Brian Hawkins

Brian Hawkins is a retired medical scientist who has lived in Hong Kong since 1982. He is married with three grown-up children and six grandchildren. He was born in south-east England a few months after the end of the Second World War into a typical working class cockney family from east London living in the capital’s first and largest public housing estate, the Becontree Estate, in Dagenham, eleven miles from central London. He lived there until he moved overseas in his mid-twenties.

In his teenage years, Brian’s ambition was to become a professional trombone player, a dream that he was never able to fulfil. However, after he moved to Hong Kong in the 1980s, he reignited his passion for music and ran a high school jazz band and took part in many musical performances in his spare time.

After a few false starts, Brian finally settled into his eventual career in medical science and wrote nearly two-hundred articles and textbook chapters in the scientific and medical literature. Since his retirement he has turned his attention to writing about the entertainment industry. Reflecting his cockney roots, he is the author of the best-selling guidebook ‘The Phenomenon that was Minder’ about the 1980s British television series ‘Minder’, which was set largely in London. The book was published in 2002 (and is now out of print) and was updated and re-released as ‘The Complete Minder’ in 2014. An e-book version with the same tite was published the following year. In 2013, Brian teamed up with accomplished British actor the late George Cole O.B.E. – who appeared as lovable rogue Arthur Daley in every episode of the ‘Minder’ series – to help write the actor’s autobiography ‘The World Was My Lobster’.

In 2016, Brian published a personal memoir entitled ‘When I Was a Boy in Dagenham’ – an account of the first eighteen years of his life. In it, he describes his earliest recollections, his life before starting school, his progression through infant and primary schools, from being a confident, precocious and academically advanced student, constantly wanting to be the class clown, to a teenager who turned his back on secondary education to chase his unattainable dream of becoming a professional musician.

Poignant at times, amusing at others, Brian Hawkins takes the reader through his life in post-war Britain and compares it with life today, as he talks candidly about the things that worried him, annoyed him, upset him and, indeed, those that made him happy.