CHAS

There are some people you meet in life who do not need to be on a cinema screen to make you think they are larger-than-life movie characters.

Charles “Chas” Rees was exactly that for me, a composite of Biggles, Tarzan, Captain Georg Von Trapp, and a character from Swiss Family Robinson by way of Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. He also had an incredible voice, pitched tonally somewhere between George Sanders, Trevor Howard, and Jeremy Irons.

As a combination of personality, voice, physical demeanour, and life spirit, Chas had a truly abundant array of special ingredients that made him appear charismatic, intriguing, and above all else, a sort of aristocratic-seeming action man who was not afraid to get his hands dirty with mortar.

A master builder, Chas was more likely to have BBC Radio 4 or 3 playing than BBC Radio 1 or 2. There was a sense that here was a man who could be of the earth but also of the air. Not so lofty that he could not lay a slab of stone or brick, but not so earthy that he would forget the divine in his work constructing new structures across the South West of England and certain parts of Wales. I always remember him playing a CD box set of Palestrina, which would waft across the summer breeze from the house he was building next to ours as he started up concrete mixers and went foraging for blocks of stone to size up and cut.

This combination of hard labour and sublime music made me think of the great cathedral builders constructing their temples to God, and though the ambition of Charles’s projects was a little less grand, this fusion of construction with timeless composition felt as if the motivation behind it all were not all that dissimilar.

And what structures his houses were. Sublime private homes of varying size and scale that often seemed part tree house, part boat, and always contained the potential for legacy as family homes.

Working with my late architect father, Peter, the two men had a mutual respect and appreciation for handcrafted houses that belonged to no co-operative. Both were rugged individualists who had to do what they had to do in their own unique, maverick, and uncompromising way. In this sense, they were like two culturally erudite prospectors who believed in that old adage, “an Englishman’s home is his castle.”

And castles were most certainly built by them, not of air but of Cotswold stone, Welsh slate, and timber frames.

There was always a sense of Fitzcarraldo-level endeavour with each of Charles’s projects, as though Chas was delivering these houses like progeny into the world. The activist, almost primal urge to build shelter, combined with his Brideshead manner, made Chas seem a social anomaly, but in the best possible way. Having observed numerous old Gloucestershire builders, roguish types who used their thick cider-drawl accents as a way of gatekeeping tradition, Chas must have seemed an oddity. However, much like my father, he had their respect, for there was no argument about the quality of the work at hand.

Besides, no one could doubt Chas’s craft as a builder or his tenacity in seeing things through to completion. Once Chas set his mind upon a project, its completion felt inevitable. It might seem like hyperbole to imagine him in various scenarios through the history of time, but I can easily picture him constructing Himalayan hill stations in Tibet, timber river stations along the Nile, a log cabin in the cold of North America, or a series of raised huts in the jungles of South East Asia.

And because I can so easily mythologise this unique, charismatic, and handsome man, it is not hard for me to consider him immortal in memory. Like a few other larger-than-life personalities I have been blessed to know, I will carry a part of Chas with me forever.

In fact, he is building another house inside my heart right now, as I am sure he is for all his beloved family and friends: an entire colony of memory towers that will signal like beacons when we think of him now.

For there will be no stopping this intrepid master builder. Certainly death cannot.

So, I hope to see you again one day, my friend.

And keep those home fires burning for us all on the other side.