversation we talked about his certainty that there was life beyond this one.
Let me end with another quote from The Last Battle where Lewis says that all that had gone before was only the beginning of the real story: “ All their life in this world and all their adventures… had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
The special people in our lives never leave us, even in death.
Cicero understood that when he wrote that “the life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living while Abraham Lincoln said, “it’s not the years in your life that count – what counts is the life in your years.”
I have no doubt that Frank’s life, his infectious humour, his deep sense of duty and public service, his legacy and his camaraderie will be treasured by everyone who knew him.
Doubtless now that his last battle is over, he will already be canvassing and organising the choirs of welcoming angels and writing letters to the recording angel in green ink.
Today our love and our thoughts and prayers are with Sandra, Bev and Paul.
May he now rest in peace.
