After being diagnosed with cancer, Hairy Bikers star Dave Myers, who was formerly a makeup artist, passed away in 2024.
The wife of Hairy Bikers’ Dave Myers has revealed the details of his difficult early years before becoming famous. After being diagnosed with cancer, Dave passed away in 2024 at the age of 66.
In her new memoir Dave &, Me, Lili discusses how he had a difficult childhood. The pair had a romantic relationship up until his death in 2011.
In the book, Lili mentions her famous husband’s struggle with alopecia and looking after his mother, who had multiple sclerosis. When Dave’s mother Margaret discovered the condition at the age of eight, his father Jim and his mother Margaret had to take care of him both full-time.
Lili wrote in her memoir that she had a wheelchair before becoming physically and mentally ill with the diagnosis of a woman. For a boy who was ten years old, Dave and his father were her full-time caregivers.
The family lived hand-to-mouth, surviving on Jim’s pension money, until social services moved them to a ground-floor apartment on a new council estate in Barrow. Although Dave had to deal with many more difficulties, he found solace in music and painting, two more lifelong passions, and food and bikes.
By the time Dave was 24 years old, both of his parents had passed away, as did Margaret, who had been placed in a care facility four years later. After being diagnosed with alopecia and losing his hair, Dave also had to deal with his own health issues.
Lili said: “Not many people know that Dave Myers, the Hairy Biker, was bald from childhood until his forties. At a very young age he began to suffer with alopecia which made things extremely difficult for him, especially in school where he was already singled out for being a ‘poor kid’ thanks to his free meal tokens.
“He was a target for the bullies, and Dave lost his confidence and spirit those days,” he said. Dave speculated that his alopecia might have been brought on by his mother’s suffering.
In his forties, Dave’s hair began to grow bath after a second health issue. When Dave collapsed while filming a scene in 1998, a hospital discovered an arachnoid cyst on his left side of his brain.
It was thought that it had been there since childhood because his brain had grown around it. Dave went for surgery which was a success and he was discharged just five days later on Christmas Eve.
According to Lili, “Davi’s hair began to grow in dark, healthy curls shortly after his op.” This is just a hunch because I’m not medically trained, but perhaps a cyst sitting undiscovered had been pressing on a specific area of the brain, and perhaps that combined with his mother’s caregiving stress had first led to the alopecia? Although I’ll never know for sure, it makes sense.
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Source: Mirror
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