William A. Neale

William A. Neale was born in Stoke-on-Trent in the 1980s. After completing his education in the city, he moved away to pursue a career in academic science. Returning to the city, he took a position in the Stoke-on-Trent City Archives. Here, he began work on cataloguing the theatre collections of the council and discovered that there was no single accurate work on the city's theatrical history, and most of that previously written was wildly inaccurate. And that is how Old Theatres in the Potteries came about.

The author first visited a theatre in 1991 when he saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Theatre Royal, Hanley. He revisited the theatre to see Aladdin, Cinderella and Robin Hood, along with taking a death-defying trip around the fly gallery as a child.

This is his first local history work, and is quite surprised that it came about at all, having previously only written academic works on plastic battery technology and serendipity in carbon chemistry.