WORCESTER'S Westside has lost one of its most amiable and friendly characters with the death of Horace Perks.

I had known him since the 1960s when he was a regular at what was then the unofficial Worcester Press Club - the 600 year-old Coventry Arms pub in Friar Street. Its landlord then was Harry Allen, who had been a Press photographer in South Africa.

The pub later reverted to its original historic name of The Cardinal's Hat.

Horace would often join me and my Press colleagues in a friendly game of three card brag, though I'm not too sure whether it was legal in those days for us to have been playing with small cash wagers!

In the intervening decades, it was always a joy to meet Horace, ever cheery, witty and seemingly laid back and carefree.

In 1997, he gave a brief and humorous insight into his life with his contribution to Philip Adams' Memories of St John's book.

Horace was born in 1923 - the year his parents moved to Worcester from Birmingham, where his father ran seven small shops, which he continued to operate from the Faithful City.

The family's new home was also a shop - No.45 St John's. It was one of a row of three tiny shops which filled the site now occupied by the Age Concern building.

"The house at No.45 was very small - you couldn't faint in the kitchen," wrote Horace. The neighbouring shops were Rallings' chippy and a sweet shop.

In 1937, however, the Perks' garden supplies and pet food shop moved across the road to premises at the corner with Bransford Road. Horace was called for war service in the "Worcesters" and served for five years, mostly in India and Burma. Later, he spent two years in America, working in a San Francisco shipyard, but then returned to Worcester to run the St John's shop, helped for many years by his mother.

It was to be almost half-a-century later before Horace finally closed the shop and sold it at the end of the 1990s.

In Horace's memory, I repeat here a particularly amusing and characteristic recollection of his, which appeared in Memory Lane a few years ago:

"Our shop was across the road from St John's Cinema and, in times past, all the local children going to see the Westerns there seemed to have pea-shooters.

"We'd bag up a quarter-pound of peas for them for a few coppers, and then they'd go and shoot peas at the 'baddies' in the films. Trouble was, they were damaging the screen, so it wasn't long before the proprietor Mr Thornes demanded in his wisdom as they went in: 'Come on, hand over your weapons.' It was like Deadwood City!

"He collected about 50 pea-shooters, which was fair enough, but after the show about 70 kids would claim pea-shooters back, so he had to go and buy some more from Mutters because the kids threatened 'We'll go and tell out dads if we don't get them back'. "

Horace's widow Josie (maiden name Anderson) was also actively involved for many years in running her family's fruit and flower shop in St John's.