ABOUT ME

I am a retired wine-buyer with a life-long love of history. As probably the last indentured apprentice in the wine trade I did not go to university but in my fifties, whilst commuting to London, I did take the opportunity to gain an Open University degree in Art-History (left).

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Retirement enables you to do so much and so I worked for Salisbury Museum (above) photographing objects in the Pitt-Rivers' (the father of archaeology) collection so that they could be researched on the Web. In my teens and twenties I had the good fortune to work for two of Britain's top archaeologists, professors Barry Cunliffe and Martin Biddle, so handling these artefacts felt completely natural.

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When funding ran out at the museum I transferred to Salisbury Cathedral where specialists in Magna Carta were being trained for its 800th anniversary. I enjoyed this enormously and so was asked to train as a Cathedral guide as well. After a year I had the opportunity of adding research work in the Cathedral Archives. 

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I was put to work on the Chapter minutes dating from 1733, the point when they started to be written in English. There was so much of interest that I wrote up my notes, so far there are 298 pages, in a book form which I call a Capitular Concordance. In order to disseminate my more interesting finds I publish on a twice-monthly basis a newsletter called Jot & Tittle. The title refers to the scribe's (Tironian) shorthand that was used in Magna Carta but today is just found in the dot on the letters i and j plus the cross on the t.

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Some years ago I took an adult teaching qualification as I lectured regularly on wine and this too included a good deal of history as it explains so much of why each area makes such different products. Finally I have always enjoyed reading about military history and especially the Napoleonic Wars having been introduced during O-level to the books of Sir Arthur Bryant - who incidentally is buried in the Cathedral.

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Left: deep in thought over Jot & Tittle.