A few last words from Paul!
I first met Richard Maugham when we were being treated to a private jet flight to the Hannover International Fair in 1982, some 43 years ago. We were both English and I was living in Tollesbury, Essex, near Colchester and Richard living near Ealing, West London.
The common thread was that all the passengers were major sellers of the Commodore ‘PET’.
Richard and I hit it off straight away. Richard was a fellow salesman. I was ex-IBM Office Products Division and Richard was ex-Olivetti.
Both of us also volunteered for the Prince’s Youth Business Trust, a charity headed by Prince of Wales, as he was then, helping young people start their own business.
Gillie and Colin, a couple who know Richard, recently sent me the following email:
Dear Paul,
I write to inform you that Richard passed away today at 2.50 GMT.
Both Colin and I were at his hospital bedside.
Our thoughts and condolences are with you.
Gillie and Colin.
The ‘today’ in the above email was Sunday, 9th February, 2025.
Richard will never be forgotten.
Richard will be sorely missed.
Learning from Dogs 
I’m sorry to hear that you have lost a good friend Paul. My mother, who passed away December 2020, outlived every single one of her friends and close family members. She had a very strong faith which I admire, and which carried her through the challenging times in her life. She never spoke of it, but I’m sure it was no fun to watch so many people leave this life before her.
I was interested to see that you worked at IBM for a time. I wrote software for them for 20 years, and have a brother who wrote software for them for, roughly 34 years!
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Dear Paul, for some reason your reply got put into my spam folder but now resurrected! The division of IBM UK that I worked for was IBM Office Products Division (OPD) and I was a salesman. I was with OPD from 1970 until 1978, selling golfball typewrites and later the first word processing (WP) machines. In 1977 I won Top Performers Award that was an all-expenses flight to Hawaii, held in 1978, and in May 1978 I resigned to form my own company, Dataview Ltd that very quickly became Wordcraft, the first WP software for the Commodore PET, that was the first personal computer in the market. Dataview/Wordcraft was purchased by some investors in November, 1988.
So I guess you and your brother worked for the main computing division of IBM.
And thank you for referring to the death of Richard. He and I were both salesmen and he was from Olivetti. A very sad loss!
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Glad you found my email Paul. I learned how to type on those IBM Selectric typewriters! Wish I had one! Absolutely the best feeling keyboard I have ever used. Can’t remember the name of the division at IBM that I was in. I was at a plant in Essex Junction, Vermont that manufactured memory chips. Big plant. 8000 employees. IBM sold that plant to another company in the early 2000s. My brother worked there for the first 10 years of his career, and then moved to an IBM plant in San Jose, California, where they made disc drives. (He married a California girl, and she wanted to stay in California!)
That’s a beautiful dog up for adoption! I have always wanted a German Shepherd or a shepherd mix. But I’m not in a position to care for one at the moment… At least I’m smart enough to know that because I’ve done my research about dogs! It’s unfortunate how many people adopt and don’t realize how much time and love is required.
I hope your wife is still making steady progress. Take care… – Paul Kruse
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Firstly, Jean has made great progress since the accident and is more-or-less back to normal. But secondly her Parkinson’s Disease (PD) continues to deteriorate and I cannot predict how her behaviour will be either later today or in a few days time. PD is a dreadful disease and sometimes I have great trouble in keeping my thoughts to myself. Thus I spend much of my day maintaining a subdued, as in quiet, relationship. But as I always say, having Jean in my life with PD is a world better than not having met Jean. We are now down to two dogs, Cleopatra and Oliver. When I first met Jean in Mexico she had twenty-three dogs and seven cats. Her husband had died in 2005. Subsequently I discovered that Jean and I were both born in Northern London; me in Acton and Jean in Dagenham. Those locations are twenty-six miles apart!
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I have a friend whose wife has Parkinson’s. It is indeed a terrible thing.
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There is much research into finding a cure for Parkinson’s but I very much doubt it will be in what is left of my life. (I’m 80 and Jean is 76.)
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My condolences to you.
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Yes despite the distance it was still a very painful loss. Thank you for your understanding; Richard will never be forgotten.
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