Bob Fannin, cartoonist and yachtsman, died on December 13th last, abed 75. He will be known to many for his gently sardonic cartoons which appeared in the Irish Field, the Evening Herald and, from its first issue more than 30 years ago, Business and Finance magazine.
Born in Limerick, he attended St Munchin's College, where his prowess both as a rugby player and as a sprinter helped alleviate what may not have been the happiest years of his life. In later years, in fact, he attributed his uncharacteristic ferocity on the rugby pitch to his feelings about a punishing school regime which was to leave him devoutly undevout.
After moving to Dublin, Bob attended the National College of Art and Design. As an impoverished art student, he also began working nights at the Irish Press, where he took in the death notices and, as he said, became an unofficial bouncer to the bowsies who mistook the paper for an after-hours drinking club.
It was as a student that he met the soprano Marie Hand, who soon gave up NCAD for the more glamorous world of the stage, working at the Theatre Royal, the Capital and the Gaiety. Thus began a 50-year marriage which produced its own share of dramas as well as four children: Laura, Valerie, Robert and Hilary.
Bob began a career in advertising, becoming head of studio at McConnell's. Also at this time, he developed his enduring passion for the sea and sailing. By the early 1960s he was competing in Fastnets, and in 1973 was a member of the Irish Admiral's Cup team. However, it was on the voyages to the far North - Iceland, Greenland, Spitzbergen, the Faroes and the elusive 80th parallel - with skipper John Gore-Grimes on Shardana, that he had his best adventures. Those who sailed with him remember Bob as entirely at ease on a boat - patient, humorous, knowledgeable, unfazed by icebergs, polar bears, raging storms or walls of water - and he took pride in his membership of the Irish Cruising Club, the Royal Ocean Racing Club and Howth Yacht Club.
Becoming a cartoonist gave him the freedom to sail whenever he wanted, and it also provided the outlet for his lateral way of looking at life. His work was wry rather than heavily satirical, and often looked at events from the point of view of animals (the demure but pained expressions on the faces of cattle attending the Beef Tribunal spring to mind).
He created his own orbit, and those within it benefited from his generosity and tolerance. When I first turned up in Dublin with his daughter in 1990 - a Londoner largely ignorant of rugby, sailing and, to be honest, Ireland - I was absorbed into the routine he set up in his later years, and was made to feel I belonged.
After a painfully early start to his day (a cartoon was produced for the Herald by 9 a.m.), and a couple of hours at B&F in midmorning, the back of Bob's working day was broken and we would head to the Baggot for a couple of glasses of wine, O'Donoghue's for a beef and onion sandwich, one at Doheny and Nesbitt's, maybe, followed in the evening by a game of snooker at Howth Yacht Club. In this easy-going way I learnt my way around the city and gradually discovered I had emigrated. And over the years I met many, many others who had, like me, been made to feel at home (and sometimes given a home) by Bob and Marie.
On arriving at hospital just before Christmas for what he sensed would be the last time, his apprehension was confirmed by the Sacred Heart of Jesus that shone brightly above the crib. "Poor fool came in for a heart transplant," he said. "And look what happened to him."
The absence of Bob's familiar, unruffled, pipe-smoking figure will be keenly felt in all his Dublin haunts. His ashes are scattered in the sea by the Baily lighthouse in Howth, a good setting for a fearless sailor and independent spirit.