Meet Ray and Peter

When Ray Mobberley’s wife of 39 years, Kathleen, passed away on 17^th June 2020, Ray was determined to do something positive in her memory. Dougie Mac had supported Kathleen with pain management and medication for her lung cancer and she’d regularly spent time at the hospice as a day patient. Sadly Kathleen passed away from Covid during the pandemic, which was worsened by her lung condition.

Dougie Mac offered Ray bereavement support but it wasn’t for him, so instead he focused on keeping himself busy and began to do odd jobs for people in his community.

Ray explained, “About a year after Kathleen died I needed something to give me a focus, and I wanted to raise money for Dougie Mac in her memory. I started doing odd jobs for people I knew, just small plumbing and electrical jobs, and sometimes a bit of gardening, but instead of getting paid, I asked my customers to give me a donation for Dougie Mac.

“Through word of mouth I started to get more and more requests for help, so my nephew Peter began to help me out. He’s a qualified mechanical and electrical engineer and plumber by trade, as myself, so together we could take on bigger jobs. Now we’re busy every single day, it’s like a full time job, but it keeps us both busy and has really helped our mental health; which Peter suffers with due to not being able to work from an operation he had. Now medically retired he wanted to help me for such a fantastic cause in memory of his Auntie, and to help me and himself get out of our house’s in which with depression you tend to hibernate and feel useless.

This cause has helped both our situations and many customers whom many of have now become lovely friends. We get great pleasure in helping people in their hour of need and sorting their problems out. Every day we get call after call so we are not short of work.

Over the last three years, Ray and Peter have donated more than £60,000 to Dougie Mac, every penny donated by their customers and now friends in payment for the work they’ve done. Ray keeps a record of every donation and each month he produces and circulates a thank you newsletter to his loyal customers to let them know how much he’s raised for Dougie Mac.

“We deliver around 20-30 newsletters each month as we like to let people know how much we’ve raised in Kathleen’s memory. Our customers have become like friends, we get to know everyone and they know they can rely on us to help them with whatever they need. Quite a few of our customers live on their own, so we’re good company for them and they ask us back for lots of different jobs.

“We do not receive anything for our time and any money received is all donated to Dougie Mac, but we hope and pray we’re making a difference to those who need their service and that our customers appreciate our help. Love and God Bless to all that have supported us.”