Ronald still remembered after his death

Managing director Joan Stanley isn't surprised: "His book is an important social document."

It tells of a man born into abject poverty in Midhurst, but a man who discovered that richness isn't just about material wealth.

"He had a good family," explains Joan.

Sadly, after waiting 20 years for his childhood memories to become a book, Ronald died in 2004 just a few months after its publication

However, as Joan says, the book A Midhurst Lad has remained consistently popular ever since.

Ronald, who was 79 and lived at Sandrock, Midhurst, told in the book the tales of his boyhood, complete with mischief and endeavour, covering his early years from when his family lived in extreme poverty in a hovel in Duck Lane to better times after the 1920s depression.

Ronald wrote the book in1983 but it did not see publication until he showed his typed script to a friend and it was sent to Joan.

"Ronald got to a stage in his life where he had a nervous breakdown. Rather than impinge on everyone, he locked himself in the garden shed with an old type-writer and wrote the story of his childhood. I think he would have been in his 50s when he wrote it, I am guessing."

The result was a gem, a book which needed almost no editing.

"He was a milkman, a very intelligent young man born into poverty so bad that he didn't get the education that he should have got. He was denied a place at grammar school as the school perceived that his parents would not be able to afford the uniform."

Ronald's episodic account of childhood begins with a visit to a hospital and being sick all over the rear platform of a bus at the age of three and ends with the purchase of a pair of long trousers.

His first job at the age of nine was cleaning the shoes and boots of young ladies attending a boarding school, for which he was paid 6d (2p) an hour. Inevitably, it was here that he fell in love for the first time...

A Midhurst Lad, illustrated by Mike Avery, is available in bookshops in the town at 8.99.