I was born in 1944 in Eastcote, to the west of London in England, and for the last 30+ years have lived in Ashford, Middlesex. My main interests are classical music, computing, and history. I maintain this personal website, including sections for music and genealogy, and also maintain a couple of other websites for organisations with which I am associated.
I perform fairly frequently in musical concerts, playing the violin in orchestral concerts, and the piano, violin, or viola in chamber music concerts and recitals.
If you reached this website via a search engine, you may have seen links for a Cambridge academic with the same name, whose interests also cover music and computing. We are completely different people.
I was educated at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, London, where I studied A-level mathematics and physics. I then went on to Cambridge University (Selwyn College) to study engineering, specialising in electronics. I was always interested in electrical things as a child, and during my teenage years I built various radios and amplifiers. But in those days it was all valves, using high voltage, and yes! I did accidentally get a painful shock a few times. It teaches you to be careful. I remember when transistors were invented and started to become available – I was reading an electronics magazine article about them on the train journey home from school, and was so engrossed that I went two stations past my stop.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, computers were just starting to emerge from university research into the business world. Typically, a large company would own a single computer (massively expensive) for its entire workload, from payroll to scientific calculations. I first met computers while studying at Cambridge, and when I joined my first company as a graduate I soon migrated into the computer department, as this was the new and exciting future. A few years later I realized that I had become a software engineer, which I remained for the rest of my working life.
In those early days, computers were physically huge (occupying a whole room) but with very small memories and low performance compared to modern machines. The first computer I used at work had only 32 KB of memory. Modern desktop computers have typically 512 MB memory (about 16,000 time bigger) and run about 10 million times faster. There were no hard or floppy disks or removable CD drives; everything was programmed using punched paper tape. And to edit a program meant snipping the tape with scissors and joining in a new strip with sellotape. There were no operating systems like Windows or Unix; you had to program a basic system yourself. Even to get a computer started after switching it on required manually entering a short bootstrap program into the memory in machine code by means of switches on the front panel.
After programming mainly mathematical problems for several years, I moved into the more exciting field of real-time programming, working for a company that built radars. The computers continuously processed the radar signals and generated displays showing the position of each aircraft, together with a label indicating its transponder code and height. These systems for air traffic control were initially pretty simple, but over the years got more and more complex. I stayed working in this field for most of my career, with just a few years in other fields. I was lucky to work during perhaps the most interesting period for software development, calling for great ingenuity and novel techniques. However during the last two decades the work became increasingly bureaucratic and constrained by officially mandated codes of practice – well intentioned to improve efficiency and reliability, but in practice achieving exactly the opposite – which reduced the scope for innovation and clever design, so I was not reluctant to take early retirement at the age of 60, giving me more time for music.
Since retiring, my interest in computing has found an outlet in setting up and maintaining several internet websites, including a personal website, family history, and some others. This is very different from what I previously did professionally, and I have had to learn some new tricks and programming languages.
Classical music has been my greatest passion since childhood. I started learning the piano when I was six, followed by the violin a few years later. My piano teacher was also a fine cellist, and taught me the cello for a few years in my early teens. I taught myself to play the viola (essentially just a large violin) and french horn. Nowadays I mainly play piano and violin, but do play the other instruments a few times a year.
When I was a boy, my piano/cello teacher lived nearby with her sister, who played the oboe. After a few years’ tuition when I and my older brother Rodney had reached an adequate basic standard on the violin, they often used to come around for an evening of family music making, in which my Dad joined and sometimes another friend. As my younger brothers Gordon and then Norman grew up and also learnt to play, they joined in too. I guess the sound we made was pretty dire, but I wasn’t experienced enough to know that then! In more recent years I still sometimes play piano duets with Norman, or a piano trio with Norman on violin and his son Simon on cello.
My first experience of real orchestral playing, other than in the school orchestra, came when I joined the London Schools’ Symphony Orchestra, a youth orchestra formed from leading players from all London schools. I played in that for about 5 years, eventually as co-leader, until I was too old when I went to university. Cambridge provided a rich opportunity for lots of playing, and after that I have played in a number of good amateur orchestras, including Hertfordshire Chamber Orchestra, Tallis Chamber Orchestra, Salomon Orchestra, and Chelsea Opera Group. However, my real love is Chamber Music, i.e. music written for a specific small group of instruments with only one player per part, such as string quartet (2 violins, viola, cello) and piano trio (piano, violin, cello). So for many years now I have restricted orchestral playing to a couple of small but high quality chamber orchestras (HCO & TCO) which meet only a few times a year for intensive rehearsal over a weekend followed by concerts, often without a conductor; and most of my musical activities have been playing chamber music. Generally my friends and I meet in each other’s homes just to play through quartets or trios informally, but we sometimes give concerts, and we also go on courses where we are coached by some of the leading professionals in the chamber music world. And for the past fifteen years or so I have gone on holiday to France each year with musical friends, and we take our instruments with us to play quartets for fun.