I was born in Forres, Scotland, in 1945. I am not Scottish by descent, my father was in the Royal Air Force and was stationed at Kinloss, my mother taught at a school in Elgin. (I went back to Forres for the first time in 1988 and it was shut! - it was a Sunday...)
| This is a picture of me taken without my consent - at least they had the decency to dress me first. | |
My childhood was spent in a variety of locations, thanks to the R.A.F.'s habit of sending my father around the world. After Forres, I lived on a farm in Underbarrow, a village near Kendal, Westmorland. Then in Skegness, Lincolnshire where I first went to school; then to R.A.F. Manby, near Louth, Lincolnshire.
From there, my father was posted to Aden, and we all ( me, mother and my two sisters) went with him, so I lived there for two years - had a great time, we only went to school in the mornings, spent the afternoons swimming and organising hermit crab races!
Back in England we lived at Mansfield (Notts) with a couple of maiden aunts for a year - terrific - until we could move into married quarters at Cosford, which is how I arrived in this part of the world.
I went to Wellington (now part of Telford) Grammar School and then to Dudley Training College where I studied P.E. and Geography. In 1966, after leaving college, I was made the offer of a job - not teaching P.E. but as a computer programmer at the Wolverhampton and Staffs College of FE - why not, I thought - so I took it!
I had an interesting time at Wolverhampton, experiencing the growth of the institution, which through the passage of time became Wolverhampton Polytechnic and later Wolverhampton University.
| I have also experieced the amazing progress of computer technology - when I started in 1966 we had a machine that stored all its information and did its calculations using valves! You can still see a bit of it in Birmingham Science Museum. |  |
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Page last updated 28 June 2005