On the Record

If there was a moment when I did not want to be ‘doing’ history I cannot remember it now. It seemed that all my family were interested in history and so was I from a very early age. In my case it was an eclectic interest ranging from archaeology to travel and exploration in the shape of pictures of tea-clippers under sail round Cape Horn and stories of the young David Livingstone reading while he worked in a cotton mill and of Clive of India sitting high up on a gargoyle on a church steeple in his home town of Market Drayton, Shropshire. I never tried this, but it certainly influenced my climbing of lamp posts in our Chelmsford suburban road!