About Me

I am the scion of Canadian and English stock, and have divided my life almost equally between the country I was born in and the one I now call home.

My father was a Canadian soldier stationed in England during WWII. He met my mother on the south coast, near Brighton, where she was a captain in The Salvation Army, in charge of a corps (Salvation Army church) near the Canadian military camp. They met, married, and I arrived nine months after their honeymoon in Scotland.

My father, who by this time was fighting his way up through Italy in the Calgary Tank Regiment, wanted to name me for the Labrador missionary-cum-explorer Sir Wilfred Grenfell,  hence the ‘Grenfel’ part of my name (he couldn’t spell very well). Along with hundreds of other war brides and their children, we went back to Canada on the Aquitania during the summer of 1947. After the failure of my parents’ marriage, my mother returned to England with me in November 1950.

I liked school, and did well. I won a place in the local grammar school in Plymouth and then at the University of London, where my tuition and accommodation were fully funded by various scholarships. I chose to complete the four-year course in three years, so the honours B.A. I earned at Queen Mary College was to be the only parchment on my wall.

My first occupation was teaching. I taught French and Latin at various schools in England, only one of which remains a teaching institution, Bearwood College, which has now been reinvented as Reddam House. There I was head of French, choirmaster and the assistant housemaster for Hawkins House. I enjoyed teaching, although I was not particularly good at it, and still remain in touch with colleagues from those days.

When I moved to Canada again in 1977 I was not able to teach because I did not have an Ontario teaching certificate, so I embarked on a career in sales and marketing at Schneiders. After some success I went on to form my own marketing communications company, specializing in the retail packaged goods sector.

More recently, I worked for The Salvation Army, as a sometime employee in Canada or in the UK, but mostly as an outside supplier. Since retirement I have continued to work part-time in the financial services sector while travelling in France and the USA, and trying to maintain an active life.