After spending 35 years in the Royal Air Force serving in a number of countries in Asia and Europe, my wife and I spent 15 years living in Southern France before moving to Shaftesbury in 2018. I have considerable experience in training, conflict resolution and  international relations, which serves me well as Chairman! My role is to oversee the running of the museum and its future development.

My main role is to manage our team of volunteers who staff the museum. Other duties include managing the shop and day to day running of the museum. I am also education lead for the Abbey museum and Gold Hill Museum. If you are interested in joining us, we'd love to welcome you to join the team. Bringing history to everyone is one of my passions. Apart from my work at the museum, I also enjoy living history and traditional crafts like Dorset Button making.

I have lived in Shaftesbury since 2011 and am fascinated by its history.  I was a civil servant for 30 years working on education, training and business policies, and have previously served as a trustee and chair of governors of an adult education college.   I have a strong interest in the use of digital technology for education and training, and at the Abbey, alongside being deputy chair of trustees, I lead on digital developments.  It can be difficult to imagine from the ruins left by Henry VIII just how impressive and powerful the Abbey once was.  Technology offers a myriad of new opportunities to tell our story to the world.

I am the first point of contact in the Abbey office and keep in touch with our Friends membership and volunteers. I enjoy organising our season of events, from open-air theatre to herbal workshops and liaise with the wider community and local media to promote all we do at the Abbey. I love exploring Dorset on foot and my choir has often sung at the Abbey during the annual Fringe Festival.

After several  (too many!) decades as an accountant and finance director, I retired in 2016 and became treasurer and company secretary of the Shaftesbury Abbey Preservation Trust.

I manage and/or record all grant funding applications, income and expenditures at the Abbey, plus our annual accounts. I am also the key contact on behalf of the Trust with the Charities Commission and Companies House for all trustee/director matters.

Since coming to Shaftesbury in 2019 I have had the pleasure of building up the Abbey’s research and lending library of over 850 books and many more papers. A “Library Circle” of interested people explores aspects of the Abbey’s history through reading and talks, and shares some of the tasks of sorting and cataloguing. My background in theology and a period in religious life helps me to connect sympathetically with the life of the community of nuns who lived here for over six hundred years, and I have greatly enjoyed the research for my two short novels about our early abbesses.