Over the summer there have been some wonderful tributes to Jonathan – both privately in the hundreds of letters and cards we have received as a family, and also publicly. We are so grateful as a family for all the wonderful things that have been shared about Jonathan and the impact he has had on many lives.

Below we want to share two public tributes that have been made for Jonathan since his funeral. The first is from Sir Michael Morpurgo, a dear friend of Jonathan’s, who spoke movingly about him at the Westonbirt School speech day in July, the day after his funeral. You can read an extract of Michael’s speech below. The second is from Martin Saunders, who shared a tribute to Jonathan at the Satellites Christian Youth Festival, on the main stage one evening in front of thousands of young people. The video of Martin’s tribute is at the end of this post.

Sir Michael Morpurgo:

I’m a year late. I should have been here at Westonbirt a year ago to give away the prizes. I believe it was my friend, Jonathan Bryan, who had proposed that I should come. Until recently, as many of you will remember well, he was a student here. I knew him as a fellow writer who had become, over the years, a dear and good friend.

Let’s just say that circumstances prevented me from coming last year. So I’m a year late, and as it turned out a year too late. But I’m here now, so not too late.

And I’m here now because Jonathan wanted me to be. He invited me again. He was to come back a year after leaving Westonbirt and be here with you and with me today. But now, of course, it is Jonathan who cannot be here. Yet he is very much here in our hearts and minds. So I wanted to begin by speaking of him. But not in sadness. This is not a time nor a day for sadness. But rather it is a time, as prize-givings should be, for celebration and reflection and gratitude.

I was at Jonathan’s funeral yesterday along with hundreds of others, all of us there because we had been privileged and grateful to have known him, and been known by him, because he has so immeasurably enriched our lives, restored our faith in faith, our hope in hope, and in the best of humanity. And I’m far from the only one who feels like this. At the end of the funeral service yesterday, the whole packed church broke out of their sadness into loud and prolonged applause, in appreciation for his life, for his extraordinary achievements and for those close to him who had helped to make it possible.

From the first moment I met his beaming smile ten years ago, I felt at once there was a warmth and open-heartedness about him I had not known anywhere before. That smile stays with me, with us all, lives on as he does. He is where he longed to be, in his garden. But I feel he is here too, with us today, looking down on us, and smiling.

Let me tell you about our first meeting. It was in Exeter Cathedral before a concert. We had arranged to meet there through our mutual interest in poetry. I had read his work, knew already about his remarkable ability to write.

His ever-devoted family was there with him, and I knew already something of the miraculous way he had learned to communicate with those about him, that by the blink of an eye he could spell out what he wanted and needed to say or write.

But as it turned out, I was the one who didn’t know how to begin the conversation. I fumbled around, as we often do when we first meet someone, searching for the right cheery words to get things going.

So I said, “Hello, Jonathan, it’s good to meet you. Good to meet a younger writer.” His face wreathed in smiles – no one smiled like Jonathan – as he began to spell out his slow and blinking reply, letter by letter, word by word, his mother then reading out his words to me.

“And ……I think…. It’s ….good ……to meet….. an …older writer.” So that was me put firmly but kindly in my place.

We met up here and there after that first encounter, two writers out there, at this or that launch or a reading or a play. He came to visit us most years in Devon with his family. I wrote, he wrote. We became friends, fellow scribblers, exchanging poems, stories, notions, ideas, hopes.

Jonathan was on a mission to raise awareness for others, many thousands of them, in his position, awareness that they all need and deserve the same intellectual and emotional stimulation we all need from our upbringing and our education, that they mustn’t ever be stigmatised, undervalued, disregarded, or patronised, never set on one side and ignored, that everyone has potential, no matter what. And he was living proof of that.

Then I heard the glad news from his parents, who are here today, that he was going to attend a wonderful school, Westonbirt – a school, clearly with a good caring heart – which would help provide him with the support and stimulation he needed, and that then he was planning to go on to study Creative Writing at university, which is exactly what he did, in Bath – for a while, until he became ill and sadly passed away.

So Jonathan lived a fulfilled life, a life of achievement, with love and support all around him, which he gave back to us and to the world about him in spades.

Tribute to Jonathan from Martin Saunders at Satellites