About the Author

REX NEEDLE worked as a journalist for more than forty years with the national, provincial, trade and overseas press, radio and television. Born in 1930, son of a working class family at Old Fletton, Peterborough, he was educated at the local elementary and secondary schools and after a spell working as a wages clerk, signed on as a regular soldier with the Royal Tank Regiment, serving for the next five years at home and abroad, latterly in Singapore and Malaya during the Emergency.

On leaving the army, he became a reporter with the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser and Evening Telegraph, moving to the Daily Express and then the Daily Mirror..

He was one of the reporting team to cover the famous Summit Conference of 1960 in Paris attended by the Russian leader Nikita Krushchev, the American President Dwight D Eisenhower and the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and also completed many other assignments overseas. In 1962, he returned to Peterborough to establish his own news agency and later opened offices in Stamford and in Cambridge. During this time, he became an accredited correspondent to the national press and a regular radio broadcaster and television news reporter for the BBC. For five years, he also contributed a weekly newsletter without a single break to the British Forces Broadcasting Service which was heard throughout the world.

He has been researching the history of Bourne for the past fifteen years and the results have been committed to the CD-ROM A Portrait of Bourne. There have been previous histories of the town but this archive now surpasses them all, containing more than 6,000 photographs and over two million words of text. Some of this material is on display at the Heritage Centre, the town's museum, and is also used in regular issues of the town guide, while other web sites that have an interest in Bourne, both in Britain and abroad, continually seek permission to include subject matter relevant to their own interests.

Regular illustrated articles written by the author have been published by The Local newspaper in Bourne since 1998 and in various magazines in Lincolnshire and elsewhere. Copies of the CD-ROM have been made available to Lincolnshire County Archives, public libraries and schools for use in social history studies while several companion books have also been published including Tales of Bourne in Past Times (2009), Stamford, Bourne and the Deepings (with artist Alan Oliver, 2009), Brief Lives of Bourne People (2010) and A Brief History of Bourne (2012). He has also produced several DVD photo presentations on the Abbey Church, the Red Hall and Bourne in past times, a collection of old photographs showing the town as it was.

Rex lives with his wife Elke in Bourne, which has been their home since he retired in 1983. Elke was born in Johannisberg, Germany, a member of the Eser family of wine growers in the Rhine Valley, but left to study languages in Paris and then London where she met her husband. They have been married for 50 years and she now acts as driver, navigator, note taker, proof reader and constant companion on outings around the town and outlying district in the search for new material.

January 2014