When I was a boy, I learned that my British grandfather had been a soldier in South Africa and India and a prisoner of war during World War One. My home in Montreal at the time was a mixture of Canadian and British culture. My father was a Canadian, and my mother was British. I […]
When I was doing research for my papers at university during the 1960s, this is what I learned to do. First, I’d visit the library and plan for many hours of scouring the card catalogue, standing at cabinets filled with drawers of index cards that described and located the relevant books on the subject I was […]
My Rutherford Chronicles book series follows my grandfather Joe Rutherford, my father, myself and other characters, luminaries and simple working-class folk, through the 20th Century on four continents. The first book begins in the dockyards of Tyneside, North East England at the end of the 19th Century, then continues in South Africa during the 2nd Anglo-Boer War from […]
My grandfather returned from his six-year tour of duty in South Africa and India in 1906 to a different England to that he had known. When he left Tyneside in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, the most critical technologies of that era had been the steam engine and the telegraph. Land transportation up […]
The research for my third book began with the so-called “interwar years” from 1919 to 1939. My grandfather returned from four years as a German prisoner of war, a wisp of a man after 1,479 days of hunger and anguish in captivity, weakened and demoralised by the ravages of war and the 1918 influenza pandemic. […]
I’ve written four historical fiction novels over the past dozen years. I have worked alone, with only occasional comments from one or two friends. And at various stages I have sought the advise from professionals – skilled readers and editors. I’ve learned that writing is a very lonely occupation. The fourth book is autobiographical and […]
Are We in Cold War 2.0—The China Chapter? Many seek answers to whether the “East” and “West” are engaging in a “new” Cold War. The term Cold War is defined as “a state of political hostility between countries characterized by threats, propaganda, and other measures short of open warfare.” It applies to the state of tension […]
I’m Canadian and grew up in a non-racist society. As a university student in Montreal during the mid-to-late 1960s, I had a left-leaning South African lecturer who explained the crimes against nonwhite people by apartheid and opened my eyes to the 1960 Sharpsville Massacre. However, the US’s Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War protests and upheavals were distracting, […]
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