Geoffrey Lewis was born in Oxford, in September 1947. As a boy, he Attended St Philip
& St James School in North Oxford, and, following the eleven-plus examination, won
a place in the City’s High School for Boys. An interest in Organic Chemistry led
him to a job in the Pharmaceutical Industry, where he worked in the field of Chemical
Development for some four years.
The closure of the research facility of Riker Laboratories in Welwyn Garden City
made him, and around a hundred colleagues, redundant. After two years with ICI Plastics
Division, he left the field of Chemistry, returned to Oxford, and fell into a period
of rather directionless job-wandering, spending some time as a technical sales rep
and then as a security guard. Fascinated by the style and glamour of American cars
since his childhood, his continued interest in them led to the offer of a job with
the U.K.’s first independent importer of U.S. vehicle spares; it was this job which
first brought him to Northamptonshire, where he lived for two years in the town of
Thrapston.
In 1978 he moved to work for a competitor, the well-known parts and performance suppliers
John Woolfe Racing Ltd, of Bedford. Somewhat unsettled home-wise, he lived in a
series of flats in Kettering and Wellingborough during this period, before buying
a house in the village of Little Irchester, selling it again to move closer to the
job in Bedford in 1982. He returned to Northamptonshire in 1987, moving to Rushden
while still working for JWR.
A third experience of redundancy, although this time taken voluntarily, led to the
establishment of Avenue Photographic the following year. Now self-employed, he specialised
in portrait photography, setting up an operation which offered the facility for families
to have their pictures taken in the comfort of their own homes, a situation suited
especially to photographing young children who might be upset and disoriented by
the trip to a studio. The business was successful for two years, slowly establishing
itself in the area, but the onset of the next economic depression (these were the
Thatcher years of boom and bust) brought a decline; in late 1990, he returned to
the motor trade, in his own words ‘packing up the photography business before it
packed him up’!
Now working for Motorvogue Ltd of Northampton, he had given up ideas of being self-employed;
but in 1995, an opportunity presented itself. As a child, he had lived a few minutes
walk from the then near-derelict Oxford Canal, and frequently would walk the family
dog along the towpath, seeing, rarely, the last of the working cargo boats carrying
coal to Morrell’s Brewery in the City. His love of the canals had been rekindled
in the 1980’s by occasional holidays on hired narrowboats, to the extent that he
had opted to give up life on the land in 1991, buying his own 44-foot boat. A chance
conversation in the Boat Inn, in Stoke Bruerne, led him to take over the established
but under-publicised trip boat ‘Linda’, based on the Grand Union Canal in the village
of Cosgrove.
Finally forsaking the motor trade, he set up the Linda Cruising Company in early
1996, and set about revitalising the semi-moribund operation. In 1997, he moved
home to be close to the business - an easy matter, when you live on a boat! - and
lived in Cosgrove for some nine years. The business prospered; the ageing ‘Linda’,
built as a cargo boat in 1912, was retired in 2000, to be replaced with a modern,
all-steel narrowboat which was refitted and renamed ‘Elizabeth of Glamis’ in honour
of H.R.H. the Queen Mother. Further growth ensued, until the Linda Cruising Company
became perhaps the best-known and most popular passenger boat in the area for groups,
families, clubs and institutions looking for a relaxing way of celebrating an occasion
or having an outing with a difference.
Following the publication of the first David Russell novel, he retired from the trip-boat
business to concentrate upon writing. The Linda Cruising Company has been sold to
a new owner, who took over for the new season in 2004; ‘Strangers’, the first sequel
to ‘Flashback’, was released in April 2004, to be followed by the third in the series,
‘Winter’s Tale’, that October. A final detective story, ‘Cycle’, was followed by
a change of direction in his writing – ‘Starlight’ was the first of his canal-based
novels, set in 1955 on the Oxford Canal, at a time when the canal was under threat
of closure, it is an emotive tale of childhood friendship. This was followed, in
2006, by ‘A Boy Off The Bank’, a historical tale set on working boats during the
second world war, which has seen him become well-established as a writer of considerable
repute in his own field. The second and third parts of what became a trilogy, following
on the success of ‘Boy Off The Bank’, were published in 2008 and 2009 respectively.
Geoffrey Lewis returned ‘on the bank’ in August 2007, finally admitting that humping
25Kg bags of coal for his winter heating was becoming ‘a bit of a chore’. Now living
in Milton Keynes, not far from the waterway, he remains a well-known figure on the
Grand Union Canal; he is a member of the Inland Waterways Association, regularly
attending the local Northampton Branch meetings, and of the Buckingham Canal Society,
a local group whose aim is to restore the abandoned canal arm from Cosgrove to Old
Stratford and Buckingham.
His hobbies include photography, and he is now the volunteer captain for a charity
known as the Friends of Raymond, who maintain and operate a pair of historic narrowboats
based in Braunston. His interest in American cars is unabated - a member of the
American Auto Club of Great Britain, he presently runs a Lincoln Town Car, and has
ambitions to own ‘one or two’ classics of the 1950’s and 1960’s. A long-time naturist,
an interest sparked during a spell working in Germany for John Woolfe Racing in the
1980’s, he is a member of the national organisation, British Naturism, and of the
Naturist Foundation. He has a permanently-sited caravan on the Foundation’s land
at Brocken Hurst, near Orpington in Kent.
The Writer: It was during the winter of 2001-2 that Geoffrey Lewis penned
his first full-length novel. He had for many years been a writer in some form or
another, publishing a number of articles in the motoring press under his own name
in the 1980’s, but fiction was a new endeavour.
He left school with, among others, a GCE ‘O’ level in English Language - in his
own words: ‘by today’s relaxed educational standards, that’s probably the equivalent
of a minor degree’! Without being a pedant, slipshod or careless use of English tends
to annoy him - he says that searching for the correct word for its context can be
one of the chief frustrations of being a writer. For many years, his writing was
solely concerned with work-related documents - reports, letters, promotional text
and so on. Whilst working as a photographer, he filled idle time with writing articles
about classic American cars. Illustrated with his own pictures, many of these were
published in the motoring press, mostly in ‘Classic American’, but he gave up this
with his return to regular employment in 1990.
When sat in front of a typewriter, for whatever purpose, his inclination has always
been to dabble with what he describes as ‘meaningless little essays’, fictional sketches
written for his own amusement, which would be torn up and forgotten once finished.
It was one of these sketches which inspired him to follow his thoughts a bit further,
running on from a murder scene through the subsequent events, until ‘I found I’d
got 80-odd thousand words worth of novel on my hands’. The result was ‘Cycle’, a
crime thriller which spans a twelve-year period, and tells of the beginnings of the
detective partnership of D.I. David Russell and D.S. Doug Rimmer, of the Northamptonshire
Constabulary.
Encouraged by friends who were avid readers and had had sight of this first draft,
he continued writing. Next up was ‘Indian Bay’, an odd tale set in an Oxfordshire
village, which changes from what the Americans like to call a ‘coming-of-age drama’
to a psychological thriller as it follows the exploits of a group of schoolboys during
their summer holidays – sadly, this remains unpublished, at least until now. His
third story returned to Northamptonshire, and David Russell, to tell of a child abduction,
with its concomitant anguish, and the pursuit of the perpetrator; this was ‘Flashback’.
Four David Russell novels have been published so far, and command a small but enthusiastic
following. In 2005, his love of the canals led him to begin writing about them,
specifically about the days of the now-defunct carrying trade for which they were
first built. His most successful books so far have been the ‘Michael Baker’ trilogy,
set on the waterways during and after the Second World War; ‘Starlight’ has
been turned into a poignant television drama although it is sadly yet to be produced.
More canal stories are planned over the coming years, together with other stories
drawn from farther afield.
