Rex Needle is the local historian for Bourne who over the past 20 years has produced a massive archive of material relating to the town which has been committed to a CD entitled A Portrait of Bourne, his magnum opus which embraces and supersedes all other histories.

He previously worked as a journalist for over sixty years with the national, provincial, trade and overseas press, radio and television until retiring to live in Bourne in 1983.

Rex was born at Old Fletton, Peterborough in 1930, and educated at the local elementary and secondary schools and after a spell working as a wages clerk with the London Brick Company, signed on as a regular soldier with the Royal Tank Regiment at the age of 17, serving for the next five years at home and abroad, latterly in Singapore and Malaya during the Emergency.

On leaving the army in 1953, he joined the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser and Evening Telegraph as a journalist, becoming chief reporter and features editor, but a job offer from the legendary editor Arthur Christiansen took him to the Daily Express and then the Daily Mirror in London during the hey-day of Fleet Street journalism.

He completed many assignments overseas and 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.

In 1962, he decided to leave Fleet Street and returned to Peterborough to establish his own news agency, subsequently opening branch offices in Stamford and Cambridge and employing both reporters and photographers. During this period, he became an accredited correspondent to the national and overseas 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 by our armed forces throughout the world.

When retirement took him to Bourne, he soon became interested in the town’s history and this led to the launch of the Bourne web site in 1998. It first appeared during the early days of the Internet and over the next eighteen years became the longest running community web site for a market town of this size, winning several awards including a Golden Web Award for design, content and creativity in 2000.

The web site also pioneered the use of digital photography to attract readers and eventually had over 2,000 visitors a week, many from abroad, especially our former colonies in the United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where people from Bourne had emigrated in past times and their descendants were anxious to seek information about their family roots. This prompted the inclusion of a Family History section on the web site which eventually had a list of more than 400 local names being researched.

During this period, Rex also widened his researches into the history of the town which continued to be a consuming passion, the results having been committed to the CD-ROM A Portrait of Bourne, a massive work that has been sold around the world. There have been previous histories of the town but this archive now embraces them all, containing over 6,000 photographs and some two million words of text and has been described as “a masterpiece of local history” and “a modern Domesday Book”.

A great deal of this material is on display at the Heritage Centre in South Street, the town's museum, and has also been used in past issues of the town guide, while other web sites that have an interest in Bourne, both in Britain and abroad, have continually sought permission to include subject matter relevant to their own interests.

Several places in Bourne have been named on his advice, notably Marquess Court in North Street and Browning Court in Manning Road, and one of his most notable achievements was in the listing of the Victorian chapel in the town cemetery to prevent it from being demolished by the town council. His application to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) resulted in the building being given a Grade II listing in April 2007 followed by a similar protection for the Ostler memorial fountain in July that year, bringing the number of listed buildings in Bourne to 71. This subsequently led to the formation of the Bourne Preservation Society by various conservationists anxious to restore the chapel and other important buildings for future generations, now merged with Bourne Civic Society.

In 2014, he was also responsible for bringing the Victoria Cross memorial tablet for Charles Sharpe to Bourne, the original destination named by the Department for Communities and Local Government during their World War One centenary celebrations being Sleaford but Rex produced evidence of Sharpe’s extensive family and working association with Bourne and as a result, South Kesteven District Council received an assurance from the minister, Eric Pickles, that the data base would be changed to reflect his home town as Bourne and the stone was subsequently laid at the War Memorial in South Street in May 2015.

Rex has been a regular contributor to The Local newspaper for 20 years and during that time over 500 of his articles have been published. He also writes regularly for several other magazines including Discovering Bourne and Discovering the Deepings, the Bourne Directory web site, the Bourne Civic Society newsletter and the Abbey Church parish magazine. Copies of the CD-ROM have also been made available to Lincolnshire County Archives, public libraries and schools for use in social history studies.

He has also published a number of books such as The Bourne Chronicle (2005), Tales of Bourne in Past Times (2009), Stamford, Bourne and the Deepings (2009), Brief Lives of Bourne People (2010), A Children’s History of Bourne (2011) and A Brief History of Bourne (2012) as well as four DVDs based on his own collection of contemporary and archive photographs including Bourne in Past Times, The Abbey Church, the Red Hall and Images of Bourne, a glimpse of the town as it is today. He has also written a series of 30 booklets on various topics connected with the town, many of which are in the public library and the Lincolnshire County Archives, and he also wrote the town guides for Bourne from 2006-11.

His latest project is the Bourne Picture Archive in which photographs taken of town and district over the past twenty years have been brought together and preserved in conjunction with Geograph Britain, almost 1,000 images of churches, houses, public buildings, open spaces, rivers, parks and other places of interest, the largest collection of photographs relating to the town ever recorded which are now available online for anyone who cares to see or use them for their own projects.

Rex lives with his wife Elke in Stephenson Way, Bourne, which has been their home since he retired in 1983. They have been married for over 50 years and she has acted as driver, navigator, note taker, proof reader and constant companion on outings around the town and outlying district in the search for new material. It might appear that everything that could be discovered about Bourne had been written during that time but new material continues to arrive almost weekly and although the Bourne web site was closed in 2016, he insists that “the quest continues.”

He and Elke have one son, Dr Justin Needle, former pupil of Stamford School and a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, who has several degrees from other universities and is now senior research fellow at the City University in London. He is married to Dr Sonia Johnson, Professor of Social and Community Psychiatry at University College, London, and they have one son, Anton.

PHOTO ALBUM

The Daily Mirror team at the Paris Summit in 1960 on the roof of the Hotel Castiglione. In the picture are (left to right) columnist Noel Whitcomb, diary writer Rex Needle, political editor Sydney (later Lord) Jacobson, columnist Marjorie Proops and diarist James Pettigrew. For its Paris enterprise, the Mirror was awarded the annual prize of Granada TV's programme "What the Papers Say".

Rex (seated centre) pictured at one of his book signings at the Heritage Centre in 2009 with (left to right) Don Fisher (town councillor and former mayor), Mrs Elke Needle, Mrs Brenda Jones (chairman, Bourne Civic Society), Tony Stubbs (military historian), Mrs Cherry Cliffe (mayor’s consort), Mrs Shirley Cliffe (Mayor of Bourne), Alan Jones (former town councillor and mayor) and John Budd (Bourne Civic Society).

WRITTEN SEPTEMBER 2016