Stephen Shellard

Stephen Shellard was born in July 1953 in Newry, Co. Down, where he attended Newry High School. He left Newry for Reading University in October 1972 graduating in Sociology in 1975 and then spending a year as editor of the Students’ Union magazine before training as a teacher in Liverpool. Following this, he returned to Reading and worked first as a social services ambulance driver and then, for two years, as a Detached Youth Worker, seconded to a youth counselling service. He resigned this position and, continuing to live in the Reading area, worked for short periods as a delivery driver and for Pickford’s Removals, before being invited to Ballycastle in Co. Antrim to work for a year as a volunteer at the Ramoan Centre, the first direct alternative to custody for serious and persistent young offenders in Northern Ireland, managed by Save the Children in co-operation with the Probation Service. During a career intermission, he went grape picking in France and spent several months in West Berlin, living in a squatted house and working as a hotel dishwasher, before returning to the United Kingdom and settling in Southwest Scotland. There he found employment supporting people with learning difficulties to live independently and spent time as a self-employed gardener before taking a job in a unit for excluded school pupils. Following this he taught secondary school pupils with additional support needs before becoming a lecturer at Dumfries and Galloway College. He worked in Further Education for more than twenty-five years, until his retirement in 2020. At the outset he taught students with Learning Difficulties but, eventually, also Psychology and Politics classes.

Over the years he has written and performed songs as a floor singer at folk clubs and open mic events. From his early years he acquired a writing habit, resulting in, amongst other things, publication of letters in the Irish Times (circa 1970), the Reading Chronicle, the Newry Reporter, the Belfast Telegraph, the Belfast News Letter, the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and the Dumfries Courier. He has written two plays, one of which, in 1981, was staged in a pub in Reading to modest acclaim. The other, written in 1982, whilst living in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim — a possible companion piece to the Billy trilogy of television plays which launched Kenneth Branagh’s acting career — the author is very happy to keep in a drawer. In 1993 he had a submission included in the Opsahl Report on Northern Ireland. Whilst working as a lecturer in Further Education, he wrote several articles on the developing implications of new technologies in the classroom for the Scottish Further Education Unit journal, Broadcast. More recently, he has written a blog which has a small and occasionally appreciative audience. Work on his blog has been on hold for some time whilst he has been writing his memoir, Remembered Fragments.