Born and brought up in a small village, Norton, near Doncaster in South Yorkshire in the 1940s and 50s, I was educated at Norton County Modern School and the King’s Grammar School, Pontefract. On obtaining the requisite GCE ‘A’ level passes in 1961, and on the advice of my Geography Master, I enrolled at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where I gained an Honours degree in geography in 1964. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1965. Whilst at Aber, the Mountaineering Club offered the opportunity to pursue my interest in hill walking and take up rock climbing. Since then, I have spent a lifetime hill walking and climbing, particularly in Wales, Scotland and the English Lake District. I have been actively involved in mountain rescue in Scotland and in the Search and Rescue Dog Association (SARDA-Southern Scotland) as a dog handler with my border collie ‘Flash’.

On graduating from Aber, a career in town and country planning beckoned and I commenced my first job in the Planning Department of my hometown, Doncaster, in August 1964. I went on to study town and country planning at the Leeds School of Town Planning (now part of Leeds Beckett University) and became a Chartered Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute in 1970. Moving to Edinburgh in 1969, I pursued a career in town and country planning with both central and local government in Scotland, specializing in rural and countryside planning. I have lived in the Scottish Borders for over fifty years and retired as Depute Director of Planning and Development for the Borders Regional Council in 1996. After 1996, I continued to be involved with town and country planning, employed as a Planning Reporter with the Scottish Government’s Planning and Environmental Appeals Division until 2015. I have researched the history of town and country planning in the Scottish Borders and my book entitled Town and Country Planning in the Scottish Borders 1946-1996 was published in hardback by Edinburgh University Press in August 2023. A paperback version is due for publication in 2025.

In 2008, following three years part-time study at the Centre for North-West Regional Studies at the University of Lancaster, I gained an MA in Lake District Studies, with distinction. This course of study re-awakened my interest in the changing role of the early outdoor holiday providers, such as the Co-operative Holidays Association (CHA), Holiday Fellowship and Youth Hostels Association. My doctoral research at the University of Cumbria into the activities of the CHA and the Holiday Fellowship was completed in February 2015 when I was awarded a PhD in Cultural History. My research on Leonard and his achievements has gained a mention in the regional and national press and TV. My book on T A Leonard and the Co-operative Holiday Association was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in hardback January 2017 and in paperback in March 2018.

I also have an interest in genealogy and have been researching both the past history of my family and that of the village, Norton, near Doncaster, where I was born and brought up. Although I was born and bred in Yorkshire, my father was born in County Durham. I’ve traced ten generations of the Hope family back to the 17th century, when the Hopes were either lead miners or agricultural labourers in Upper Weardale around Stanhope (see the Hope family’s origins in County Durham). During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Hopes formed part of the widespread migration of workers in the north-east of England from the rural areas of the Pennines to the Durham Coalfield further east. Then, as coal mines closed in the early part of the 20th century, there was a migration southwards to Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire and in 1920, my grand-father and grand-mother, with their six children including my father, moved down to South Yorkshire where new pits were being sunk. There, the family took up residence in a small agricultural village, Norton, 2 miles from the neighbouring pit village of Askern. A brief history of Norton can be found here. My grand-father and grand-mother took over a small holding and then opened a general store selling everything from fruit and vegetables to washing up flakes. A description of Norton at the time of their arrival at the beginning of the 20th century can be found here. A summary of the characteristics of the village at the 1921 Census can be found here. During the 1920s and 1930s, the extended Hope family played an increasing role in the community of the village [see the Hope Family in Norton]. It is intended that my research on the Hope family and the village of Norton over a period of 300 years will form the basis for a book on societal change during the English industrial revolution.

I have also been researching the family of my daughter in law, Trudy, who hails from Banbury. Her father, Ian Hedges, was born in a small Cotswold village, Milton-under-Wychwood, in 1936 and his forebears resided for over 300 years in the “Wychwood” villages; Shipton-under-Wychwood, Milton-under-Wychwood and Ascott-under-Wychwood. Although of generally lowly agricultural working class, Hedges are remembered in the memorials to the Ascott Martyrs of 1873 and the Cospatrick Disaster of 1874, as well as on the war memorial to the fallen in the First World War on the Green at Shipton. The name of Hedges therefore continues to live long in the memory of the inhabitants of Shipton and surrounding villages. To find out about the role the Hedges family played in the history of “The Wychwoods”, read my article The Hedges of “The Wychwoods”.

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