Born and raised in Norwich, I have been a writer and journalist all my adult life. Since joining Eastern Counties Newspapers (now renamed and rebranded Archant) straight from the City of Norwich School, I have worked variously as a district reporter, cutting my teeth in Diss, Fakenham and King's Lynn before moving on to Great Yarmouth and Norwich, sports journalist (covering King's Lynn Stars speedway), sports editor (Yarmouth Mercury and Evening News), columnist and features editor (Evening News). I have also edited the EDP's first TV, events and listings supplement, its Saturday Magazine and the Sunday supplement, eventually leaving, in 2010, as assistant editor, to concentrate on writing books while working as a freelance journalist.

My early books combine my passion for military and local history and were written in scraps of spare time with the support of my wife of 31 years, Sandra, and my daughters, Katie and Holly, who are now grown up and have long since left the family nest. The first to be published, though not to be written, was a pictorial study of my home city based around the magnificent archive of 20th century photographs in the joint Evening News and EDP archives. Images of Norwich (Breedon Books, 1994) was followed by Over Here: The Americans in Norfolk During World War II (Breedon Books, 1996). Meanwhile, my first project, a biographical study of the Victoria Cross recipients of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, had made it into print (Sutton Publishing, 1995) as part of a series on the VCs of the First World War, a venture initiated by Norfolk-based publisher/writer Gerald Gliddon. Over the course of the next six years, I contributed a further two books to the series – Passchendaele 1917 (Sutton Publishing, 1998) and The Naval VCs (Sutton Publishing, 2001).