Tony Fyson
Tony Fyson
Tony Fyson MBE, Chairman of the Community Bookshop, Chairman of the Dartmouth and Kingswear Society and Town Councillor, is sitting in a holiday letting house next to the Community Bookshop in Higher Street.
“My wife and I acquired this house because it enjoyed a covenant giving rights to use the yard behind the shop. By chance the house came on the market, so we bought it and extinguished those rights. We now have planning permission to extend the shop into the yard, and next we hope to use the ground floor of the house itself.”
“I’m committed to the community bookshop because as soon as we moved to Dartmouth the Harbour Bookshop closed and it was one of the things we loved about the place! We were having a pint one day with friends, grumbling that “someone ought to do something” about it, when I realised that the ‘someone’ ought to be us!”
Things moved on quickly for the resulting bookshop project. “We formed a not-for-profit co-operative and received the generous offer of a free six-month tenancy for the shop at 12 Higher Street from the Dartmouth Trust. We bought fixtures, fittings and computers from the old shop and engaged Andrea Saunders as manager. Without her the whole thing wouldn’t work, as the rest of us are just occasional volunteers led by a small, hard-working, committee”.
“Crucially, people from far and wide bought ‘shares’ in the shop knowing that they would never earn anything from the investment: they, like us, simply wanted to see a bookshop in the town for the good of the whole community. This gave us the capital to stock the enterprise and a sum to spend on the expansion plans. We have just successfully completed two years trading in difficult conditions”
Tony was born in March, Cambridgeshire in 1943. When he was 11 he won a scholarship to the boarding school Christ’s Hospital in Sussex. The school, which took only less well-off children, is famous for its ‘Bluecoat’ uniform dating from Tudor times. He was a sporty child so survived well in the public school environment. His claim to fame was catching a batsman in the slips off future England bad boy fast bowler John Snow.
After school Tony joined Voluntary Service Overseas aged 19, and was posted to the Fiji Islands to become an English teacher for a year. “I was lucky to be sent to Fiji – it was quite an experience and I’m sure I learnt more than I taught,” he said. “I also got to spend five weeks working as a midshipman for the Royal Navy after the Commander of a survey frigate offered me the chance over the Christmas holidays.”
Returning in 1963 Tony studied Geography at Oxford University. It was the Swinging Sixties and he even got to see the Beatles once, though not in conventional circumstances. “I saw them out of my college window overlooking Radcliffe Square,” he said. “I was alerted by the screams of fans as the Fab Four left after an incongruous dinner on a college High Table.”
His studies led to an interest in how towns work, in terms of design, conservation, social and economic functions. He hopes to apply his knowledge and experience for the benefit of Dartmouth. “I’m interested in how we can make towns prosperous and house people better. I’m a bit of an idealist, and I don’t apologise for that.”
After university, Tony worked in town planning for Westminster City Council before “brushing the dust of town planning” from his feet and training to teach. But he then found himself running an environmental education unit for the Town and Country Planning Association.
After a brief spell in academia, he returned to planning as a journalist, becoming Editor of The Planner, the journal of the Royal Town Planning Institute. “I worked there for ten years before the then Secretary of State for the Environment’s private publishing firm bought the magazine, but perhaps understandably didn’t buy me with it! So I freelanced before retiring.”
His contribution was recognised in 2004 when he was made MBE for services to town planning and urban environmental education. He remains a trustee of two environmental planning bodies in London.
Tony and his wife Hilary were student contemporaries at Oxford but first met at a Unesco Conference in Helsinki in 1977 and married in 1980. They moved permanently to Dartmouth in 2011, leaving three grown-up children in London, but Tony’s association with the area goes back much further.
“My parents retired to Kingswear in 1971 – when it was possible to get a train there direct from London. My father died in 1982 and my mother moved to Dartmouth in a flat next to Bayards Castle. She died in 1990 and we kept the flat.”
Now happily ensconced in Above Town, Tony feels that there is much to do. “Dartmouth does suffer from being a bit remote,” he said. “The lack of a timetabled rail link doesn’t help and the D&K is exploring the feasibility of re-establishing it.”
“As far as planning is concerned I think we need to grow the town’s economy and create more affordable housing for full-time residents. As a former second homeowner, I have to accept that the shortage of new building means that second homes are threatening to become a significant problem for the town. Part of the solution is to acknowledge that not all modern development is unacceptable, even in a wonderfully historic place like this.”
First published By The Dart May 2014
