I’m a Salford born writer and for those who aren’t familiar with the city, it’s the subject of the popular folk song: ‘Dirty Old Town’. In fact, for those of you familiar with the lyrics, my father very probably did kiss his girl, (my mother), by the Gasworks wall as it was the place he found his first job after emigrating from Ireland in 1947.

Salford is also the birthplace of notable writers, artists and celebrities, among them Mike Leigh, the playwright/director, whose father was the local doctor and who  lived four houses down from the home I was born and raised in. Then there’s John Cooper Clarke, the bard of our city and who, every morning would hop on the No.1 bus that took me to school and him to his work as a laboratory assistant at Salford Technical College.

Anyway, enough about the loose links to my illustrious city folk and back to the ‘about me’ overview I’m tasked to undertake here.

After leaving school and qualifying as a Plumbing mechanical engineer, I spent much of my career in the building trade as a kitchen contractor. I began writing via my own online consumer advice forum in 1999. It proved very popular with visitors and as a result, I was signed up by Granada TV to act as Project Consultant on popular television DIY shows such as ITV’s Better Homes, followed by Granada’s 60 Minute Makeover.

I was then commissioned to take a lead role in a two-part special for ITV’s Tonight With Trevor McDonald. In a sociopolitical experiment that subsequently rendered the project a great success, I was charged with transforming a derelict Liverpool terraced house into a fully refurbished home. I was successful with the aim and achieved the goal at a fraction of the cost of its proposed demolition and the rehousing of its neighbourhood community.

My expertise in the field of kitchen installation led to a number of writing commissions for both consumer and trade magazines and I honed a passion for writing on subjects I was passionate about.

In 2010, I set the wheels in motion to create a campaign to honour Tom Crean, an Irish explorer who served under Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton on three pioneering expeditions to Antarctica in the early part of the 20th century.

From a young age I had been left fascinated by the heroic tales of Tom Crean, whose story I discovered while spending much of my time as a youth in my father’s birthplace near Castlemaine in County Kerry, Ireland, home of the ‘Wild Colonial Boy’. With yet another song reference, you won’t be surprised to discover I have a love for music and included in my love for writing are a few song compositions.

In 2017 I decided to utilise many years of research and study into the life of Tom Crean to compile a biography about Tom Crean.

Seven years earlier, in 2010, I created a Facebook page to support the campaign dedicated to achieving official national recognition for Tom Crean who was born just a few miles away from my father’s birthplace.

The campaign and media platforms are today supported by a growing worldwide audience and in February 2018, a petition for a new Irish Naval Flagship to be named in honour of Tom Crean, signed by over 10,000 supporters, was formally received by the Irish Minister for Defence at Government Buildings in Dublin. The campaign for Crean’s national recognition bore fruit in January 2021 when it was announced that a government funded research vessel was to be named RV Tom Crean in his honour. It was a great victory for over 50,000 worldwide supporters after a proposal to name the vessel in honour of Crean was put forward to the Marine Institute by Lorcán Ó Cinnéide who had been among the very first signatories to put his own name to the petition back in 2016.

During the course of my research for the biography, I discovered that the existing storyboard of Tom Crean contained a number of inaccuracies and was missing significant sections of Crean’s life and career. After submitting my entire research, it was confirmed in March 2021, that the Royal Irish Academy had, in light of the sources I provided, substantially revised Tom Crean’s story in the internationally recognised Dictionary of Irish Biography.

The biography: Crean: The Extraordinary Life of an Irish Hero, was published and released by Irish Academic Press imprint Merrion Press in May 2023 and I utilised my research to write an illustrated version for young children titled, Tom The Mighty Explorer, which was released as a self-published book. I’m still on the hunt for the right publisher to take the children’s version under their portfolio.

I would like to work on a compilation of other stories of those unsung heroes whose lives deserve a spotlight shining on them and I have already identified a few unheralded people who fit the bill .