I was born in Doncaster in South Yorkshire, of Irish and Welsh parents. My father was an RAF Officer who travelled extensively, and a man of many stories. I trained to become a chartered civil engineer and spent my first ten years based in London, on a variety of projects in the UK including five years on the Thames Barrier. My career then took me all around the world including the Middle East, Nigeria, China, Japan and twenty years in Hong Kong on major infrastructure projects. Whilst there, I was invited to write a promotional book for the Stonecutters Bridge in 2010 by my Japanese employers, Hitachi Zosen.

 

I gathered many stories in my travels and after retiring in 2014 I started writing The Passionate Imperialists which took four years to research and was published in 2018. It is the biography of Sir Frederick Lugard, to whom I was distantly related. He was an adventurer, explorer and administrator, and his amazing wife, Dame Flora Shaw, was the first Colonial editor of the Times in 1890. It is a riveting story.

 

The Flight of the Arctic Fox followed after three years research and published in 2021. It tells the story of a mid-air plane collision over Italy in 1958 between a BEA Viscount and an Italian jet fighter. All those on the Viscount died including my 22 year old brother. After a chance call in 2018 from the son of the radio operator, I was invited to travel to Italy for a 60th commemoration service and met some of the family members who had also lost relatives on this flight. I was asked to write a book on the lives of the crew and passengers on board, and this led me to Malta and several memorable trips to Ireland, where I learnt many new facts about the crash and made many new friends. It resulted in a very moving reunion in Italy in 2022 with many family members who came from all over the world.

 

I worked on the Thames Barrier for five years, and had always wanted to write about the people who I had met during that momentous period. After a year’s research, We Gave a Dam will be published in May 2024, to coincide with the 40th Anniversary of the opening by Queen Elizabeth II. It covers the history, and construction of the barrier between 1974 to its opening in 1984, with many contributions from those that worked on it.