Monkee Davy Jones’ Norfolk sister pays tribute

Lynda Moore, 68, of St Michael’s Close, Thetford, said the family was “heartbroken” at the 66-year-old’s death in February, which came as a shock to she and her three sisters.

Ms Moore, a retired social worker, grew up with her brother and three sisters in Openshaw in north-west Manchester and said Mr Jones had never forgotten his family, despite living in America.

“I saw him for a month in October and we were sitting by the ocean and he said when he went he was going to float around there,” she said. “I said ‘don’t be silly, I’m going to go before you’ – we never though we’d lose him this early.

“I don’t know how to say how much I miss him. My sisters and I are devastated. He may have been famous to a lot of people but to me he never forgot Mum and Dad and I feel he’s with them.

“He’s not running around doing things for everybody any more and he’s at peace.”

Mr Jones, best known for singing in pop band The Monkees in the 1960s, died on February 29 near his Florida home while riding one of his 14 horses.

“He got off and said he was a bit breathless and died at the side of the horse,” Ms Moore said. “He’d had a medical four weeks before and they said he was fit as a fiddle.

“He died of a heart attack.”

As a teenager Mr Jones secured a part on soap opera Coronation Street, playing Ena Sharples’s grandson, and also had a role in the television series Z Cars, but when his mother died of emphysema, he left showbusiness to train as a jockey in Newmarket.

He returned to acting however with a role in a West End production of Oliver! after it transferred to Broadway, and built up a career as an actor and singer before auditioning for The Monkees.

Ms Moore said she would visit him at least twice a year in America and said her brother, who was married three times and had four daughters, was fond of watching her own grandsons play cricket when he was in Norfolk.

“We were very close and because I’m now retired I was spending more time with him,” she said. “He was a very ordinary man and we were very proud of him.

“Whether he was famous or not he was a lovely person to all of us. He always wanted to help other people. He was very down to earth and would go back to talk to all of his old school chums.”

She added Mr Jones’ ashes would be scattered near his Miami home, and off the coast of Southampton “so he can float on either side of the ocean.”

via Monkee Davy Jones’ Norfolk sister pays tribute – News – Norwich Evening News.