The latest from Chairman Ben Clasper, from the Programme of our Home game against Billericay Town on October 9th.

Three years ago this week I burst into the ‘Two Chairmen’ in Westminster having run from the meeting in Whitehall in which we secured our return home to Champion Hill from exile in Tooting. I had left Duncan Chapman and Tom Cullen after telling them I would be back in an hour, just enough time for them to sink a quick lunch-time pint to settle the nerves. I am not sure how many pints that turned into as one hour became four and the meeting became a marathon rather than a sprint but at least we could blame the beer for some of the jumping, hugging and tears of three grown men crashing like pink and blue waves in a grey sea of Government suits. Seeing their faces when they saw the smile on mine as I came through the door and knowing how much that victory meant to two people who had led that fight for far longer than me will forever be one of my happiest memories.

On Wednesday we woke to the devastating news that we had lost Duncan, our dear friend and Club director. I always struggle to decide whether I find it worse losing someone when you know it is coming than when death is unexpected, but I do know that the hole it leaves is always the same. With Duncan that hole for many people associated with Dulwich Hamlet is one they will feel they won’t ever be able to climb out of. We may have known this day was coming and on occasion we may even have thought we were prepared, but nothing protects you from that jolt when you hear the news.

There are many people who have been far closer to Duncan for far longer than me and so I will leave it to them to tell a fuller story of his family, his life and career in their own time and their own way. However, I can speak first-hand about how and why Duncan belongs firmly and definitively in the category of ‘people without whom we would have lost our beautiful club’.

Before we were thrust together in 2018 in the last-ditch effort to save the Club from disappearing, Duncan and I had been ‘friends of friends’. We would say hello at the Club, the pub, Labour Party events or the occasional cricket game but we certainly weren’t close enough to know what each of us were getting into when teaming up to try to return the Club to Champion Hill. I think it’s fair to say I got the better end of the deal as Duncan turned out to have the perfect set of skills to offset my flaws when it came to sensitive negotiations. I lost count of the number of times he would say ‘I’m not sure it’s quite that bad Ben’ as he would read carefully between the lines of some comment by a politician from which I had already jumped to the most dramatic possible conclusion. I may have set the fires to return us home, but Duncan made sure it was a controlled burn that would save the Club, not an inferno that would engulf it.

The day we announced we were coming home and our first game on Boxing Day will both live long in our collective memory but those of us involved day to day between those two moments also know that Duncan was critical to that first game even happening. Walking back into a derelict stadium is one thing but ensuring it is in a state to safely host a capacity homecoming game is a whole other ball game. I still don’t know how he managed it, but Duncan rapidly became an expert in every area of safety and sports stadia management and once again, his calming approach made possible what often seemed an impossibility to me. If you were here on Boxing Day 2018 you were only here because Duncan made it happen.

Duncan also knew that the homecoming was just the start and not the end of the story and so went on to ensure we also took the first steps towards our long-term future by helping to finally secure a planning committee meeting date for our new stadium. Finishing that story is now our responsibility and while I am sure we will have more bumps in the road ahead I would encourage us to always try to remember, even on the darkest days, ‘I’m not sure it’s quite that bad Ben’.