I spent most of my working life in the charitable and public sectors. My work largely involved campaigning, research and policy development in relation to social issues such as poverty, poor housing and public health. I also taught community work and health promotion at Bournemouth University. I retired from full-time work in 2015 at the age of sixty. In my retirement I have carried on what has been a lifelong commitment to voluntary work. I worked one afternoon a week last year, alongside three other volunteers, aboard the Bibby Stockholm barge, helping refugees to learn conversational English (I live on the Isle of Portland where the barge was moored). Most recently I worked with the museum here on the island to develop an innovative history project in partnership with the local primary school. We were all very proud of this project and although it is not especially relevant to this website, if you are interested, you can see an entertaining video about it at the bottom of this page.

I keep fit by walking along the coastline and among the strangely beautiful heaps of rock and abandoned quarries that make up much of Portland. I also play football twice a week - albeit at a slower pace than I used to play forty or fifty years ago - with the Portland Walking Football group.

I have all sorts of other interests - but the most important in this context is that I have for many years collected old diaries, manuscripts, letters, photo albums and other socio-historical ephemera. I buy them wherever I find them; in auctions, in bookshops, at car boot sales. I always planned that in my retirement I would bring some of the personal stories I had discovered into the public domain. My research skills and experience of writing campaign materials and policy documents in my pre-retirement life proved invaluable in organising for publication the two books I have created so far.

You can read about both books in the by clicking on the link at the top of the page. The two books are unlike each other in many ways but they have this in common; both are engaging human stories - and both offer fascinating insights into particular aspects of history. They are stories of amiable, ordinary people who have found a way to speak to us directly and vividly from the past. They are the voices of ghosts. Amiable ghosts.

And for anybody interested, here is the video I mentioned: