Frank Dobson

• I STARTED voting because Frank Dobson drove past me in 1987. I was grateful for that encounter during his funeral at St Pancras Church on Monday. In those years many members of London’s ethnic communities were intimidated into not voting.

The sub-text of a right-wing establishment and echoed by a violent BNP was that we, though born here, didn’t belong here. We should leave or, at best, keep our unworthy little fingers away from English institutions.

And so, on that slightly hazy day, 30 something years ago, a car, a little worse for wear, was turning into Grafton Road with a voice crackling out of a megaphone something like: “This is Frank Dobson, thank you for voting.”

The voice was not asking us to vote. It was thanking people like me, in my neighbourhood, for having voted. It was an epiphany.

So people like me did go out to vote. Moreover, “they” voted for ordinary people like that fellow in a car that had seen better days.

It may sound daft, but it takes a kind, spontaneous gesture to change your world. Since then I have voted at every election.

Frank Dobson cared, and in that church on Monday it was a relief to recognise a handful of – hopefully – like-minded politicians, including his successor as well as one who also famously sports a snowy, slightly brambly, beard.

CONSTANTINE BUHAYER
Gospel Oak