Les Dawson at the DC

Les Dawson adopted this coast, and this coast adopted him back. 'I'll stick to Blackpool and Lytham St Anne's,' he said in 1975. 'It's smashing. I love living here.'

He was President of the District Club for 1983–84. That is not club folklore: it is painted on the honours board in the reception hall, between F. P. Kippax and L. J. Walker, in the same gold leaf as every other president since 1929.

Those were the days of archaic licensing laws, when the DC was one of the few places in town where a man might find a civilised drink at an uncivilised hour. Les was not the only comedian in the room, but he was the only one who did it professionally.

His chair still sits in the corner of the Kilgrimol Room. It is ornate, high-backed and entirely unnecessary, which is the best case for keeping it. Members are welcome to sit in it, and most do, once.

Among the club's archive photographs is a black-and-white group on the green, sometime in the 1970s: a dozen members in the flared and checked splendour of the period, one gentleman mid-delivery in the foreground, and Les in the middle of the back row, grinning. To his left stands Nigel Bradshaw, who would himself be President in 1979–80.

Les died in June 1993. Comic Heritage put a blue plaque on his Islay Road home in 1995. In October 2008 a statue by the sculptor Graham Ibbeson was unveiled in the Peace and Sensory Garden beside the pier - a few minutes' walk from the club where he had once presided, seated, mid-anecdote, in bronze.