Vice President
I was born and brought up in Rainham, in what is now part of Medway. It was a lot smaller and quieter then! I had an interest in birds from when I was at primary school and when I went on to Gillingham Grammar, was delighted to find that there was an active Bird Club there, led by an elderly teacher, Mr Rimes. Many happy times were spent at weekends birding on the North Kent Marshes on foot and by bicycle. I first visited Sandwich Bay in October 1962 and still have my notebook entry that recorded the momentous event. I was immediately hooked and managed to make several more visits before going off to Leeds University to do a Geography degree and a year’s teacher training qualification. A fair amount of birding around Yorkshire included trips to Spurn and Bempton – in the case of the latter, before it was an R.S.P.B. reserve and when the Gannet breeding population totalled just eleven pairs! I also got a taste for foreign birding trips on an expedition to the Moroccan Atlas, where, amongst many other things, I found a new species for the country, the White-rumped Swift. At home during the university holidays during the mid-1960’s, I spent probably far too much of my available time (and certainly what little money that I had) at Sandwich Bay. It was a very different place then, both the local area and the Observatory building itself!
On finishing university, I came back to Kent and was there for most of the 1970’s, working in two secondary schools, starting a family and getting more and more involved with the Observatory. I was Chair of the Committee between 1970 and 1973 in the days before the Observatory became a Trust and when its total membership could be listed on just one page in the Annual Report. I was also Voluntary Warden at what was later to become the Sandwich and Pegwell Bay National Nature Reserve. Lots of memories of birding with great friends during those years – both locally and abroad, with overland trips to Spain and Morocco being amongst ‘the stand-outs’. In 1979 I was offered a job in a school in Kenya and spent two (mainly!) wonderful years there, becoming a lifelong Africa-phile in the process – as did my daughter, just a toddler at the time.
Back in the U.K. in 1981, work took me away from Kent – to the West Midlands, in fact, which I thought was going to be just a temporary move, but where I ended up spending the rest of my professional life. I worked in middle and senior management in two large urban comprehensive schools, then transferred into the F.E. College sector and, at the end, contributed to teacher training courses at Birmingham City University. I got to do a lot of birding with a group of friends from the Shropshire village where I lived, including being introduced by them to the delights of the Isles of Scilly, a love which has lasted! And, of course, I kept in touch as best I could with what was going on at Sandwich Bay.
When I retired, I knew that I would be going back to Kent and duly found a house in North Deal, where I still live, and soon got involved again in Observatory affairs, as a Trustee, then Secretary and then Chair for five years from 2016. During my period as Chair, we converted the charitable status of the Observatory to become a Charitable Incorporated Organisation, as befitted its growing size and level of operations; completed the purchase and further development of Restharrow Scrape; managed the difficult Covid pandemic year and generally improved things, I thought… I also did quite a few tours for Observatory members, with the rare birds of the Scillies and the winter geese on Islay being favourites, plus a couple of trips to Spain and Bulgaria.
At the same time, I was writing an up-dated and complete Flora for the Observatory area and got interested in sorting out the amount of archive material which the organisation had accrued over the years and which is now catalogued and safely stored. I took over as Warden of Monks Wall Nature Reserve in Sandwich and, as a break from all of this, have been fortunate to carry on with quite a bit of birding around the world – from Tanzania to Japan, Indonesia to the Galapagos and many others.