Listening to your Essex friend Roy may be one of your mistakes.
There are probably 500 million full-on atheists in the world - and a much larger number who dabble with cultural religious rituals and those who adopt agnosticism as a label because they philosophocally allow for a degree of doubt about everything, even though they don't believe in a deity.
Over 200 million of those people are in China which is not a hotbed of Richard Dawkins study groups!
I would be amazed if even 5% of worldwide atheists recognised the name of Richard Dawkins. Most atheists I have known over the years in the UK (thousands of them) do not know Richard Dawkins or his books. Why would they? Their non-belief in any god is because they have no reason to believe in a god. They think it's infantile and/or deluded and has no relevance to their lives.
Which is right.