There is a particular kind of obituary that no newspaper commissions: the one written by the people who almost met the famous person, or met them sideways, in a corridor or through a ceiling. That is what these two letters to the Guardian are. Together they take about ninety seconds to read and leave a clearer picture of Bob Davenport than most long-form profiles manage. Jocelyn Rose remembers being a teenager at Hornsey School of Art Saturday classes in the mid-1960s, singing loudly in corridors in the calculated hope that Davenport — her teacher, whom she knew from the local folk club — would hear her and put her in touch with his agent. He didn't. She remembers him fondly anyway. The gap between the plan and what happened, and the warmth that survived it, says something precise about the man. Siobhán Ní Chuanaigh's letter is even shorter and stranger. It lifts a detail from Davenport's obituary — his family turning up the radio so the Irish family upstairs could dance to the Ceilidh Hour — and simply says it gladdened her heart. 'Hospitality comes in many forms.' Four words that function as a thesis about a life. What emerges from these fragments is a portrait of someone who occupied multiple worlds at once: the folk revival circuit, the art school, the immediate geography of his neighbourhood, the Irish diaspora community above his ceiling. He didn't seem to police the borders between these worlds very aggressively. That is not a small thing. The letters section of a newspaper is, among other things, a distributed memory system. Individual readers hold specific moments that institutional archives don't. Rose's corridor story and Ní Chuanaigh's radio detail would not appear in any formal record of Davenport's life. They exist because the Guardian asked, and two people happened to write in. The folk tradition Davenport worked in operated on exactly the same principle: songs survived because someone remembered them and passed them on, not because an institution preserved them.
