Bill Linskey; longest-sober member of AA in Britain and Europe
Hyfler/Rosner
Bill Linskey
(Filed: 26/08/2006) Telegraph
Bill Linskey, more commonly known as "Dartmoor Bill",
who died on Tuesday aged 85, was the longest-sober member of
Alcoholics Anonymous in Britain and Europe, having not
touched a drink for the past 53 years.
While serving with the Merchant Navy during the Second
World War, Linskey survived two sinkings and a shipwreck;
his life later fell apart due to alcoholism and he served
five years in Dartmoor prison for assault, emerging in May
1953 with the conviction that he must never drink again. The
first British AA meeting had been held on March 31 1947 at
the Dorchester Hotel in London. By 1953 there were only four
in the capital (today there are more than 700), and Linskey
found one in Chandos Street, behind the Edgware Road. He
immersed himself in AA's "12 Steps", and remained sober. By
the 1960s he was a husband and father, making a living as a
street-trader; he also trained as an electrician and found
stage-lighting work around the West End theatres.
Concerned that there was no established AA meeting in
the East End, where problem-drinking was endemic, Linskey
made it his mission to make the Fellowship better known. In
March 1965 he and a fellow-member called at Toynbee Hall,
the charity based near the Aldgate. The Warden, Walter
Birmingham, heard them out, then showed them into an ornate
hall with magnificent oil paintings and leather armchairs;
would this do for a meeting place? When Linskey protested
that AA could not possibly afford to rent such a place
Birmingham said they could have it for nothing. Linskey
explained that AA insisted on being self-supporting, and a
nominal rent was agreed.
For many months, Bill and a fellow recovering
alcoholic, the actor Robert Urquhart, occupied two
comfortable chairs around a table waiting for people to
come. At first no one did. But the two men persevered, and
gradually the meeting attracted people with a drinking
problem. The Toynbee Hall meeting continues today, every
Wednesday night. In March last year it celebrated its 40th
anniversary, the members raising a soft drink to Dartmoor
Bill.
William Linskey was born on February 24 1921 into the
poverty of Jarrow. His mother died when he was seven, and
aged 14 he went to London in an unsuccessful attempt to find
work. On the outbreak of war he joined the Merchant Navy,
stoking the engines in supply ships. He was unsurpassed as a
bare-knuckle boxer, both on board ship and in the rougher
ports at home and abroad. Linskey survived the sinking in
the South Atlantic of the Ashby, which was torpedoed 200
miles from land. He and a few others spent seven days and
nights in an open lifeboat until a clever young first mate
steered them to the Azores with a compass.
Next Linskey served on the Arctic convoys carrying
cargoes of food and weapons to the Soviet Union. He worked
on Russian soil, unloading ships in Archangel after enduring
hazardous voyages across the North Atlantic.
When a torpedo sank the Empire Beaumont, part of the
convoy PQ18, Linskey was again lucky to survive. He was
picked up by a Russian trawler and taken back to Archangel,
where he learned Russian and acquired a taste for moonshine
vodka. In an attempt to get back to Britain, he signed on to
an American ship, whose skipper was even better acquainted
with vodka than Linskey. The ship hit an iceberg and sank;
again a Russian ship came to the rescue. In 1995 Linskey was
one of 200 seamen taken to Murmansk and honoured with a
medal for their part in what the Russians call the "Great
Patriotic War". Linskey was discharged from the Merchant
Navy in 1943, probably suffering from what would now be
recognised as post-traumatic stress syndrome. His wartime
marriage to Mary McAlinden collapsed, and for four years he
led a nomadic existence, drinking heavily, until he was sent
to Dartmoor for his part in a drunken assault.
"I was not, by nature, a violent man," he later said,
"but drinking changed me. I was fortunate that Wyn [his
second wife, Winifred Riddell] stayed with me, and we
married soon after I completed the full term in prison, much
of it in solitary."
Although Linskey remained an atheist, he came to
believe in what he viewed as the many "miracles" seen at AA
meetings as alcoholics managed to achieve sobriety. When Wyn
died from leukaemia in 1967 he had been sober for 13 years,
and he found no strong temptation to drown his sorrows. He
met his third wife, Eunice, at Toynbee Hall in 1967, and
they married in the same year.
Dartmoor Bill reached his half-century of sobriety in
May 2003, and hundreds of AA members celebrated with him at
a party given by Eunice at a church hall in Chelsea. Despite
the onset of asbestosis, he spoke loud and clear for half an
hour, regaling the company with his experience and sense of
hope, insisting: "If you don't take the first drink, you
can't get drunk."
He is survived by his third wife, and by a daughter of
his second marriage.
Kathi
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