The troubled early life of Hairy Bikers' Dave Myers: Star's widow Lili reveals how star battled childhood sickness, bullying and messy first marriage before his tragic death

Daily Mail​

4 hours ago

He was beloved by millions of Hairy Bikers fans who expressed an outpouring of love after his death from cancer in 2024 aged 66.
Now Dave Myers ' widow Lili has revealed he faced adversity in his early life as she detailed his childhood and early adulthood in her new memoir Dave & Me.
Lili, who married Dave in 2011, recounted the late star's early years in the emotional book, including his battle with alopecia and his mother's health struggles with multiple sclerosis.
Dave's mother Margaret was diagnosied with MS when he was just eight years old, forcing him and his father Jim to become her full-time carers.
Lili wrote: 'Within a year of Margaret's diagnosis, she was in a wheelchair and, in time, became physically and mentally ravaged by illness and medication.
'Dave and his dad were her full-time carers which was an immense responsibility for a boy not yet ten.
'Social services eventually moved them to a ground-floor flat on a new council estate in Barrow and the family lived hand-to-mouth, surviving on Jim's pension money. There were many other challenges to contend with, but Dave found escape in music and painting, two more lifelong loves alongside bikes and food.'
Dave had lost both his parents by the time he was 24, with Jim dying of a stroke and Margaret passing away in a care home four years later.
The presenter also had to contend with bullying in school which occured after he was diagnosed with alopecia and lost his hair.
'Not many people know that Dave Myers, the Hairy Biker, was bald from childhood until his forties,' Margaret wrote.
'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 those days were miserable for Dave, sapping his confidence and spirit.'
Dave even believed his alopecia may have developed as a side effect of the stress of caring for his mother.
It wasn't until Dave was in his forties that his hair started to grow back which came after a worrying health scare.
Lili told how Dave was working on a film set as a makeup artist in Luxembourg in 1998 when he collapsed.
Rushed to a German hospital, a scan revealed an arachnoid cyst on the left side of his brain which was thought to have been there since childhood because his brain had grown around it.
'Against advice from doctors and friends, he travelled in his van (driven by a colleague), back to his home in Aberdeenshire where he was admitted to the Royal Infirmary for an operation to install a shunt to relieve the pressure, plus drains to remove the fluid from the cyst itself,' Lili wrote.
'Thankfully, the surgery was a success and Dave was discharged just five days later on Christmas Eve, but his recovery took some unexpected turns.
'Not long after his op, Dave's hair started to grow in dark and healthy curls. I'm not medically trained and so this is just a hunch, but perhaps that cyst sitting undetected had been pressing on a certain part of the brain ... and maybe a combination of that and the stress of caring for his mum had triggered the alopecia in the first place? We'll never know for sure, but it makes sense to me.
'I could still feel the shunt on the left side of Dave's head when I met him seven years later, a testimony to a past I was not part of. Another life.
'One I only knew from pictures and Dave and his friends' endless stories. Oh, Dave was so proud of his hair once he had it back! He would wash it every day.'
Prior to his fame with Simon King as part of the Hairy Bikers, Dave worked as a makeup artist for 23 years.
He worked on several film sets and did the makeup of stars including Christoper Lambert, Sir Roger Moore, Dennis Hopper, Helen Mirren, Stephanie Beacham, Timothy West, Michael Parkin-son, Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Seymour.
In 1987, Dave was working as a freelancer when he met his first wife Kate.
They relocated to the northeast of Scotland, buying an apartment above a small shop in Huntly, Aber-deenshire and setting up an antiques business together.
'I'm not sure how happy those years were, but they must have loved each other and Dave spoke fondly about the fun he had running the shop, with him taking ad hoc makeup artistry work when he could throughout the year,' Lili wrote.
But all was not well as Lili told how Dave returned home one weekend from a job in Darlington and found the shop, flat and his bank account emptied and Kate gone.
'Twisting the knife further was the discovery that she'd enlisted the help of Dave's unwitting best friend, Dr Dave Easton, to load the van under the guise of going to an antiques fair,' she wrote.
'Poor Dr Dave had no idea he was aiding and abetting Kate to clean Dave out and he felt terrible, although of course it wasn't his fault. It would be a source of humour between the two Daves throughout all the years that followed.
'Dave never saw Kate again after that and they only spoke once more to agree to an uncontested divorce. From what he told me, she felt unsettled living where they were, but the reality for Dave was now starting his life again from scratch.'
Elsewhere in the book, Lili discussed Dave's cancer treatment, which she described as 'debilitating and ugly'.
His treatment was so aggressive that he developed sores in his mouth and had to wear gloves due to nerve damage in his hands.
'It got to the point where he was too ill to speak; after each bout, one of the substances he was being given brought on a temporary speech impediment so he could not properly articulate words,' Lili wrote.
'He had sores in his mouth which meant he was unable to eat or drink and was suffering with such severe nerve damage in his hands that he had to wear gloves.
'He had it in his legs too, which affected his balance and ability to walk. I remember Si picked us up from the hospital one day and he was shocked at the state of Dave, who was a shadow of his former self.'
Lili also described how difficult it was for Dave to lose his hair again whilst going through chemo.
'Losing his hair as a result of the chemo was incredibly painful for Dave given his history of alopecia and the regrowth following the surgery in 1998 for the arachnoid cyst.
'The decision to shave it all off was our way of taking control, which was psychologically beneficial, although it took him a while to get used to being bald again.
'He felt reduced to being only a cancer patient, stripped of his image, identity and personality, and with a face he no longer recognised.'
She added: 'He told me how difficult he found it to love himself when he looked in the mirror because the physical change was so drastic. He thought he was hideous with no hair, no eyelashes and heavily stained teeth from chemo.
'He'd lost a lot of muscle mass which meant his skin sagged, the neuropathy in his hands and feet made them unbearably achy, and some fingernails and toenails had fallen off.'
Lili first met the TV personality in 2005, while he was working on location in her native Romania.
They became pen pals before establishing a romance, with Dave eventually becoming stepfather to her two children from a former relationship.