Denny spoke with the club for an interview published in a matchday programme in 2019, after a bladder cancer diagnosis and heart attack. He was told he had months left to live but, incredibly, continued to battle for over two years afterwards.
The interview is republished verbatim below, with his family's permission. The club would like to express its condolences with all of Denny's loved ones.
Every other week for over half a century, Denny Warren has walked from a local pub to the Lower Holmesdale. In recent years, this meant heading from the same seat in the Victory Club near Norwood Junction, past St Chad’s Catholic Church and onto the Holmesdale Road, where Selhurst Park rises like a cathedral in the heart of south London.
But in 2017/18, this routine pilgrimage became hampered as Denny had to stop and rest on the walls of terraced houses packed along the five-minute stroll.
‘Alright, Denny? Want a hand?’, passers-by would call out, spotting a face known across SE25.
A year later, Denny was in Mayday Hospital, celebrating his birthday over chocolate cake with the nurses on-hand to help him battle bladder cancer. A doctor walked in.
“You’ve got months,” they said.
Chemotherapy came and went unsuccessfully with Denny suffering a heart attack after spending the day out with his wife, Margaret, in central London.
“He just couldn’t breathe,” Margaret explains. “He’d had a mild heart attack caused by the chemo. They stopped straight away and said: ‘That’s it, there’s nothing we can do now.’”
But sitting in Denny and Margaret’s living room a remarkable six months later, it would take an astute observer to know the pair had been through so much in such a short space of time. With Stella, the family dog, rubbing against heels much to the Warrens’ hospitable chagrin, Denny sits in an armchair - tea in hand and Margaret close by to fill any blanks - and recounts a lifetime’s memories supporting his local club.
“I was about 17 in 1962. That’s when I started going up there,” he throws a thumb over his shoulder, pointing through his garden in Penge, over neighbouring roofs and towards Selhurst Park, about a mile away. “Palace was my local team and that was it. I was at the top of the Holmesdale. It’s where I met all of my mates.”
Though mates - and there are plenty of them - are not the only Palace followers Denny has met and shared a mutual love for Crystal Palace with.
