Biography and Notes (further contributions welcome) :

Born 1947 and brought up in a working-class household in Sunderland, in the north-east of England, Tony succeeded in passing an exam at the age of eleven, which sent him to the local selective Grammar School. He feels he "drifted" from there into the teaching profession, training as a drama teacher at a college in Nottingham, where he met his present wife. Lives are changed by the most ordinary of events and after two years as a teacher he was already becoming bored with teaching when someone in a bar suggested that if he joined the local police they'd give him a house and his qualifications would stand him in good stead. Moved by a naïve desire to "do good for society," a year later saw he was patrolling the local beat in a police uniform and working shifts. For a while he ascended the learning curve, passing all his police exams, gaining a part-time LLB and trying to conform to the culture of the police where, he felt, some of the detectives, were almost as devious as the criminals, bending the rules of fairness when it suited them. Due to his exam successes he was allowed to try for accelerated promotion but didn't get it and had to work his way up the system the hard way, resulting in him getting only to the rank of sergeant and eventually feeling the frustration of seeing others going past him in the promotion stakes. The boredom of shift work soon left a gap in his life and he began the process of writing plays for competitions, some of which he won and so began his urge to become a recognized playwright. Two of his one-act plays were published by New Playwrights Network of Macclesfield, UK, and when he got his first refusal he decided to explore the idea of self-publishing. Since then he has published more than twenty plays, most of which have been performed by UK amateur groups and one, "My Brother's Keeper" reaching the final of the Pittsburgh New Play Festival and later published in Holland and Belgium. He has also published novels and poetry for children and adults. At the age of forty he almost escaped the police system when he went to London to audition at the Poor School for a place on a part-time course for actors. He was the only one in his group to be offered a place but having teenage children and a mortgage he regrets that he didn't have the courage to make the break. They say that the writer must suffer for his art. Tony's desire to write finally got him in trouble with his employers when, working as an instructor at a Police Training Centre in Coventry, he used their ageing photocopier without permission to make some copies of his latest one-act play and when challenged, Washington-like, he told the truth, expecting clemency. Instead they confined him to his room, carried out a full investigation and held a military-style discipline interview after which they summarily expelled him back to his own force. The end of his police career also wasn't happy, but the British law of libel prevents him being able to say why.