Simon Galbraith is the co-founder of Redgate and one of the creators of Simple Talk. Here, he pays tribute to Andrew Clarke. You can also read Tony Davis’ memories of Andrew here.

His eyes have been darting towards the door sporadically since I bumped into him.

“I must make a management decision.” 

With that, he presses his hand on the door plate, it opens, and he walks through it. I am left, stood legs akimbo, like the small figure of a man embossed on the door that Andrew Clarke has just walked through.

Andrew was a brilliant renaissance man: yanker of his manager’s chain, acquirer of the most heterogenous and obscure areas of expertise, a child psychologist, a software developer, a gardener, a historian, the restorer of beautiful houses, a woodworker, a wonder-host, a raconteur and so, so, so much more.

So much more. I can absolutely guarantee that I am going to attend his funeral and discover whole, enormous, areas of knowledge and expertise that Andrew had that I was unaware of.

He once made himself, and then me, a guitar made out of a saucepan that had, when he played it, the sweetest and most magical of sounds. He tuned it by ear and used a glass bottle as a slider; if I closed my eyes I was transported to the Deep South of America as I listened to him.

Andrew was incredible.

I don’t mean that in the way ‘incredible’ is often used today but in the original sense of the word: difficult to believe.

As far as I know, Andrew never told me a lie but even when I was there, witnessing him with my own eyes, I struggle to convince myself that it really happened.

– Did he really tell me, his manager, that a bowel movement was the same as a ‘management decision’?

– Did he really buy one of the most amazing private houses I have ever seen for only a little bit more than the price of a normal house?

– Did he really have 3 personalities, all with their own distinctive style, writing separate technical articles and arguing with each other?

– Did he really get my young daughter to operate a chainsaw and chop up fallen willow trees?

– Did he really look around the most expensive house ever built in Cambridge – a Georgian replica built with obsessive attention to detail – and whisper to me after viewing it: “ivy will be a kindness.”

– Did he really attend a dinner party where he realized half way through that he was the only one present who didn’t have his own private island?

– Did he really kindly invite us over to his wonderful house to pick plums and grapes, have him and his lovely wife Jenny feed us and then lead us, saucer-eyed, through the most beautiful of gardens? Gardens that he and Jenny had made so insanely lovely that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced better (and I am the corporate sponsor of Chelsworth Open Gardens!)

– Did he ever, at the point in his career when most people would be retiring, play a pivotal role in building up Simple Talk to be a site and newsletter with a readership measured in the 100,000s, educating similar numbers about databases, database languages and how to have them think and learn?

The answer to the last of these is 100% yes but the rest…. even now I have the nagging doubt… Really?! Can that be true?!

20 years ago, I wrote to him:

“Dear Andrew,

Nice talking to you just now.

Just to confirm we’d like to experiment with you writing a monthly column of interest to our technical audience of SQL Server professionals (60%) and .NET developers (30%) and their bosses (10%). I’d like the column to be technically opinionated and to join the dots between different events – it is more important that the dots are joined interestingly and controversially than correctly. i.e. Newsy is good, controversy is good, technically controversial news is excellent and obscure technical is bad.

I suggest we try it out for 2-3 columns to see how we all enjoy working together and how our audience likes it. We pay $500 per article.

Simon”

The audience did like it and I would estimate that many hundreds, if not thousands, of articles have both been authored by “him” or brought into being by his editorship. (This doesn’t include the comments to other articles which must also be near uncountable.)

I’d been introduced to Andrew through something so rare I can’t think of a word for it: so I’ll call it “upward nepotism”. Andrew was recommended to me by his son, Lionel, after I asked Lionel to introduce me to his brother Humphrey (also a brilliant writer who I was hoping to poach.)

Lionel Clarke, who worked for Redgate for more than a decade, told me that if I wanted someone who could write and was highly technical then I should speak to his dad. This is all a long time ago but I think Andrew had just stopped working for Lord (Alan) Sugar who, at the time, was famous for being a tech entrepreneur rather than today’s ennobled TV star.

(I’m quite sure, if quizzed on the phenomenon of “upward nepotism”, Andrew would have known the correct word and been able to quote numerous historical examples of it.)

I was (and am) a big proponent of permission marketing – i.e. you earn permission to continue communicating with your audience by giving them something that they want. My first go at this was to send really great content to people who signed up to Redgate’s newsletter. Unlike every other company’s newsletter, it didn’t shill us – it would be for and about our audience. But I had a problem: it was an emailed newsletter, so the content disappeared once it was sent, and engagement with the content was near impossible.

So, a few months before I wrote this letter to Andrew, we had created the website “Simple Talk” where these articles could live and be found. Simple, because we were trying to make ‘ingeniously simple’ software; and talk, because we wanted people to engage with the content. And I needed someone to write articles that my potential customers would eagerly read. 

That’s where Andrew came in and he did that, and so much more for us, for over a decade. He wrote not only as himself but also as William Brewer and, of course, his nom-de-plume Phil Factor (the name is a database joke), which was saved for his most intriguing work.

He edited, pushed us to be ambitious, and did so much to make Simple Talk the enormous success it eventually became. Andrew (along with Tony Davis) was a huge part of how we built up permission to communicate with huge numbers of people.

You might look at Redgate now earning approximately £100 million annually, employing more than 500 people with 100,000s of users and 10,000s of customers, and it might seem inevitable. But much of our permission to talk to all that vast hoard was done, one article at a time, by a man wearing a ragged wooly jumper, using a wooden rocking chair made by his brother as an office chair, writing whilst looking out over the exquisite gardens of Pentlow Mill.

I would guess that the number of people who read articles by Andrew were in the many millions. Most of them will have learned something. Many will have laughed. Many more than a few, like me, have been touched deeply by this most kindly, brilliant, and incredible of men.