I graduated with a First Class degree in History from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, in 1981. On graduation I began a career in Information Technology lasting nearly forty years, but retained an ongoing interest in history, and in particular military history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2011, prompted by my wife, I began to look into turning my amateur interest into a more serious qualification.  After six years of study at the University of Buckingham supervised by Professor Saul David and Dr Spencer Jones, I was awarded a doctorate for my thesis on the influence of the Civil War on the Victorian British Army. This was the first significant work on this subject for nearly sixty years, and formed the basis for my first book, Bull Run to Boer War: How the American Civil War Changed the British Army, published in the UK by Helion in 2019 and distributed in the USA by Casemate.

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I am a Trustee of the American Civil War Round Table (UK), for which I have produced a number of presentations and articles. I have also published in Military History Matters, the Coast Defence Journal, and Saul David’s eMagazine Militaria, and online on the Military History Now and Occupied Italy websites. I conducted a very successful online discussion about my book on Reddit’s “Ask Historians” forum, have presented at the National Army Museum in Lonson, and participated in several podcast interviews.

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I began researching SHERWOOD BOYS about five years ago after obtaining the war record of my father, who served in the 5th Sherwood Foresters from 1943-46, reaching the rank of Sergeant, and realising the story of ordinary soldiers like my father had never been fully told.​​​