Arthur Hale (1941 – 2026)

Their Story

Arthur James Hale was born in the spring of 1941 in Port Talbot, Wales, the second of four children, and spent his boyhood between the shipyards where his father worked and the hills where his mother swore he would break his neck. He broke an arm instead, twice, and considered it a fair exchange for two perfect summers. He trained as a marine engineer, and the sea kept him for thirty years — cargo runs to Lagos, Halifax, Singapore — until Margaret, whom he met at a dance in Swansea in 1967 and married eleven months later, told him the children no longer recognised his footsteps. He came ashore without complaint and taught engineering at the local college for two decades, where a generation of apprentices learned that a machine will forgive almost anything except being lied to. He grew impossible roses. He wrote letters on paper long after everyone stopped. He kept every ticket stub of every voyage, filed by year, in a biscuit tin his grandchildren were forbidden to open and therefore opened constantly. He is survived by his three children, seven grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and a garden that will spend years forgiving him for leaving.