Some later background

Following National Service with the Royal Engineers, I read Government at the London School of Economics and then embarked on a commercial career in transport and shipping.  

Once again my career move resulted from my secretarial experience and expertise.  My 'varsity vacation work was generally as a temporary secretary via one of the London secretarial agencies. I recollect that it was Fine's Agency, Praed Street in the Paddington area of London.  Mostly I had to overcome the gender prejudice, if not from the agency itself then from the employer, but my secretarial ability and broader-based experience than the average "temp" soon won them over, and I was regularly wooed by employers.  I remained faithful to the agency, however.  

One of my temporary assignments was with a firm of timber brokers in the City of London and they said I should contact them after I had taken my finals.  This I did and, fortuitously, they had an opening for an assistant to the general manager of their export merchant subsidiary.  Much of my novel, The Torturous Scheme, has its basis in my experience in that job.  Indeed, I  actually did start writing a novel at the time and also completed several short stories.  I got a lot of encouragement from my direct boss, Jock Melvin, who became the role model for Mattson in The Torturous Scheme.  "Ars Gratia Artis," he used to say to me.  "Don't waste your time writing a lot of rubbish.  Concentrate on producing one masterpiece."  He himself had been polishing up a short story for years, about a cripple who saves a small boy from death and, in the process, gets killed.  Jock admired the Somerset Maugham style of short story writing.

Throughout my life I have retained a commitment to my leisure pursuit of writing. An enforced early retirement from the prestigious Sea Containers Group, in the early 1980s, led to a commission for a book on refrigerated containers by the World Bank in Washington DC and a request by Sea Containers that I freelance the production of a news journal for their container division. Eighteen years later I am still producing the journal.

The Michaelmas Ball at LSE, 1949.  My partner, Naomi, became the first Mrs Sinclair

I have been married (more than once!) and divorced and honestly believe that married is best.  Alas, the tides of time have swept the sands of connubial bliss away and too few remain perhaps to fill an hour-glass.  In Spring a young man's fancy turns . . .  they say.  Who knows?  Perhaps a few springs remain in the Autumn of my life.

My two subsequent wives.  Both pictures taken before the marriages

June, at a Masonic ball - 1957	Ines in Holland - 1965