Steering Group Chairman

Steering Group Actions

I have been interested in social justice, environmental trends, poverty eradication and development  since I graduated with a BA Hons degree in Regional Development Studies back in the 1980s. Wycombe For Fairtrade formed in August 2008, and I have been Chairman since then. With a supportive, and knowledgeable Steering Group, we managed to obtain a Council resolution to become an official Fairtrade Town, joining over 500 others throughout the UK in March 2014

We have been active at the local Wycombe level, at a national scale, and have forged two international links, one with the Fair Trade Town of Grecia in Costa Rica, and in October 2025, hopefully with Kelkheim, High Wycombe’s Twin Town in Germany. We have jointly delivered presentations and workshops at two world conferences exploring Fairtrade Town Linking and had a journal article published in March 2022.

Having a very supportive Member of Parliament for High Wycombe has provided another level of constructive dialogue confronting the current unfair and unsustainable trade justice system. The Steering Group also receive financial support from a church in High Wycombe, which also provides accommodation for our meetings.

The Steering Group have been making conscious efforts to deepen our local footprint by collaborating with other High Wycombe local groups e.g.  HWBidco in adding Fairtrade retailing and catering outlets in the “Wander Wycombe” map, supporting other environmental and cultural groups, delivering sustainability lessons at two local school, and regularly provide Fairtrade hot drinks at the annua lMayor’s Festival of Carols each December. Fairtrade stalls at the Pann Mill Open Day attract interested residents. We have regular meetings with the Mayor of High Wycombe to explore joint promotion opportunities.

General Biography

I left school with two “A” Levels in 1972, unsure of my career path. Acting on a friend’s advice, I began public library work in the London Borough of Hillingdon.  Catalogue cards provided book locations, while printed indexes and abstracts gave access to newspaper and journal articles. I enjoyed the work and talking to users. When my father’s firm relocated to Reading in 1974, I moved to Reading, working in two or three branch libraries, including Tilehurst, where I lived. I decided to make librarianship my career and was accepted by Ealing College for a two-year Librarianship Diploma course which I began in 1974. It was a professional course comprising   classification, cataloguing, and bibliographic research, as well as communication skills.

Unfortunately, the recession after 1976 curtailed public library posts. Therefore, I applied for a Civic Service post with the Training Services Division and worked with job trainees and liaised with regional colleges who provided the vocational training for five years to 1980.

As I had always been interested in social justice, environmental trends, poverty eradication and economic development, I applied to Bulmershe College of Higher Education in 1980 to study    Regional Development Studies. It was the most rewarding part of my life to that point, meeting my wife to be as well!  I graduated with a BA Honours degree in 1983.

Reading University Library had an opening for a Library Assistant in its Department of Agriculture and Agricultural Economics in 1984. It was a busy specialist library dealing with enquiries from undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and academics. I also gained valuable experience using the Library of Congress subject classification system, rare for the UK. Periodically, I began a project in the Central Library reindexing Agricultural pamphlets, discarding old ones and entering recently published ones on to the computer catalogue. This professional project helped me to gain my Library Association Professional Charter. I left the University of Reading in 1988 to gain more experience researching and compiling a leisure and tourist database covering Southern England for the Countryside Commission in 1989/90.

In 1991, a professional Subject Librarian post came up in the Faculty of Health Studies and Nursing at the Newland Park Campus of Buckinghamshire New University. I applied for and was offered the post which I accepted. I was responsible for information retrieval searching skills delivery to new nursing students, second years, third year finalists, as well as postgraduate specialist nurses, researchers, and new members of academic staff.  It was a rewarding and satisfying post allowing me to not just cover library inductions, but targeted advanced database searching of Medline, CINAHL, PsycINFO, as well as the myriads of Journal publisher subscription databases locating the best clinical evidence-based practice. During 2004 and 2006 I managed to study for and gain Certificate and Diploma in Post-Graduate Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. The Newland Park Campus closed in 2009 when I transferred to Uxbridge Campus and worked there until my retirement in 2019.

I enjoy travelling, reading, walking, swimming and listening to a wide range of music. I am a member of the Chiltern Society and the local Wycombe, Friends of the Earth branch. I became Chairman of the Wycombe For Fairtrade Steering Group in 2008, a post I have held for 17 years!