Christopher Goodwins

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher William Hedley Goodwins was born on an April Sunday in 1936 at St. Peter’s Vicarage, Sparty Lea – which is a remote Allendale hamlet in the wilds of wild Northumberland. When he was just three, the family moved to Norfolk, firstly to Roydon, and then to Potter Heigham.

He spent ten years as a Boarder at Norwich School, distinguishing himself in very little except being Head of the School Choir, and in 1955 gaining the absolute minimum of GCE O and A levels to satisfy the Matriculation requirements of Cambridge University, passing Maths at O level on the sixth and last possible attempt!

Prior to Matriculation, at St. John’s College Cambridge he had been awarded an Open Choral Scholarship to that world-famous Choir as a Counter-Tenor. Graduating in 1958, he was awarded a Special BA Degree in Geography and Old French Literature, coming top of his Tripos, and gaining his MA in 1961.

During that time, the family had moved to Great Ness in Shropshire. After Cambridge, he began his National Service as a Private in the Somerset Light Infantry at Taunton, before being Commissioned as Second Lieutenant RAEC at Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot; training as a Teacher at Beaconsfield; and finally being appointed as Education Officer attached to both Regiments of the prestigious Household Cavalry, at Windsor.

During his year there, he married Doreen, and the two of them took a full part in Church life at St. Michael’s, Little Ilford, Manor Park, London E12, where he was Churchwarden. After a year as Education Officer to the Kuwait Government in London’s Baker Street, and another year doing supply-teaching at East Ham Girls’ Grammar School – where he was a Form Mistress – he accepted a place at The Bishop’s Hostel, Lincoln Theological College.

In 1964 he was Deaconed in Cromer Parish Church, and Priested in 1965 in Norwich Cathedral, serving a five-year Curacy at St. Margaret’s, Lowestoft, and Oulton Village. During that time, he and Doreen adopted two adorable children, Rupert and Lulu, and in 1969 moved to Tamerton Foliot in north-west Plymouth, where he spent the next 29 years as Vicar. For eighteen of those years, he had the honour of regularly broadcasting, presenting the late night Epilogues, Faith For Life on Westward Television, and Postscript on Television Southwest.

On his first retirement in 1998, when he and Doreen moved to Isleham in Cambridgeshire, he spent the next five years there as Priest-in-Charge of St. Andrew’s Parish Church. Having qualified with a Private Pilot’s Licence at Plymouth, and then based at Cambridge, he often flew Cessnas 172 with Doreen as his navigatrix, until he retired for the second time in 2004.

He and Doreen have travelled extensively throughout the world, and have often broadcast on Television and Radio, and between them in the past twenty years have published fourteen books, for you to enjoy!