I am very sorry to hear about the death of Mark – my thoughts are with you and your family. During our business relationship with FireFly I had the chance and pleasure to meet Mark twice at your Munich office.

Wish you all the best and a lot energy to stand these hard times now!

Eva

Our deepest sympathies to you all, Claire I know Mark was your rock and you his.  Jan 28th will not only be remembered for Jordain’s earth day but now also for Mark’s end to suffering, a good man with passion who with your team developed a culture unmeasurable at FF.   

Alex, Jordain, Saphron and Anayah!

Cyril and Brenda McGann and family in Dublin

I was
also fortunate enough to spend my formative years in PR at Firefly; I can still
put together a mean coverage board with extremely neat edges! My abiding memory
of Mark was at the 2002 Christmas party. 80′s theme and Mark (who I was a still
rather scared of!) was there in head to toe denim, rocking a rather fetching
bandana a la Axel Rose. It certainly broke the ice and I was able to realise
that even though he was super important, he was also bloody good fun.

Far too young to go and unfortunately I won’t be
able to attend next week, but will very much be thinking of you all. Camilla x (was Maddern when @ Firefly)

Very sad and shocked to hear this news. Together you and Mark have inspired so many. I hope you can find some solace in knowing how much positive influence Mark has had and continues to have on so many Fireflies as these comments pay tribute.

Jon x

Natalie

What very sad news I heard today about Mark, I am so sorry.  My time at Firefly was the happiest of my career and I remember being so excited by Marks’ Hot House.  I felt then and still consider myself very lucky to have worked with so many amazing people in such a fun loving and inspiring environment.  Claire, my thoughts are very much with you and the children, I send you my love and will be thinking of you all.

Mark gave me my big break into tech PR in September 1994. By the time I left Firefly in October ’97 it felt like I’d gained ten years of experience. It was the absolute zenith of the hi-tech media boom and Firefly was the best place to be.

Impatient, cocky and really pretty inexperienced, I’d arrived in London after a year at Apple in Warsaw and thought I knew it all. Mark steered me into the company and defended my corner when I’m sure it would probably have been easier to fire me. 

Mark was really patient and understood organisational dynamics well. He’d carefully and tactfully counsel me on drives to meetings in his 1990 Lotus Elan (which I was just speechless in, because it was so cool). For example, I have only ever sent one flame email in my life – a stroppy note to Stuart Field when our new (1995) Macs weren’t working well. Mark quietly took me aside and explained this wasn’t the way to solve a problem. He was right.

Mark was an excellent businessman and a shrewd competitor who knew how to make tough decisions. In 1995, I’m pretty sure he led the decision to throw out Firefly’s most hard-won client, Apple, to take on Compaq. It was an inspired and bold move – and absolutely the right one – that we all later respected.

He had a really good grasp of 1990s communication methods and Firefly did a brilliant job of recruiting and training a team of people to deliver them. In this sense, Firefly was a very old fashioned company. The investment in training is just something you wouldn’t see today. Yet anyone who doubts the value of such training need only look at the long-term impact on the people it touched and the industry they now help to lead.

Sometimes Mark did a great job of playing dad to us all. For example, there was the aftermath of the infamous food fight in the hotel in Le Touquet. I’ll never forget the next day, Mark stood hunched at the front of the coach, as we circled the town looking for Lori and Colette, only to discover them lunching in a restaurant. I remember Lori simply waved through the restaurant window, at a fuming Mark and a coach full of dazed, hungover Fireflies.

Mark is responsible too for one of the great friendships of my life, with Stuart Lauchlan. After I’d been outed by Kieran (“So come on dolls. What is it? Straight or gay?”), Mark took me into Soho one evening “to meet a journalist”. I was served up, like the Firefly dish of the day, over a pint at the Star and Garter. Stuart and I hit it off right away – and have never stopped drinking, gossiping and laughing our way around the bars of Soho since.

I first heard that Mark had cancer at a party of Craig Heath’s a year or so ago. I remember talking with Shelley, Bill Mew and Simon Glazer about it that night. I’d seen Mark a year or two earlier and had been disappointed that he didn’t ever seem interested in what I was doing now – everything kept coming back to Firefly and his clients and their work. There was an air of betrayal – we’d left, and somehow disappointed him. 

I said that I didn’t think Mark ever fully grasped the legacy of friendships he helped to create and the long trail of professional achievement that came out of that mid 1990s period. So many of my friends and colleagues from that era have gone on to really big communication roles right at the top of IT – steering what has become the most important industry of our era. Not bad for a little company, with a bonkers security guard, tucked in a strangely inaccessible corner of Fulham.

Shelley said I should tell him. On a few occasions I thought about writing him a letter, but it slipped by. Now I’ll never have the chance to let him know. 

Claire, I’m so sorry you’ve lost him – I know how much you loved him. My thoughts are with you and your children.

Unfortunately I can’t be in London next week for the funeral but I’ll be thinking of you all.

With much love,
Mr Charmer x