Overview
For many years I have taught mediaeval and renaissance literature in the University of Cambridge and I have written a lot of books and articles about it, which some people read. But for a long time I was also a smallholder, growing or hunting a good deal of the family’s food when the children were small and money was very tight. (It still is, but less so, and I still am.) For over twenty years I was a beekeeper and can tell many (not always self-flattering) stories about my experiences with those determined ladies.
I also worked several summers as a bus conductor in rural Lancashire (when buses had conductors), as a trawler deckhand, hired out deckchairs on Blackpool Prom for Blackpool Corporation, and did a stint as a night porter in one of the best hotels in the town. (That was highly educative…) I wrote affectionately about a lot of this in Between the Tides
My first boat, Boston Seafoam
Later I trained as a printer (and had my own small private press). I have travelled widely: I was part of a party sledgehauling across the Spitsbergen icecap, I have stopped people treading on penguins in the Antarctic, ridden a cutting-out pony in Georgia, USA, and dined sumptuously on an asado in Argentina after walking down a glacier and through the Southern Beech (nothofagus) forest. Once I rounded Cape Horn, but it was in a big boat and it was disappointingly calm.
A lot of this experience has found its way into several of my more personal books: A Field Full of Folk (originally written as a growing-up-and-leaving-home present for my son and daughter) was republished as Out of Reach, and one critic called it ‘a little classic’ of local history; my Between the Tides: A Lancashire Youth was highly praised; and the book which most expressed my love for and interest in the environment and history of Iceland, Norway and the Arctic, Latitude North was a joy to write and many found it a joy to read.
My book of memories of Cambridge town, University and countryside, my own and others’, Coming to Terms: Cambridge In and Out gets me lots of dinner invitations. I am currently working on a long and much darker, very personal, book, part memoir, part history, part protest, which I think will be called A Book of Murmurations. But even there, comedy keeps breaking in.
Early Life
I was born in 1941 in Manchester, during the Blitz. I have few memories of either event. My mother was from a clerical family; my father’s roots were in the farming and mining villages of Staffordshire and Cheshire linked by the canal network.
My great grandfather had a boatyard here
My father’s war service abroad in Gibraltar meant that my mother and I moved to rooms in Blackpool, where she worked as a School Secretary and later for long and happy years as a College lecturer in Hotel Management. She and my father also ran a guest house. I grew up, an only child, within sound of the sea pounding on the flat beach at Rossall, running fairly wild and mostly happy in the windy fields where the geese came in winter and the hares boxed in Spring. This is the time when I became blasé about cows and their habit of creeping up and blowing down your neck when you are quietly fishing.
Rossall Beach
Education
Arnold School, Blackpool
I attended Beach Road County Primary School, the debt to whose wonderful teachers I acknowledge almost daily, and then I went to Arnold School, Blackpool, where I hated Rugby, failed to catch cricket balls, achieved no rank in the CCF, but loved shooting, Latin, French, English and Geography. I became in time very friendly with its redoubtable Headmaster, whose memory I honour and for whose support of an awkward, wayward youth I am ever grateful. An Open Award to Queens’ College took me to Cambridge, where I read English to a very acceptable degree.
Career
My first job after graduating was with Cambridge University Press Printing House, then as Arts (later Senior) Editor with University Tutorial Press, and at this time I began my lifelong University teaching, and my doctoral research into the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The then newish University of East Anglia gave me my PhD. And I have not stopped writing about that clever, witty, fascinating book since.
A move to The Leys School in 1973 meant happy years teaching English and Classics. Then I was invited to be College Lecturer in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, Director of Studies in English (and later Fellow) of Wolfson College, and finally Senior Tutor and Director of Studies in English at Hughes Hall, Cambridge.
The Leys School, Cambridge
Magdelene College, Cambridge
Wolfson College, Cambridge
Hughes Hall, Cambridge
For years I was an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English, and Programme Director for Cambridge University’s Summer Schools in English Literature and in Shakespeare. I am also Editor of the Literature Insights list of Humanities-ebooks.co.uk. Take a look: it is a good list.
Family
In 1962 I married Jennifer Mary Williamson, whom I had admired (initially from afar) for several years, and we had two children: and then a yellow Labrador. The move to a rundown cottage in Reach, then a run down village on the edge of the Fens led to a certain expertise for us both in building work, growing things, and poaching. (I also, in due course, wrote a short history of the village: you can find it on the village website, though it has also been published in hard copy.) The children survived to become very solid citizens: a headmistress and a senior manager in Air Traffic Control.
Reach, Cambridgeshire c.1900
Jennifer died, rather suddenly, deeply mourned, in 2009. After years of solitary, hard-working silence, accompanied by Hector my black Labrador, I met Rosanna Price, and we married in 2017 to Hector’s delight.
Hector, looking delighted
We share a startling array of enthusiasms, most of which are probably of no interest whatsoever to anyone but ourselves, though we are always happy to talk about them.
Oh, and my hobbies and interests…well, hillwalking, fishing, shooting, growing things, church architecture and history, mediaeval and early modern literature, reading the landscape, archaeology, ecology. I write books.
And I try to leave the smallest possible damaging footprint on this wonderful planet of ours. I am not good with computers or mobile phones. I don’t do Facebook.