A Staffordshire Man

About the Book

The story, set in North Staffordshire, follows the life of a young man returning to civilian life from national service, attempting to pick up the threads of his former years and wrestling with mixed emotions generated by the suddenness of change, lifestyle and environment. It describes his induction into a job and the foundation of a career that spanned more than forty years.

It describes the difficulties of adjusting to a new environment, the meeting of his wife and their life together. It tracks his life from the happiness of courtship, the difficulties and struggles of early married life and parenting to one of satisfaction and fulfillment.

From the author’s perspective, it illustrates the organizational, technical and business changes he experienced at the English Electric Company at Stafford over more than four decades with a frank, light hearted and sometimes humorous approach.

It is a sensitive and frank portrayal of an ordinary life, similarly experienced by many people, but it is also a work of social and industrial history that helps bring back powerful memories.

The cover picture is called ‘Our Potteries Heritage’ and is printed by kind permission of the eminent Staffordshire artist Sid Kirkham ‘the Potteries Lowry’.

About the Author

Harry Titley was born in 1936 in a poor area of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, the county where he has lived for most of his life and about which most of his story is told. The youngest child of a working class couple, both from families with long histories in coal mining, he grew up during the Second World War, where, in spite of lives being on hold, he had a childhood freedom that was not experienced by generations of children before or since. It is a time where so much has been lost and mainly forgotten. His sensitivity and his contentment with his lot helped to consign those times to memory, “a thousand latent joys and half-forgotten sorrows.” After completing his national service in Germany, he went to work at the English Electric company in Stafford, where he remained until his retirement in 1999. He married Ann in 1960, and they had one child, Julie, in 1961. Although “A Staffordshire Lad” is Harry Titley's first book, he has written some poetry and a number of articles for a Canadian magazine and local newspapers. During his working life, he was editor of a company-wide magazine. He now lives in the North Staffordshire countryside with his wife.