'Before joining Rugby League’s central administration, I spent some very happy years teaching in Kent. It is a great county! Its folk are very proud of their heritage and they love their sport. I have no doubt that Kent Invicta Rugby League Football Club will carry the county crest with great credit and provide a thrilling and attractive new dimension…

During the long hot summers in the 1960s there were no treatments for hay fever and if it was a particularly dry spell my only relief came from staying indoors. It was here that I started to watch Test matches on our newly acquired television. My father always preferred to listen to Test Match Special on the radio with the…

My lifelong affair with the Isle of Thanet, and Ramsgate in particular, began in the late 1940s. The war was over, though food rationing had not completely stopped and people were getting their lives back together after six years of destruction and unimaginable heartache, bereavement and separation. The beaches that had been the repository of tank traps and coils of…

Whenever I watch Ronnie Barker’s Open All Hours it takes me back to the shops of my childhood in Bexley village in the 1950s. In those days most of the shopkeepers we frequented knew my mother by name and we addressed them likewise. There were two grocers, the Co-op and Pearce’s Stores; two butchers, the Co-op and Mr Kelsey, who…

At the age of 11 or 12, I became the proud owner of a bicycle, and was soon cycling round the familiar streets of St Mary Cray where I lived. It wasn’t long before I started getting more adventurous, and in the company of the boy who lived next door, I went on my first bicycle excursion into the country.…

Let’s start in around 1949 which is my first memory of my life in Herne Bay. My Aunt Alice came up from Ramsgate in Thanet, to visit her sister, Minnie, my Nan. We all went to the Willow Tea Rooms which consisted of a small shop which sold ice creams to the public through a large arched window. Then next…

The recent television production and film of Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations reminded me of the occasions in the 1980s when, with a friend, we took part as characters in the Dickens Festival, Rochester. My friend was the late Tony Blair of Chestfield, remembered now for his cine film shows in Whitstable and Canterbury of past life and events in…

My maternal grandfather owned a small meadow on the outskirts of a Kent village. It was his hay field that he harvested and then stored in a lean-to alongside the stable in his yard. A dark brown Welsh cob called Mona enjoyed the summer-scented mixture from this scythed plot all winter long. Her nose-bag held the aroma all year round…