Steadfast Auditor and Family Anchor: Harold John Izzard

Basic Information

Early Life and Childhood: Sidley and the Brickyard Fields

Born in 1928, Harold John Michael Izzard was the only child in a modest household at 1 Laburnum Cottages, Ninfield Road, Sidley. The physical map of his childhood—brickyard fields and the small terraced house—shaped a boy who learned early that patience and small, steady efforts accumulate into something larger. He moved to Sidley at age seven in 1935. His grandmother, Charlotte Adams, and great-uncle Albert Adams were fixtures in the family network; their presence made the house more than shelter, turning it into a social hub of stories and homemade toys at Christmas.

Schooling was patchy at first. Discipline at St Peter’s did not suit him; aptitude at the Boys’ County School in Turkey Road did. At age 12, wartime evacuation to St Albans (1940–1943) interrupted a conventional childhood and forced rapid independence. The wartime years read like a catalogue of bold, small-scale adventures: aircraft-spotting along the coast, bicycle rides collecting shrapnel as souvenirs, and through the Air Training Corps, looping in a Tiger Moth. These were formative experiences—raw, physical, and oddly ordinary—shaping a character with an irreverent sense of humour and an appetite for practical solutions.

Wartime Service and the Navy: Discipline and the Wider World

In 1945, at 17, Harold joined the Royal Navy as a Stores’ Assistant aboard HMS Formidable. He served in a period of transition for Britain and returned from a voyage to Singapore upon demobilization in 1948. Naval service provided structure. It also introduced him to the mechanics of logistics and accounting in larger organisations—skills that fitted neatly into the accounting career that would follow. If childhood taught him to make do, the Navy taught him to systematise; the two melded into an efficient, quietly competent professional.

A Career at BP: From Filing Cupboards to Global Auditing

Harold entered the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP) in 1948 as a clerical assistant. Anecdotes about him reorganising the filing system are more than quaint office lore; they point to a mind that read structure in disorder. Promotions followed: by 1955 he was assistant cost accountant and, over decades, rose to group internal auditor level. A posting to Aden in 1955 brought both work and personal change. There he met Dorothy Ella, a nurse and midwife; they married and started a family with two sons, the younger being Eddie (born 7 February 1962).

Career highlights include intensive international travel for audits, strategic internal reorganisation, and a professional peak in 1983 when he served as president of the Institute of Internal Auditors. That year marked public professional recognition—an apex reached not by flash but by steady competence. He retired early from BP in 1984, shifting his analytical skills to the civic realm.

Family: Love, Loss, and the Model Railway as Memory

Harold’s private life moved in patterns of care, loss, and quiet resolve. He married three times. The first marriage to Joy Spray (1953) ended in divorce. The second, to Dorothy Ella, produced sons Mark and Eddie; Dorothy died of cancer in March 1968, a rupture that left Harold a single father at 39. The model railway he built with his sons during Dorothy’s illness became both a coping mechanism and a family artifact—later donated to Bexhill Museum in 2016 and resurfacing as a symbolic tribute in 2019.

In 1975 he married Kate Tomasetti; their long companionship ended with her cancer diagnosis in 2010 and her death in 2014. The family narrative is threaded with loss: two wives taken by cancer, resilience left in their wake. Harold approached fatherhood as a steadying presence—supportive, sometimes emotionally reserved, but rarely absent. His sons remember him as the man who taught decency, and whose humour could enliven even the dullest occasions.

Community Life: Sidley, Treasurer, and Local Recognition

After retiring from BP, Harold turned his attention to local civic life. From 1996 to 2009 he served as Treasurer of the Sidley Community Association, building on an informal legacy his mother Louisa had begun around 1949. His aptitude for numbers translated easily into volunteer roles: accounts, fundraising, and the quiet administrative work that keeps small organisations alive. Community honours followed: recognitions from the Bexhill Chamber of Commerce in 2003 and 2005, the High Sheriff Award in 2005, and a Bexhill Overall Achiever Award presented in 2008. These were local attestations of a life that traded public glory for practical service.

Timeline of Key Dates and Numbers

Career and Achievements Table

Family Members Table

Portrait of a Life: Sturdy, Funny, and Private

Harold’s life reads as a ledger of modest gains: steady promotions, a presidency at a professional body, voluntary stewardship of a community association, and the quiet dignity of a man who repaired systems and relationships alike. The model railway—built in the shadow of personal loss and later preserved for public memory—functions as a small, ironclad metaphor: tracks, carefully laid, that carry memory forward. He moved through six decades of change without ostentation, leaving behind a family that remembers him with warmth and a town that awarded him practical accolades.

His humor, described by his sons as irreverent and enlivening, punctuated an otherwise disciplined life. He navigated grief—twice widowed—without turning inward to dramatics. Instead he made things: a railway, a tidy household, balanced community books. Those who encountered him in civic spaces saw a man who preferred to fix the plumbing rather than claim credit for doing so. Numbers mattered to him, yes, but more importantly was the human side of order: the way a well-run meeting restores confidence; the way accurate accounts keep trust intact.

Memory of Harold persists in local halls, in the donated railway, and in stories told on stages and in interviews by a son who owes him both structure and the freedom to be oneself. The life contains ordinary acts that, when tallied, add up to a durable legacy—one reckoned in decades, awards, and the softer arithmetic of family loyalty.