I just got home from the UK, where I had gone to attend the funeral of my oldest friend, Ben Battle. Many of my fellow mourners were kind enough to say how much they enjoyed the eulogy I gave, and to ask for a copy of the text. It is principally for their benefit that I’m now publishing that text, but I hope some of my other readers may be interested to read what I have to say about this singular individual.

I first encountered Ben in 1962, when we arrived, within a term or so of one another, at the Junior School of Gresham’s.

Very soon, it became clear to me that he had a matchless ability, and a voracious appetite, for irritating figures of authority. These were qualities that strongly appealed to me.

As far as I can recall, Ben reserved his most strenuous academic exertions for those subjects likely to fatten his wallet. It will surprise no one who knew him to learn that mathematics, and in particular the study of probability and statistics, featured prominently. He had the good fortune to find a teacher who shared his enthusiasm, and whom he credited with giving him the grounding he needed to distinguish himself as a better – which he always insisted he was – rather than a gambler, a term he disdained. He was making a nice distinction, too, He kept meticulous accounts, recording not just his winnings – which gamblers are apt to do, but also his losses – which gamblers tend to neglect.

Just a few yards from his house, on the Cromer Road, there was a phone box. Somehow or other, Ben had managed, by the age of 14, to open not one but two telephone betting accounts, and the phone box became a sort of al fresco office, in which he could be seen, form guide in one hand, the other clutching a fistful of pennies, shoulder hugging the phone, laying his bets for the day.

Towards the end of our time at Gresham’s, Ben celebrated the acquisition of his driver’s license by spending ten quid on a Morris 8 Post Office van, which he kept hidden behind a hedge, a short bike ride away from the school. Manufactured in 1948, it had had a hard life, which had brought it to an almost biblical state of disrepair. It had a body made of rotting ash, clad in rusty steel, which, unless you parked it on a perfectly level surface, would slump sideways, preventing the rear doors from opening. It had, however, the quality most prized in a car by impecunious teenagers – heroic adequacy. It could be relied upon to perform, albeit not very well, the basic functions needed to get its owner from A to B – or in Ben’s case from point to point. In short, it was, so far as Ben’s schooldays were concerned, the ultimate tool for what was to become his lifelong mission – beating the system.

He was at it again when it came to organised games.

In matters of sport, English Public Schools of the day tended to be in thrall to the cult of the gifted amateur. If you weren’t gifted, then instead of trying to actually teach you the skills you needed to play rugby, hockey or cricket, you were shunted into the obscure siding of the Fourth Game, there to languish in ignominy for all time. Ben and I were both perennial denizens of the Fourth Game.

Ben had a highly reductionist approach to batting at cricket. Suitably padded up, he strode to the crease, held the bat between thumb and forefinger and, as the bowler released the ball, lifted it to allow the ball an unimpeded path to the stumps. The bales having duly fallen, he walked back to the long grass to continue his perusal of the form guide. His sole concession to sporting culture was golf – because it enabled him to while away a games afternoon in the 19^th hole of Sheringham Golf Club, nursing a scotch and soda and a Number 6.

Ben played the cello in the school orchestra, giving him a grounding in that register that was later to serve him well in the various garage bands he assembled to pursue his passion for rock music.

During our time at Gresham’s we developed a private language. Based on a grotesque exaggeration of the elocutionary foibles of one of the masters, and bereft of verbs, it served us as a means of communication throughout our lives.

After school, both of us gravitated to London, Ben to be articled as an accountant, and me to start a career as an aviation broker. Neither paid its juniors well, and we supplemented our incomes – Ben through gaming, and I by trading in cars.

I favoured an auction held every Saturday morning in Southampton, just next to its railway station. I’d travel down on the train, hop over the fence which divided the station from the saleyard, and drive back to London in whatever I bought. If I bought more than one car, I had to sneak down the following day and retrieve it from the station car park. It was much more convenient to take with me Ben – whose inner Arthur Daley was piqued by the car trade – and have him drive back my surplus stock.

One Saturday the lots on offer included a rather nice Wolseley 1100, to which Ben took an obvious shine. As it happened, when it came through, Ben was in the loo, and I ended up buying it. To say that he was discountenanced when he returned from the Gents and found that I had pre-empted his debut into the scrag end of the car trade would be to understate the case. And to cut a long story short, by the time we got back to London, he’d offered me, and I had accepted, a small profit, and he’d become the owner of a rather nice Wolseley 1100, with at least another 30 quid in it, if offered to the general public through the medium of the Evening Standard.

But it was not to be. Before the general public could avail itself of this exciting opportunity, Ben was driving it down Redcliffe Gardens when a car shot out from a side-street and T-boned him. Faced with the destruction of his entire stock, and with blood from a scalp wound trickling down his face, many an aspiring entrepreneur would have succumbed to despair, but not Ben. When the tow-truck driver arrived, he looked up at him from the kerb on which he was by then seated, and said “OK, what are the fiddles, here?” “Well,” said the driver, “it starts with me writing you an invoice for twenty quid, and charging you ten.” Ben then bought another 1100, not nearly as nice as the Wolseley, but much cheaper, and a lot nicer when its bald tyres and flagging battery had been swapped for the Wolseley’s. By the time the second 1100 had been snapped up by the general public, and Ben had returned the imaginary rental car for which he’d invoiced the insurers of the car that had destroyed the first one, his profit comfortably exceeded what he could have expected if he’d just sold them – like a car dealer.

In 1976, I moved to Australia to pursue my aviation career. Ben began to flourish in the property business, but I visited the UK every year or so, and we’d meet up for a few days’ recreational bickering.

Along the way, Ben made one of the best moves of his life. It takes a special kind of woman to handle a character like Ben. Not only did Christine have those qualities in abundance, but she turned out to have breathtaking gifts as a botanical illustrator. She made a home for Ben, and I’ll always be grateful to her for the care she took of him, and the love she gave him.

In the 90s, I was working with a Los Angeles-based cargo airline, and Ben had discovered a poker club in East LA. This provided more opportunities for recreational bickering. And more trouble with cars.

On one occasion, Ben had rented a vast Cadillac to make the daily journey down the Ventura Freeway to the club.

This Cadillac developed a peculiar fault –when the brakes were applied, the horn would sound. Ben initially found this hilarious, but one day, in those pre-GPS times, he took a wrong turn off the Freeway on his way back from the club, and found himself in the worst part of downtown LA – approaching a stop light – behind a car containing four large gentlemen of African-American descent. Quite how he talked his way out of that one, I will never know, but he was still shaking when he got back to the apartment.

I hope this brief reminiscence gives you some idea of what Ben’s friendship meant to me, and why I will miss him so greatly.