Welcome to my new Website. As this is the first post on here, and likely therefore to be at the bottom of the pile, few people will see it let alone read it. But, for me, it gives a chance to provide some personal artistic and work background, and a description of youthful influences on my interests today – history, literature, music, art, politics, social justice.
History, Books, Film, Music & Art
I grew up with a fascination for both history and literature, which has never left me.
When I was young, the history was all about Bruce at Bannockburn, Knox in his pulpit, Mary Queen of Scots, the Bonnie Prince, Wellington vs Napoleon’s Marshalls in Spain, and the Scots Greys at Waterloo. At school, this transferred into themes such as the Reformation and Counter Reformation, The Thirty Years War, Nineteenth Century Military, Social and Cultural History, and inevitably on to Marxism, Revolutions and the World Wars. I would fight battles in my bedroom, focus on history at school, and argue vociferously with anyone I could find on the need for a fairer socialist utopia for all to live in.
The literature interest when young was of any novel I could get my hands on, at home or in the Caterham Hill public library. So many come to mind. Initially it was the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott books my Dad had inherited, before I moved on to war related fiction, living so close to a Battle of Britain airfield (RAF Kenley), including Paul Lund’s PQ17 Convoy to Hell, numerous Alistair MacLean books, and Nevil Shute.
Other books were SciFi, triggered by a love of tv shows like Lost in Space, Star Trek and Blake’s 7. First such novels were by HG Wells, Aldous Huxley and above all John Wyndham, then Arthur C Clarke and Michael Moorcock. Alongside SciFi was American crime fiction, ranging from Donald Westlake to Mario Puzo. In my mid teens, JRR Tolkien changed everything for a couple of years and led me down a fantasy route and ER Eddison, before University life brought me to classics like Catcher in the Rye, On The Road, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, Catch 22 etc., then on through to anything from Camus, Kafka and Sartre, and broadening to Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Dalton Trumbo, JG Ballard, Graham Greene, Hanif Kureshi, Vikram Seth & Anthony Burgess. The list was endless.
Film interest ran alongside the reading for a while, triggered by seeing Polanski’s Repulsion at the University Cinema Club, and then a fascination for European art house movies by directors such as Bergman, Cocteau and then later Kieslowski, Almodovar and almost anything French.
Music was always important in these years, especially Two Tone (Madness and Specials) and New Wave (Joy Division, Cure, Bunnymen & Nick Cave) and then my Art interest grew, especially Impressionism, Fauvism and Expressionism, with Chagall, Munch, Turner, Dix and Roualt being particular favourites.
But then, many of these interests were frozen, for years, as adult life, parenting, and an all-consuming career in the NHS, took over. Some literary fiction stayed the course with me, such as Alice Munro, AS Byatt, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, AL Kennedy, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Iain Banks, but only recently has my reading finally picked up pace again, with Julian Barnes, Ursula K Le Guin, Amor Towles, Margaret Atwood and Iain M Banks taking the main plaudits recently.
Mental Health, Jazz, Writing & History
I worked for the NHS for 33 years in Mental Health, Addictions and Community Services: as a Psychiatric Nurse and Clinical Specialist in Substance Misuse in Surrey; a Drugs/HIV Trainer and Diploma Leader at the National Addiction Centre & Institute of Psychiatry in London; an Operations Manager in South-East London and then the Isle of Wight, and finally a Director of Mental Health Services and Strategy in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Avon. This career started in an old fashioned Mental Asylum outside London, transferred to the streets of Camberwell, Peckham, and Brixton, dealing with the chaos of heroin and crack use, and evolved into a series of missions to open new hospitals and develop innovative services for mental illness in much of South West England. This included running the first integrated NHS & Council Mental Health Service in Wiltshire & Swindon, leading the development of a new hospital site in Salisbury to replace the Old Manor Hospital there, managing the development, design and building of the Victoria Hospital in Swindon, and successfully leading work on the country’s largest competitive tender of mental health services in Bristol.
After 33 years of full time work in the NHS, I took early retirement nearly 10 years ago due to becoming the carer for my father at the end of his life. For a few years, I promoted his jazz photography, running exhibitions at the Royal Albert Hall and in Paris amongst other venues, connecting with numerous well-known and very supportive musicians, and working closely with the London clubs whose walls are covered with his images, such as Ronnie Scott’s, Pizza Express Jazz in Soho, the 606 in Chelsea, and with the London Jazz Festival. I also set up a website with a friend about Dad’s photography to help him sell his images all over the world. After his death, the archive was too large for me to keep at home, and I wanted to ensure long term visibility of his legacy, so I took the decision to pass the entire collection on to Getty Images/Poperfoto, who were delighted to have it and paid a small fee too (only about 5-10% of what they would have paid before recent digitisation of photography).
At the same time as dipping into the jazz world, I also undertook some advanced courses with Penguin Random House on Creative Writing and Novel Writing. I have dipped in and out of this ever since, completing but not publishing one novel and intending to write more soon. I am a member of an excellent Writers Group which tries to meet monthly in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, to critique each other’s work.
The fiction writing was put aside for a few years when from 2019-2023 I undertook a Masters Degree in Medieval Studies, including a Dissertation about Augustus Pugin, for which I received a Distinction. This in turn led to an increased fascination with gothic and religious art, stained glass, memorials, and the Reformation’s destruction of so many of these, which I have pursued since. through talks, writing, and continued visits to churches and other historical buildings, particularly in and around Wiltshire. Recently, I became a member of the Editorial Board of the Sarum Chronicle, a local history journal located in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and due in 2024 to expand its main area of coverage to Hampshire, Dorset and all of Wiltshire. The next Edition of the Chronicle, to be published in October 2023 will open with a 6,500 word article from me on Augustus Pugin’s Salisbury Period. A separate and much more detailed publication about Pugin’s time in Wiltshire, based on my Dissertation, is due to be published in 2024 under the aegis of the Pugin Society.
Alongside all this, I have, for the past decade, had a major interest in family history. This, as with almost everything on this website, originated from my parents. Both researched their ancestry in depth, although my father came up against a couple of brick walls in doing so. My mother self-published her own book about it, A Welsh Childhood, and this has been my inspiration to one day do my own version of that, but in a less autobiographical way and more connected to a number of cousins who share the same interests and with whom I have discussed from time to time doing shared writing on our collective past.
What the future of all these things holds, I am not quite sure. But, hopefully, his website will provide an indication of my intentions, as well as a vehicle to achieve some of them.
Malcolm. October 2023.
PS. I shall hardly mention immediate family at all on this website. That is for a simple reason: I am still learning in life that what one gives to family is about actions, not words.
