Tim Quelch

After retiring from my former local government post I began writing football and cricket books as a hobby, with the intention of raising funds for charities such as Alzheimers’s UK, Parkinson’s UK, Cancer Research UK, Prostate Cancer UK and the British Lung Foundation. I donate all my royalties to charity.

I have watched football at all levels for over 60 years, 50 years of which have been spent following Burnley FC, throughout its massive ups and downs notably during the 70s and 80s.

My first commercially published book was ‘Never Had It So Good’ which was about Burnley’s incredible title winning side of 1959/60, containing interviews with eight members of this team, and coverage of the weekly football action placed in the context of a receding local economy, with the once world famous cotton mills in the process of ‘weaving out.’ My current publishers Pitch reprinted this book in 2015.

My other football books, all published by Pitch, are:

‘Underdog!’ about English, Welsh and Scottish teams at all levels who managed to punch above their weight, albeit temporarily in many instances;

‘From Orient to the Emirates: The Plucky Rise of Burnley FC about the club’s rocky upward journey from the brink of extinction to its present day success;

and my latest book ‘An End of Innocence’ about how English football changed radically in the early 60s.

I have also written two cricket books: ‘Bent Arms and Dodgy Wickets’ about the controversies created and encountered by the England cricket team in the 50s and ‘Stumps and Runs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, a personal diary about growing up and older with the England Test cricket, accompanied by a popular music soundtrack of my life. My other book, ‘Good Old Sussex by the Sea’ is about local football and cricket in my native county, Sussex, during the 60s.