Happy Father’s Day Dad

Some men leave you a name. My dad left me a way of standing up in the world.

My father Vic Jobson was the biggest man I ever knew - not just in build, though he filled a doorway, but in heart, in nerve, in his sheer refusal to give up on anything he loved. I think of him every single day. There hasn’t been a morning since he went that he hasn’t been somewhere in my chest.

He loved football - and Southend United in particular - the way you love something you’ve saved with your own hands. And he did save it. He took the club on in 1984, becoming Chairman. It was broke and days from disappearing, kept the lights on, willed it back to life, and then built the greatest era in its history, lifting little Southend to the highest it has ever climbed and rebuilding Roots Hall around them, designing the new stand himself because he could never leave a thing half-finished.

The papers called him the saviour of the Blues. For once they were right. But to me it was never really about football. It was about a man who would not be beaten.

A carpenter by trade, he went on to make his money as a property developer, working with Sir John Hall on the development of the MetroCentre in Newcastle.

Before any of it he was a footballer himself and not a bad centre half, out of a footballing family - his own father, my grandfather Thomas Henry Jobson, was an Arsenal and Ipswich Town player in the 1930s.

And he was, before everything and after everything, my father. He taught me to never give up.

To keep going precisely when it got hard. To strive, always, to be the very best I could be.

He drove me on - to be the best you can - and I’ve heard his voice in my ear in every difficult room I’ve ever walked into since.

Everything I’ve done, I’ve done partly to make him proud.

He died in New York on 19 September 1999, only 62, that great fighting heart of his finally worn out. He left my late mum, Jean, and the four of us - Stephen, me, Andrew and Heather - and a hole that never quite closes.