Issuu

Accordingly, this booklet is for my grandchildren so that they may see the better times of a life very well enjoyed.

Would I do it all again? Take a wild guess!

Dr. Keith B Moseley. PhD., ALIADip

ISBN: 978-1-0669762-0-1

781066 976201

THE STORY OF A VERY LUCKY MAN

This book is the expurgated version of the original biography of Keith Moseley, having removed all the sex and violence together with the trials of life, losing a child, the loss of many dear relatives, the tribulations of two marriages and the numerous struggles of my profession.

The Story of A Very Lucky Man

The Story of a Very Lucky Man

KEITHBBENJAMIN DR. KEITH MOSELEY. MOSELEY PHD., ALIADIP

If you wish to order more copies of this book, please email the Author directly to receive a discount: ??keithbmoseley@yahoo.co.uk??

ISBN: 978-1-0669762-0-1

The autobiography of Keith Moseley. A.L.I.A.(Dip)., Comp.O.H.W.

CONTENTS 1.

IN THE BEGINNING

OUT INTO THE WIDER WORLD

FUN AND FROLICS 4. THE PATH OF SPIRIT 3.

LIFE STILL HOLDS SURPRISES

43 73 91

IN THE BEGINNING

eing in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 aeroplane was like sitting on the roof of a building … then suddenly rushing down the runway at 180 m.p.h. and leaping into the sky was indescribable! Destination South Africa … However, this was a far cry from my early beginnings. Back in 1939, before I was born, my family were bombed out of 161 Oldﬁeld Road in Birmingham and were rehomed in a government-requisitioned house at 133 City Road, Edgbaston, which was a very prestigious Birmingham address in those days. It was a three-story house, but we just occupied the ground ﬂoor which partly encompassed the servant’s old quarters – the bells to summon servants to other parts of the house were still on the wall. We had an outside loo which froze in the winter and a butcher’s hook with squares of cut-up newspapers on it for toilet paper. My plaintive cry could often be heard, “Dad, there’s no paper!” My mother was Rose Matilda Dancer whose family had traditionally been nail-makers in the eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries but my great grandfather, Cornelius Dancer, had held the position of druggist and chemist with his wife, Emma, that of postmistress in their Soho premises at Smethwick, Staffordshire. Cornelius was also the treasurer of Smethwick Music Society which was very well attended and quite a thriving concern in late Victorian times. Rose’s father, 9

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Benjamin, married Annie Elizabeth Shaw and they went on to have ten children altogether. Rose was born on 26th August 1912. After her mother died, she was the youngest girl and had to stay at home to do the housework because everyone else had ‘paid’ work and could not be spared. Benjamin at one point obtained Solicitor’s letters instructing all of his sons and Rose, to leave his house and seek other accommodation. Rose wasn’t the sort of person to meekly accept this and at the ﬁrst opportunity of being proposed to and escaping, she was off; she had always wanted to enjoy the better things in life. On the 2nd December 1933, Rose married Wilfred Norman Moseley. She was just twentyone years old and he was a thirty-year-old tool setter also living in Smethwick and working at Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds. As with many workers in the Midlands, his family were also traditionally attached to trades working in metal, his grandfather, Charles Moseley, being a brass warehouseman and his father, Charles Jnr. a copper tube drawer – all skilled jobs. My father had started off as a bookie’s runner in his very young days and as a consequence became very good at mental arithmetic. His ﬁrst love was sport and locally he was quite a famous amateur sportsman – my son, Adrian, now has all his gold medals from those days. He spent much of his time practising in the evenings after work and playing at football and cricket matches on Saturday and Sunday. This had a serious downside as it left my mother dealing with two young children completely on her own – my sister, Ann was born in January 1939 and I was born 27 months later in South Road Nursing Home, Smethwick, at 8.a.m. on the 1st July 1941, a 10

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very fortuitous time and date I am told. It must have appeared to my mother that the clock had turned back to her pre-marriage years when she was looking after her father and siblings – suddenly, ten years later, she was in an almost identical situation. Even worse, during the war, my father Wilfred worked in a reserved occupation as an engineer in a munitions factory. The factory was operating around the clock, and he worked three different shifts, (6.am. – 2.pm., 2.pm. – 10pm., and 10.pm. 6.pm.) for a fortnight each. This meant that my mother was alone until late evening for two weeks at a time and alone all through the night for the same length of time – during the blitz, this must have been especially hard. My father also worked as a fire watcher at night so my mother must have hardly seen anything of him. When I was three years old, my mother abandoned me and my father, taking my sister, Ann, away to be brought up by a maiden aunt, Ruth Dancer. Mother ran away with the local butcher, William Frederick Hunter, (Bill). She had been working as a cashier in the local Co-op and he had begun to teach her how to cut up the joints of meat. My parents never divorced so she and Bill never married, but they had a son, my half-brother, also called Bill, and lived a happy family life. Still, I find it difficult to imagine how a mother could leave her children like that. How my father managed to bring me up on his own with such obvious hardship I will never know. My relatives often commented in later years that they could never understand how I could have been so successful after such a difficult upbringing. Several local ladies offered to take me off his 11

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hands, (including Mrs Marjory Brown from across the road who subsequently became Lord Mayor of Birmingham), but father hung on to me despite everything. However, he was never tactile with me and confessed in later life that he was frightened that the authorities would take me away from him and that he didn’t want me to get used to too much affection in case I later came to miss it in an institution. I did sometimes crave affection and learned at an early age how to acquire sympathy from ladies with whom I came into contact. Being a blond, curly-haired, blue-eyed little boy, (when I was twelve months old, I won a baby competition run by the Smethwick Telephone, a weekly newspaper, the prize for which was a guinea – £1.05), I could sometimes reduce them to tears – it was called ‘laying it on thick’ in those days. At that time, my Aunty Dorothy (who lived three miles away) was the only person to ever take me in her arms for a cuddle and for that I will love her forever. On one Sunday afternoon, I remember going to Southﬁeld Road Sunday School when I knew that Sunday School would be in progress. I was welcomed in and asked if my mother knew where I was. I replied that I didn’t have a mother. At that time, Easter rush crosses were being handed out but there weren’t enough for me to have one. At seven years old I could do nothing else but cry and so the Sunday School teacher gave me hers. After all, who could resist a motherless little boy? I do remember sometimes crying and begging my father not to go to work at 5.30.am. when he was on an early shift. After he went, I would be left alone until 8.30.am. when I would walk myself to school. 12

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When I was about six, I remember the post-war effort offering free boots to poor children via their schools. I put my name down but my father refused point blank to accept any charity and the boots were returned. One morning when I was about seven years old, my father was ﬁnishing his 10.pm. – 6.am. shift and I decided to walk the mile or so to his work and wait outside the factory gates for him. It was snowing quite heavily at the time and fortunately, the gatekeeper invited me into his hut where there was a potbellied stove to keep him warm. When the hooter went off and all the workmen came out, the gatekeeper called my father over and sympathised with him over his child-rearing problems. When we got outside, father boxed my ears. Apparently, he had chosen that morning to remove a pick from his workplace, carrying the head under his overcoat and the long handle down his trouser leg! To be caught doing such a thing would have meant instant dismissal. Yet my father was a gentle man which, I think, has in turn made me gentle too. He has my deepest love, respect and admiration. Without him, I would never have made anything of my life. It never occurred to me that I was in any way underprivileged – life was just what it was. As far as I know, father never had any other relationships with women, but he was very caring. Every Sunday morning in winter he’d take me to the local swimming baths and swim with me, or in summer we would ﬁnd a river to swim in. Father used to take me out at the weekends for such activities as a day fruit picking or conker collecting. I remember once when I was seven or eight, we were picking conkers and he was throwing stones up into a tree when one of them bounced 13

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down and hit me on the head. He was appalled because he thought he'd killed me! I assume that when we were doing these weekend activities in the autumn and winter, he must have given up his football because I never went to a football match with him, but I was always accompanying him to cricket matches. We never had a car or telephone or anything like that, and one day we got a lift to a match in someone else’s car. I was left playing in it during the match and managed to let the handbrake off so that the car began rolling down onto the cricket pitch. Fortunately, the players all ran over and stopped it. I was always a troublemaker! Dad and I began visiting my sister Ann regularly on a Friday evening when I was ﬁve or six – possibly after the end of the Second World War when it was safer to cross the city again without fear of bombing raids. My father bought a new bicycle for my sister, and we took it over to her on the bus. She was thrilled to bits. The following Friday we went over only to discover that it had been sold. Aunt Ruth thought a great deal about money and also ruined at least two of my sister’s early relationships in order to try and keep Ann with her. The ﬁrst time I met my mother after she left us was when I was seven or eight. She was then living in Berkshire. Once I learned that she was going to visit Aunty Lizzie, I got on my bike and travelled across Birmingham to meet her. After that, she would sometimes pick me up from somewhere and take me out for the afternoon. Sometimes, we used to go to the Kardoma restaurant in the afternoon and have tea and cakes. I never went away on holiday as a child. As I grew older, I would just put a tent on my back and go walking for miles – 14

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North Wales or up around the Lake District. My mother would take my sister Ann away with them on holiday each year, but I was never included. I did ﬁnd fun in other ways. When I was eleven, I joined the Scouts and spent many happy days camping locally with them. I progressed up through Senior Scouts and Rangers eventually becoming a Scoutmaster and band leader. My bugle-blowing was atrocious, I was more of an organiser than a musician. I was seconded to the Jubilee World Jamboree in Sutton Park in 1957 as an administrator and enjoyed every minute, especially the bargaining between foreign Scouts for badges, knives and clothes. At the age of thirteen, I became friends with David Spires, a Jewish boy, and at his house, I was educated in some of the ways of that religion. For instance, I learned a lot about ‘kosher’ food and living, a precursor for my wider interest in other religions. When I was fourteen or so, my father and I were sitting in the kitchen one day when he said, “I’ll have to do something about this ceiling – it ought to have plasterboard up there.” Oh, I thought, if he wants it down, I’ll do the job for him. I got my friends round while dad was out at work, cleared the furniture out, opened all the windows, and pulled the lath and plaster ceiling down. What a colossal mess! Not only that but it was also a Monday, traditionally wash day for all the ladies in the area. I didn’t half catch it – they all had to do their washing again! When my father saw the ceiling he went bananas. He never hit me, though. The mess was unimaginable – it took us a week to clean the kitchen. I don’t 15

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know whether Father couldn’t afford to finish the job, but it must have been twelve months before the plasterboard went up – and even then it was never skimmed. Peter Summers was my main pal when I was growing up. It was with him that I went on the first and only holiday of my youth. We went to his aunt’s house in Portsmouth where he and I went apple scrumping … and got caught! His mother declared that Peter shouldn’t mix with me again. We, of course, took no notice. Peter was a year older than me and so we travelled around on his motorcycle until I could legally ride by myself. We met secretly and went all over the country on it. Such was the state of my finances that when the time came, I had to buy my bike in bits and build it from scratch. Before that, we used the same method to build track bikes, with straight handlebars and tyres with big treads, and we did a lot of speedway wherever there was a local track. I had been making my own bicycles since I was about the age of ten. Peter and I were both very poor but in order to travel on the motorbike, we needed petrol. To get around the problem, Peter and I would lie under cars and syphon a little petrol out of their tanks. Another prank to raise some cash involved the old Button ‘A’ and Button ‘B’ red telephone boxes. In those days, if you wanted to make a call, you would press Button ‘A’ to be connected and when the person answered your money would be taken. If there was no reply, or to cancel the call, you had to press Button ‘B’ and your money would be returned. We would stuff paper up the ‘B’ slot so that any money would be prevented from falling, then come back to the box a few days later, remove the stuffing and fill our pockets with coppers from Slot ‘B’! 16

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It was not until I was sixteen that the loneliness of spending so much time on my own, without any loving or tactile contact, caused me to feel even more unsettled. My friends would be going home to hot meals, being cuddled by their mothers or looking forward to holidays, whereas I would occasionally have to walk several miles to visit members of my mother’s family, just for some company (and hopefully some food!). Unfortunately, various aunts got wise to this caper and hid their food away when they saw me coming. No one had that much to spare and one aunt preferred to allow her faggots and peas to burn in the oven rather than get them out and share them with me. When I was younger, my general fodder, left to myself, often consisted of condensed milk sandwiches, banana sandwiches or cold tins of Heinz Beans. One of my culinary highlights was to buy a twopenny batch loaf, hot from the baker’s oven, and climb up onto the Air Raid Shelter to share it with my pals. My mother and Bill the butcher had a holiday home on Hayling Island –butchers were quite wealthy in those days. In my later teens, I was invited down there for a long weekend over Easter. My half-brother, Bill, would have been around ten or twelve by this time. I remember running into the Solent – one of those mad devils who would dash in – oh goodness! The water was freezing, I could barely breathe, my skin was blue, it was terrible! Unfortunately, that weekend was something of a catastrophe. Mother wanted something out of the loft, so up I went, assuring her I would be ﬁne … and then put my foot through the ceiling! She was frightened to death that Bill the butcher would come down after he had ﬁnished his week’s 17

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work, (in Caversham, Oxfordshire), and discover the mess. She went and found some local builders to come and repair the ceiling as an emergency before he arrived. Fortunately, he never noticed, but I think that she was terrified of him, as well as being very much in love with him at one time. Such are the inexplicable ways of relationships. My mother was invited to become a Conservative Party candidate for somewhere near Caversham, (where they lived and had their business), but she had to decline the offer. Her reputation would never have stood the scrutiny – two abandoned children and husband and now living openly with another man and another son? Not likely! For similar reasons, whenever my sister or I visited my mother, we were told that we should call her ‘Auntie’, if we went out with her – we never did though, and she used to go barmy! I have always been very fond of my half-brother, Bill, and we have always got on well together. Bill thought the world of our mother and she in turn did everything for him. He went to a private school, came out with flying colours and got a job as a branch manager with the Halifax Building Society. Bill, the butcher, never liked or got to know me, we were never friendly. I used to cycle down to Reading to visit my mother – quite a journey – but one year when I was about twenty, I drove down. It was always her custom to give me a fiver as she had plenty of money. I’d relied upon this to provide me with enough money to buy petrol to get back again. It transpired that my mother had broken her leg and was very poorly and there was no money forthcoming. I was obliged to ask Bill for the loan of £5. His reply was, “No, sorry, can’t do that. That’s the problem when you come here, you’re 18

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relying too much on your mother.” Instead, I stopped halfway home and exchanged my driving licence at a garage for some fuel. Bill was that sort of person. He and my mother and halfbrother had a very close family circle, you were either in or out. While he was very devoted to his son, and presumably, hopefully, to my mother, I was never included in that circle.

n 1946 I began attending the George Dixon Primary School attached to King George’s Grammar school. I then moved on to the secondary school in Station Road, Harborne in Birmingham where in 1953 I passed an entrance exam to Aston Commercial School, (also known as Holte Grammar School). Essentially, it was a girl’s school for training P.A.’s and secretaries and taught us shorthand, typing and book-keeping alongside the orthodox curriculum. The ﬂaw in the system lay in the fact that you could take this exam at any age, for any given year’s intake. As a result, ages ranged from eleven to fourteen, all ending up in the same class. The older boys obviously had the advantage of two or three years more education. As one of the younger boys, we were always at the bottom of the year-end exam results, a fact that was a big source of discouragement to us, especially as the staff made absolutely no allowance for that huge disparity. Most of the boys either went into the newspaper business or into the accountancy profession. I worked diligently for three years and chose the latter. In 1960 I began work for the accountancy ﬁrm, Fowkes-Cowney. If you were articled to an accountant, your parents had to pay them to train you. For poorer people, like myself, the accountant would take you in return for a very small wage.

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This meant that I was earning a much lower wage, (£2. 10s. 0d. (£2. 50.) per week), in comparison to my pals who mostly worked in factories and earned £7 per week. To try to redress the balance, and also avoid spending what little I had, I did a multitude of other part-time jobs. When I was eighteen, I began two years of Geriatric Nursing in Dudley Road Hospital, working twelve-hour shifts, 8.am. – 8.pm., every Saturday and Sunday, qualifying as a State Enrolled Assistant Nurse. It taught me a lot about life. I was in a geriatric ward and most of the patients had dementia. They frequently pooped the bed – no sanitary aids like adult nappies in those days – and because of their condition they were in the habit of grabbing a handful of what they had done and smacking you in the face with it. Some nurses got nasty about it. We were always having to clean the patients up, two or three times a day – strip them, strip the bed, and sometimes even change the mattress. We also had to wrap up the bodies after they had died. It was hard going, but I learned that if you didn’t have any money, the only thing to do was to get out there and work hard for it. Other part-time activities involved ﬁlling and shoulder carrying hundredweight sacks of coal from a horse-drawn cart, installing domestic white goods, labouring for plasterers and bricklayers, collecting weekly payments for clothes and insurance, being a butcher’s boy, a baker’s assistant, ad nauseum. In 1962 I ﬁnished nursing and coincidentally joined the ranks of the Police Force and became a Special Constable (all whilst still working through the week in accountancy). Throughout my youth, I had always had the feeling that the 22

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police had their eye on me. This was confirmed when I went to the police station and the desk sergeant asked, “What do you want, Moseley?” Shocked as I was to find that he already knew my name, I blurted out that I wanted to be a Special Constable, and he and his friends just laughed. I went on to work part-time as a Special Constable variously with Birmingham City Police, West Midlands Police and West Mercia Police for thirteen years. I had some fantastic adventures. I once arrested a gunman in a nightclub. Another time we went to talk to someone about a burglary but when the man answered his front door he became very agitated saying, “Thank God you’ve come, I knew I couldn’t get away with it forever, I need help… I need treatment!” It transpired that he worked at the local hospital and had been practicing necrophilia there in the mortuary where he worked! During my service I gained four Commendations for Arrests. I first began to feel that I was achieving something in my working life when in 1962, at the age of twenty-one, I moved from accountancy to insurance. I couldn’t cope with accountancy, I wasn’t an academic, and while I learned a lot about accountancy and could call myself an accountant, I wasn’t a qualified Fellow of the Royal College. I did my groundwork with the Britannic Insurance Company in a sales capacity. Then the following year, I joined the London and Manchester Assurance Company in Smethwick as an agent. Here I began to shine because of my accountancy training. I was meticulous, always did everything strictly according to the book and became more capable of doing the accountancy side of things than my companions. When we were doing audits, mine had to be spot on. Most 23

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people would accept an error of anything up to £10. This wouldn’t do for me. Once I was a ha’penny out and it frustrated me terribly. My work began to stand out among my colleagues and in 1966 I was promoted to manager of the Walsall Branch from where I began to work my way up the tree. Two years later I was promoted to manager of the Dudley Branch and in 1972 to manager of the Worcester Branch. Earlier in my career, the regional director who first appointed me as a manager called me into his office one day and kindly pointed out that to actually become a manager one needed first to be married. There were no official grounds for this whatsoever, but I took the hint. My first wife, Ann, was a very gentle girl. She never had any pretensions. Intellectually, she was cleverer than me, very competent, and was certainly a talented secretary. Such was the standard of her qualifications that while she was still a student, she became the unpaid secretary to the headmistress of our school. She was very popular but at the time I had only been interested in sport. Although Ann and I had attended the same school, we didn’t get together until after I had left. We met at a dance one Friday night in 1958, and I took the plunge and asked her for a date. Afterwards I took her home on the bus which was a long way as she lived in the opposite direction in Handsworth and I lived in Winson Green. When we went to one of the Old Acsonian monthly dances, one of our original teachers, Mr. Woodward, (generally known as Woodpecker or Pecker), was standing at the door. As we came walking across the 24

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playground holding hands, Pecker cried out, “Holy Moses!” (this was my nickname at the time) “You two - together!” We had actually been courting for eight years and I was in no particular hurry to get married. Over the years we’d been on holiday and driven around Europe together and we were quite set in our ways. There was one drawback, however, and that was that Ann wasn’t sure if she wanted children, and I most definitely did. She was eventually persuaded. When I was saving up to get married, I was earning £15 a week, which is what my father was earning when he retired. I found it incongruous that in my youth I should be earning as much as my father who had spent a whole lifetime working himself into the ground for me. By the time he retired, I was earning between £35 and £40 a week, which was an enormous amount of money then, but by that time I was manager of a fairly large area of Staffordshire. Before our marriage, I also remember that Ann and I kept buying furniture and storing it in the front room of my father’s house. I left home at the age of twenty-five to get married and we bought our first home which was a three-bedroomed semidetached house with a front and back garden in a rural location in Pelsall, Walsall. I always bought new builds and this first one cost £3,200 with a deposit of £200 which I borrowed from my company at some silly interest rate - 1.5% or 2%. My first brand new car cost me £600. I have always loved driving and at one time I had the number plate KBM1, which included my middle initial, ‘B.’ for Benjamin. Ann and I were married in 1966 at St Germain’s Church, City Road, in Edgbaston where I had been a choir boy and then an altar boy. My mother came to the wedding where she 25

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met my father again for the ﬁrst time in twenty-two years. That meeting went quite well on the day, and they got on reasonably. Understandably, Bill, her new partner, never came. A psychic had told Ann years before that she would have three children. We were also told that I would inherit a factory and marry a dark-haired woman, which, as I was married to a blond at the time didn’t go down very well with Ann but we did indeed have three children and I later married a darkhaired woman. First came our son, Adrian, born on the 14th March 1969. We had a reception for the christening and my mother came to it. Family gatherings in those days were quite large and we felt it expedient to use plastic cups and paper plates. After returning home, my mother subsequently wrote what I considered a nasty letter, saying that she had never been so humiliated as to be the grandmother of the child and be served on paper and plastic and it had reduced her to tears. I wrote back to her saying that I was very sorry if it reﬂected on her in this way, but if she wanted to know about crying, she was actually speaking to a past master who’d spent sixteen years of his life sitting on a doorstep crying and wondering where his mother had gone. One of my aunties saw the letter I had written and burst into tears. Unsurprisingly, my mother didn’t attend the christening of our second child, Helen, who was born on the 10th February 1971. Ann and I had a good life together. I got on well with her parents, Bill and Doris Morton. When they retired to Devon, Bill became the curator of South Molton Museum. I have happy memories of horse riding on Exmoor which was such a 26

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thrill. I have always loved horse riding – another memorable occasion was on horseback riding in St. Lucia into an azure sea under the bluest of skies. However, while I was working for the London and Manchester, I never made a lot of money. By the time I left in 1986 I was still only on about £14,000 a year (approximately £38,000 now). At the end of the war, my father had bought a house in Winson Green which was only ten minutes away from our previous home but in terms of status it was in a different world. He originally paid £1,100 for it in 1951. In 1960, it was compulsory purchased by the council to make way for a new housing estate. In compensation, they would only give him what he had originally paid, even though his home was worth twice that much by then, and he ended up back in rented accommodation in Quinton. All through his life, dad used to come and stay with us for one or two days a week. I relied on him to keep my vegetable patch going. I never got to go away on holiday with my father as a child, but after Ann and I were married, we used to take him away with us. He was a saintly man and I feel very lucky to have had him in my life. I have to admit that I was a workaholic, returning early from a holiday to get back to work, or working through the night. Unlike my father, I was very ambitious, but money was never a factor for me, I simply wanted to be the best. I had a competitive nature. Working as a regional manager for London and Manchester I was once asked to go and make a ﬁlm at their London headquarters in Finsbury Square. My part in the ﬁlm was to be selling an insurance policy to this other insurance guy, who was acting the part of a customer. 27

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Later, we watched the film and I thought to myself, “You know, I could buy insurance off that bloke.” It’s amazing the amount of confidence it gave me. Perhaps my special trip to Ireland in 1968 to kiss the Blarney Stone had paid off ? My perfect day, as a younger man, was when I won all the Company Cups at the Annual Conference of the London and Manchester Assurance Group. There were three forms of insurance which we sold: Ordinary Branch which was endowments for mortgages, pensions and that sort of thing; Industrial Branch which entailed going from door to door collecting money; and General Branch which covered house, fire and motor insurance. We all used to compete to be top of the country in those three categories and that particular year, I swept the board, so to speak. I was the first! In 1972 I was promoted to District Manager of Worcestershire and Herefordshire and had to move to Worcester. The company I worked for were very nice to us and really looked after their managers. I bought a house with a swimming pool on Columbia Drive. It was situated backing onto the Worcester Golf and Country Club. I put in a gate at the bottom of my garden and used to nip out each night for a few holes with my next-door neighbour, the renowned orthodontal surgeon, Roy Roberts, enabling me to get down to an 11-handicap. At least we didn’t have a line of little old ladies dressed in black, all down on their hands and knees in a line, weeding the fairway, as I saw at Javea Golf Club in Spain in 1987! Soon after we were married, I bought Ann one of those nightdress cases in the form of a big cuddly teddy bear… and I fell in love with it! It was only then that I began to realise just 28

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what I had missed. I had never had any soft toys to play with as a child; I certainly hadn’t had any cuddles. I can’t imagine just how much my father must have struggled to bring me up, or how a mother could leave her little children. Many years afterwards, in the early 1980’s, when my mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s and she was a patient in the Mendip Hospital, I used to go down and visit her. She would mistake me for her brother and talk to me about her concerns for the little children she had deserted – it was obviously preying on her mind even then, in her demented state. Small consolation, but I am sure that she never forgave herself. I have always been friendly with my half-brother Bill. One day Ann and I were talking with Bill and his wife. “Did you ever find out what happened to your father’s first wife?” I asked him. “What first wife?” Bill asked. By this time, he was in his thirties but had never known that his father had been married before, or that he had also abandoned someone to run away with our mother. By this time, Ann had become pregnant for the third time. On the 10th June, 1978, she gave birth to Amanda Louise but tragically our daughter was strangled at birth by the umbilical cord and died. The third child! We had never had any intention of having more children – she had been a surprise package. After this incident, the company offered me a troubleshooting role as area director for the west of London, working in Twickenham but living in Maidenhead. It was to be a fresh start for us all, but Ann found it difficult starting a new home at that point. I have lived in thirteen different houses in my 29

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life, invariably we have moved each time I received a promotion. I had always played cricket, my father taught me – his talent was astounding and his timing brilliant, but I had to work much harder at it. Now I joined Maidenhead and Bray Cricket Club and became Club Secretary and Veterans Captain. The club president was Sir Michael Parkinson and I used to play and spend a lot of time with him and his sons. He was a pal of Billy Connolly; Dorothy Squires lived just a few doors above them, Marilyn Montgomery opposite them and Ernie Wise not far away, Maidenhead being handy for the studios – there were also film studios just down the road from where I lived. Sir Michael would arrange two charity matches each year, one against the Yorkshire Cricket team and the other against a Celebrity Eleven from Screen and Stage. Sometimes there were too many celebrities in attendance, and I would end up having several of them making numbers up in my team. At different times I have found myself playing with Robert Powell, Rolf Harris, Rudolf Walker (‘Love Thy Neighbour’), Malcolm McFee (‘Please Sir’), Brian Jackson (‘The Man from Del Monte’) and others, but my real claim to fame was that I once bowled Jeff Boycott out. Oh, he was not happy about it, and he could have quite a nasty temper! While I was there, I also qualified as a National Children’s Cricket Coach and Umpire. In 1983, I had been debating whether to take my Associateship Life Insurance Qualifications – A.L.I.A. – which later became the minimum qualification. I sat and passed the exams. It was heartening to learn that the guy sitting next to 30

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me in the exam was the treasurer of the Association of Life Insurance, and he failed! Subsequently, when the Financial Services Act came into operation and the government brought in lots of new-fangled qualiﬁcations, my original qualiﬁcation exempted me from having to pass all the new exams, yet I almost hadn’t bothered to sit it. I knew stacks of men of my age who were good insurance men but who just couldn’t make it because they weren’t academically inclined. Then in 1982, Ann became ill and was diagnosed as having a brain tumour. I was told that she only had three months to live, but her doctors advised me not to tell her or the children just how serious it was. The company were wonderful to me, allowing me to take Ann to London every day for radiotherapy. After she died, with the children being 13 and 15, it got to the point where I knew I just couldn’t go on like that so, after working for London and Manchester for twentythree years, I resigned. Two years before I had given up playing cricket, which I had done every Saturday and Sunday – following in my father’s footsteps, you might say – it was too time-consuming, I needed to look after Ann. Instead, for a bit of exercise and light relief, I took up hockey playing with the rival section of the cricket club. This only took up a couple of hours a week. The culmination of my hockey career was to play as a goalkeeper in the World Hockey Cup in London in 1986, albeit playing for the Belgium team because their own goalkeeper had broken his leg. I began giving Ann – and another lady who was also ill with the same problem – spiritual healing. The other lady recovered and lived, whilst Ann outdid all medical 31

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expectations and lasted for another twenty-two months, eventually passing away in 1985. She was only forty-one. It greatly upset me that someone else I was treating should recover, but that I should lose my own beloved wife.

Gang Leader

Honeymoon in Ibiza

Dunns River Falls, Jamaica. 1973

Ann and me. 1975

Me and the Terrors. 1978

First Jag E-Type. 1978

Ann and me. 1979

Captaining Maidenhead & Bray CC. 1982

Kingswinford House 1979

FUN AND F #

fter Ann died, I decided on a change of direction and chose to become self-employed as an Insurance Broker. By this time, Adrian was sixteen and Helen thirteen, but they still needed someone to be at home for them. I got a licence and then spent £50,000 converting our double garage into an office with red flock wallpaper and carefully lit pictures on the walls, two walls covered with books, a nice coffee table and red sofa on which to sit with clients, and then there was a rather gorgeous desk and captain’s chair. A big bay window replaced the garage doors. It proved a success and in the first three months I earned £9,000 and was now on the right road to specialising in inheritance tax planning which is what I committed to later in my career. During my sojourn in Maidenhead, I was asked to lecture to the Institute of Personnel Management at the Slough Branch of London University – I taught them their pension syllabus. Roger Hadley, originally a client who became a firm friend, first introduced me to Freemasonry in 1977. Subsequently it did much to fill my life and taught me many things. The first time I became Master of a Lodge we celebrated its twentyfifth anniversary in 1987 and I had to organise the Ladies Night with Roger and his wife, Judy. We hired Warwickshire County Cricket Ground Conference Centre and laid on a banquet with dancing and a cabaret. Later, a huge cake was brought out into the middle of the floor and cut while a lone 43

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trumpeter played ‘Congratulations’, this was immediately followed by the spectacular appearance of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlander’s Marching Band. One of the lodge members was in tears because it had been his regiment. Roger, who was working in Japan at that time, returned in the middle of dinner and brought a display model of a Geisha Girl as a present for my wife. Altogether it was quite a dramatic evening. I met my second wife long after she had divorced her husband. He had worked for me some years earlier and so we had previously met socially. By this time, she had moved from London to the village of Cookham Dean near Maidenhead, and we met coincidentally one day while out shopping in Sainsbury's. Lilian initially helped me out with the children before becoming a permanent part of our lives for some twenty-five years. Before we were married, Lillian used to come and stay with us. Both our bedrooms backed onto each other. There were big fitted wardrobes in each bedroom which also backed onto each other and at some point, I removed a part of the wall separating them and so was able to nip through to Lillian without the children, (who by this time were about fourteen and sixteen years old), having any idea. Early one morning, Helen walked into Lillian’s room (where I was hidden beneath the bed covers) and began asking where I was. Lillian suggested various places where I might be, and Helen eventually went off to look. Meanwhile, I hopped out of bed and nipped back through the cupboards pretty smartly – I don’t think that the kids ever did find out! 44

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Alan and Sheila Jones were close friends of ours and we always used to joke about ‘trying to keep up with the Jones’s’. Alan had the franchise for newspaper deliveries in Berkshire, distributing papers and magazines to all the newsagents in the county. He used to get the holiday magazines first and thereby knew what deals were coming. One day he rang up and asked if I fancied flying on Concord to Egypt for the weekend, leaving Friday morning and returning Monday evening. The four of us went. We visited the Tutankhamun exhibition in Cairo and the following day we went on a boat trip up the Nile. Alan and Sheila persuaded me to propose marriage to Lilian while we were on board. The following day we visited the pyramids – where I didn’t enjoy the confined space, although I had been perfectly fine in similar enclosed spaces such as the Lascaux Caves in France when I was younger, and scuba diving into caves. I did try to sell Lilian to a camel herder for three camels but he would only agree to two! We were married in 1988. A few years later, I was head-hunted to join the Allied Dunbar Group as a branch manager, working out of an office in Watford, which was only three quarters of an hour away from home. The children were a bit older and more able to look after themselves. My objective was to put together a new area team. At that time, my boss was a bit of a rebel. Once we were in Vancouver having a lovely dinner in a big restaurant and this chap was dropping bread rolls into red wine and throwing them at other people. Two of the other managers, (coincidentally, both Jewish), didn’t like this fellow and got him dismissed. I never found out how they did it, but it unnerved 45

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me; he simply turned up for work one day and the doorman wouldn’t allow him to enter the premises, simply handing him a box containing all his personal effects. The chairman, Sir Mark Weinberg, had originally founded other companies by recruiting people and offering them shares in the new company, which, of course, had no value until the company was up and running. He did the same thing to form Allied Dunbar. Whilst president, the company was taken over by Eagle Star who put in a chap who had been Chief Executive of Mars, and he and Sir Mark fell out dramatically. Sir Mark decided that he would leave and again start another company. Being Jewish, he was very pally with Lord Rothschild and he and Jacob decided that they would put together this other company and call it the J. Rothschild Assurance Group. Such was the renown that Sir Mark was held in by his staff that the Chief Executive, Managing Director, five other directors and two hundred and fifty partners, (of which I was one) also left to join them. We were all founding partners of this new company which was officially founded on the 2nd January 1992. Because they had so many of us all over the country, they had to rapidly open various offices and, in our case, they rented a lovely Fifteenth Century manor house and estate called Yateley Hall in Hampshire. I subsequently moved to Finchampstead to work at the Hall. Fortunately, my office was on the ground floor looking out across parkland. It also had its own outside door. (On the other side of the building they looked out onto a moat.) My Great Dane, Sophie, used to accompany me to work and sit in the open office doorway, and if she saw any foxes, she’d be off ! In June 1999 I bought Lilian the Sub-Post 46

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Office in our village, which she ran until 2004 when we moved to Spain. It kept her busy whilst I played golf. To celebrate Lilian’s fiftieth birthday, I told her that I was taking her for lunch – and to stay overnight – at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Raymond Blanc’s Manor in Oxfordshire. We planned to travel in the Jag but first I had to pop into the office on the way. Once there, I delayed leaving by calling her in to meet my boss. Reluctantly she came in and was chatting while I stalled for time. Eventually, someone knocked on the door and said, “It’s here.” By this time, Lilian was wondering what on earth was going on – the truth was that I had arranged for a helicopter to come and pick us up and fly us to Oxfordshire. She couldn’t believe it! (My secretary drove my Jag up so that we could drive home in it the next day.) When we entered the restaurant, they asked for my vehicle registration number and I just wrote, ‘Helicopter’! Others also flew in and out of Yateley Hall grounds, including one of my great pals, Jaffa Ariff, who maintained that he came from a long line of Cypriot gangsters. It had been known for new recruits to be positively stunned when they suddenly saw a chopper landing outside the office window! Jaffa coming back from lunch! When it came to my fiftieth birthday, Alan and Sheila had a similar surprise in store for me – only this time they flew us to Jersey for lunch. The next ten years were perhaps the best of my working life. There were a lot of ups and downs throughout my career, and battles – mainly between me and management – but to sum it all up in one word, it was FUN! I played hard too. 47

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I have always enjoyed taking part in different sports and these have included car rallying, (especially the North Devon Rally, Birmingham to Porlock), football, squash and skiing as well as cricket, hockey and scuba diving. My pal, Peter Summers, and I once appeared on T.V. at Silverstone Racetrack, (where we were acting as marshals), caught pushing one of the only privately owned Ferrari sports cars of yesteryear onto the track for a ﬁlm session. Driving has always been a passion but there have been many incidents on the road in my life that I feel I was very lucky to have survived. One was when I was out driving with Lilian in Spain. A lorry came out of a side road right in front of me. There seemed no way I could avoid hitting the lorry, but somehow, I ended up in the side road which the lorry had just exited facing the wrong way round. Thanks were expressed to whoever was watching over us that day. Another passion I had was scuba diving which also had its accompanying scares. While diving in Malta, I can remember being very sick underwater, not a good thing when you are wearing a mask! In Bermuda, I was chased by an Octopus, and off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, I was passed by a large reef shark. Maybe my scariest ‘near miss’ was in Stoney Cove, Leicestershire, where an old quarry pit has been converted for diving. I was instructed to remove my mouth-piece and head straight to the surface by my instructor. It was only through prior experience that I knew what to do and avoided getting the ‘bends’. I have been all over the world diving, but possibly one of the most memorable times was the trip I took with my ﬁfteen-year-old granddaughter to Australia for a month, diving the Great Barrier Reef, spending a whole week on a 48

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Live-Aboard boat. We also visited Sydney Harbour Bridge, the iconic Opera House there and explored the city of Brisbane and Steve Irwin’s crocodile zoo, whilst visiting a cousin there. I have a love of travelling and have visited countries all over the world, both as a tourist and on business. These places include Jamaica, Barbados, St. Lucia, Grenadines, St. Martin, New York, Florida, Canada, Thailand, China, India, Dubai, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Malta, South Africa, Mauritius, Oman, Qatar, Turkey, Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Holland, Germany, Norway, Malaysia and Australia, but my favourite place of all is Bermuda. It was here that I spent my second honeymoon and is so lovely – no cars to be had, you can only hire motorbikes which you can then create havoc on! There are some great golf courses there, too, and the diving is wonderful. It is just as well that I have always loved ﬂying - I would have liked to become a pilot. I organised an introductory ﬂight in a single engine Cessna for myself at Elmdon Airport. It was quite entertaining because they actually allowed me to take the controls. The pilot asked me what I would do if the engine cut out. I replied, “Jump!” He then switched the engine off as he explained that you could just glide without power… and we did… until he restarted the engine and we went up again. Once back on the ground, I managed to convince Bill Moore – a very dear friend who had given me a lift to the airport but who was frightened of heights – to have a go for himself… and he did… but he never forgave me! This led me to try gliding. A chap who used to work with me for Rothschild’s was a glider pilot and he took me down to a club in Hampshire one weekend and let me have a crack at it. 49

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I enjoyed that – it was absolutely fabulous. In a glider, there is absolute silence, except for the wind, but it is glorious. Then it was on to hot air balloons, but they were not so quiet! So was flying in a World War II American bi-plane. A friend on the Isle of Wight owned one and again, it was an incredible experience as it was all open. You wouldn’t believe how those little windscreens protect you but stick your head around the side and you nearly get blown away! Flying with an ordinary airline can be quite an experience too. When I flew to Vancouver it was extraordinary – 3,000 miles over the Atlantic Ocean and it was just blue; you realise just how much of the earth is covered by water. Then you fly across Canada and it’s the same darned thing, only this time it’s trees – endless trees all over the place! I came to be in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 because a mutual friend from Maidenhead and Bray Cricket Club had secretly organised it with one of his airline captain buddies. Lilian and I were sitting on the ‘plane enjoying a drink destination Durban - when the cockpit door opened and the captain came straight up to me. “Hello, Keith, how are you?” I didn’t know him from Adam, of course. “Chris told me you were on this flight and to look after you. Would you like to come and sit in the cockpit while we take off ?” My wife was quite happy to be left with the refreshments, so I went and sat in the engineer’s seat and was strapped in and off we went… that was quite glorious! Another trip we went on was Concord to New York. A hundred seats on board, two either side of the gangway, quite cramped, just a long, small tube really. When Concord first began flying, the carpets used to rip because at supersonic 50

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speed the whole plane used to grow six inches longer than it really was, so they had to be exchanged for elastic carpets! In 1989, it was Alan’s fiftieth birthday and Sheila had organised a surprise trip with eleven of his family and friends: two hours, fifty minutes to reach New York, then two hours waiting on the coach for the driver! Three days in the Big Apple and then back on the Q.E.2 where, as there were thirteen in our group, we won the fancy dress competition as a ‘Baker’s Dozen’. We didn’t always fly either. One memorable trip was on the Orient Express to Vienna. It’s a lovely train with a grand piano being played in the lounge and the dining car was fabulous, but train travel isn’t really for me. Dawn French and Lenny Henry were on the same trip, and he seemed to be of similar mind to me. We also accompanied Alan and Sheila several times on the Orient Express around the south of England, on afternoon tea excursions. Great if you like fine dining – working for Rothschild and travelling around the world we became used to such luxury. Moving in the circles to which I was now becoming accustomed, we also had close brushes with royalty. Alan and Sheila Jones part-owned a racehorse which was running at Royal Ascot, and they invited Lilian and me to accompany them in place of their children – we were only feet away from the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Princess Diana in the royal enclosure. We also used to go to a lot of concerts at Ascot and take picnics with us. I had become a patron of the church at Sandhurst Military Academy and was eventually invited to one of the passing-out parades that Prince Charles was leading. 51

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Then there was the dinner concert with Princess Alexandra at St. James’s Palace – only about a hundred people there – which my wife arranged for us to attend. The palace is absolutely fabulous inside! It is just up the road from St’ James’s Place, Lord Rothschild’s headquarters. He had taken over Spencer House (historically the London home of the Earls of Spencer) and built an ofﬁce complex around the back of it whilst completely renovating the house itself - I was there quite often. We had our fun! Even now, as an alumni of the St. James’s Place Wealth Management Group (the re-named Rothschild Group), I get invited to a couple of gatherings a year. All the partners used to meet at the Grosvenor in Park Lane and enjoy a dinner and cabaret. They have always looked after us extremely well and pay our expenses to go, even when I was living in Spain. On each occasion they have a whip round for a designated charity and the company matches the amount raised. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, the Partner’s whip-round raised £530,000. Ergo, £1,060,000 going to the SJP charity fund. We all used to put up at the Intercontinental Hotel at the bottom of Park Lane, where the wives or husbands of the partners would spend the evening and wait for us to join them. During the time when I had Sophie, my Great Dane, there was one particular occasion when I rang up the Intercontinental and told them that I was bringing the company mascot. Unfortunately, dogs aren’t allowed in the hotel, so I insisted that they make a note on the computer that in this instance I had been given permission to bring her. 52

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At the end of the evening, I returned to the Intercontinental, we had coffee and then went to bed. At 1.00am. I received a telephone call from the night manager who was querying the fact that I had a dog in the room and asking me to remove it immediately. I suggested that he check his computer records as there was a note there that I had been granted permission. I also suggested that he might like to phone up Lord Rothschild’s room and ask him if he minded the company mascot being removed from its room at one o’clock on a Sunday morning and see what he had to say about it. After all, the company had about three hundred rooms booked there. The manager rang off and about ten minutes later he called back to apologise. It is just a shame that most of the really good things in my life, (apart from the birth of my children), happened after my dear first wife died. My second wife, Lillian, who was a bit of a snob – absolutely loved it all! In 1995 I had to have some time off due to depression brought on by the sudden onslaught of supressed grief from the earlier loss of my first wife, my daughter, father, mother, father-in-law and Aunty Dot, all within a very short space of time. Because I was used to legal work and accountancy, I had ended up doing all the probates for them which didn’t give me any time to grieve, I just carried on. Years later it all came back and hit me hard and I spent a year off sick, which was a terrible experience. I was very fortunate that Rothschild’s looked after me very well and kept my job and office open for me. I was sent to see the chief psychiatrist for Berkshire and she went into my childhood. She maintained that I had 53

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suffered a double trauma in early life, not only in losing my mother, but in also losing my sister, Ann. Following heart problems, (two stents in my heart and ongoing angina), I eventually retired from the group in 2002. By this time it had been renamed ‘The St. James’s Place Wealth Management Group’ which presently has funds under management of some £130 billion. We retired to live in Spain in 2003, mainly to be near my daughter and her growing family who were currently running a bar/restaurant and nightclub. We purchased some land and in 2004 - 2005 built a large house, Casa Serendipity, with three acres of garden, mainly laid to almond orchards, and a swimming pool (YouTube - Casa Serendipity/ Keith Moseley). I took up clay pigeon shooting and joined a club in England to get in some practice. (I’ve still got the shotgun.) Wild boar and Jennets were always crossing our property and pairs of Eagles would ﬂy over our pool all the time. However, we were right on top of a hill in the middle of a valley surrounded by mountains in quite an isolated location, the nearest house being at least ﬁve hundred metres away and I wanted a little security. I have to confess that to begin with, the difference between the Castilian and Valenciano languages did initially cause me some confusion! Prior to our move, Lilian succumbed to breast cancer. Despite the mastectomy, unknown to her doctors, it had been metastasizing around her body, eventually invading her ovaries, lymph glands and brain. As a consequence, her character began to change. Lilian died on the 3rd December 54

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2013 in Spain. Helen sang at her funeral, ‘You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings’ which was one of her favourites. After Lillian died, I sold the estate in 2014 and bought my present apartment in the nearby village of Benidoleig (where my daughter and son-in-law had lived whilst running their various businesses), with a view to continuing to live in Spain. However, I had few friends out there and they all lived many miles away. I was now 73 and realised that I needed to be nearer to my family. In May 2015 I moved back to England. Helen had earlier returned to England in order to pursue her profession as a midwife. I stayed with her and the family in Cheshire until I found a nice little one bed bungalow in a very rural village only 10 minutes away from her. I have retained the apartment out in Spain and my grandchildren, who all grew up and went to school there, still have lots of friends and often go to stay at the apartment for holidays and to catch up with old mates. It is also a good place for me to take friends to enjoy holidays together.

Flying US Byplane. 1978

Phyllis Court. Henley Regatta. 1987

My 4th Jaguar

Pen Y Fan. 1987

Venice Simplon Orient Express 1987

Woodhall Spa Golf Club. Linc's. 1988

Bermuda Honeymoon. 1988

Concorde to New York 1989. Cockpit & Cabin

50 years! 1991

My Office (white door) 1992-2002

Lillian in St. Lucia. 1994

Gliding on the South Downs. 1994

77 Nine Mile Ride. 1994

Lilian and me. Bangkok. 1995

Masters All! Roger Hadley, Adrian Moseley, Keith Moseley and Bill Hunter. 1998

Lilian's 50th birthday treat. 1999

Nine Mile Ride. 2000

THE PATH OF SPIRIT

cannot account for the influences on my seven-year-old self, but it was around that age that I began to take an interest in religion. This was surprising as my father had no interest in spiritual matters and neither supported nor discouraged me in my religious curiosity. Dorothy Banning, (Aunty Dot, the only relative to ever cuddle me) took me to see a clairvoyant as she and her other sisters were interested in such matters, but that had been my only clue that there was something more to this life. Years later, I followed it up by becoming a choir boy at the local Anglican Church of St. Germain’s, until it was discovered that I could not sing and I was sacked from the choir and promoted to altar boy – oh, heady heights! I also owe a lot to a dear man called Austin Kinchin who ran a church youth club and was the one who first got me down on my knees to pray. He brought me nearer to and more aware of the powers that be. When I was sixteen I became very depressed as I began to understand just how different my family life had been from that of my friends, and it dawned upon me how alone in the world I was. This had an extraordinary effect on me. I began to experience ‘out-of-body experiences’ or astral projection, which eventually developed into my first ‘vision’. At this point, I believed that this beautiful ‘sighting’ was Jesus himself, and to be fair, it did bring with it a wonderful sense of happiness, 73

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fulﬁlment, compassion and all-encompassing light. After many years of meditation, I learned to enter this state at will and gained much enlightenment from doing so. At the age of eleven, I developed the notion that there must be just one true religion which would lead me to God. I determined to study all of the major religions, which I did until I was about eighteen, developing a keen interest in the religions of the East, particularly Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Spiritualism, Judaism, Islam, and Suﬁism. During my search, I was drawn to attend seances as a way to prove that there is life after death (which you cannot do, of course). Interestingly, during this time I had a couple of messages come through for myself. One was from Bill Hunter Senior, who died before my mother, Rose. The message said, “Would you look after your mother?” Later, I received a message from my mother asking me to look after my brother, Bill. My wife’s mother, Dorothy, died of breast cancer in the early 1980’s and my father-in-law eventually married Irene. We all went on holiday to Majorca together with the children, but during the course of the holiday, Irene passed away peacefully sitting in her chair. Once all the formalities had been seen to and the funeral held, we tried to salvage what was left of our holiday. We were all sitting on the beach one afternoon and I had gone to buy ice creams for everyone, when suddenly I heard a voice say, “Keith!” I looked around but there was no one remotely near to me, so I carried on. A few steps further on, it happened again. “Keith!” Being spiritually minded, I realised what was happening and simply sat down where I was, with my hands full of melting ice cream and made myself 74

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available for a conversation. My father-in-law, Bill, and his second wife had only been married for twelve months when she died. Now it was Irene’s voice saying, “I just want you to tell Bill that it was the best year of my life.” She also asked me to look after him – a recurring theme it seems! There were other times when my limited psychic abilities impinged on everyday life, like the time my first wife, Ann, and my one-year-old son were travelling around Spain with a camping trailer in 1970. The first day we arrived at a campsite near Santander and I had an overwhelming premonition that I should not be there! I told my wife that we had to return home immediately but could not give her a reason. Needless to say, Ann was not at all amused, but we drove back through France and spent the rest of the holiday with her parents in Devon. The following weekend when we would have been at that particular campsite, there was a great storm and all of the tents were blown away and caravans were blown into the sea. Several people lost their lives, including children. At one time I was studying with the Spiritualist National Union, a religious institute like a church, who have the capacity to marry and also bury people. I eventually went on to marry two couples in Spain, the first being the daughter of a friend and neighbour. I was also registered as a healer and have done healing in churches and with private patients in England and Spain for many years. I have had various epiphanies, one with a gentleman with whom I knelt and prayed. He was with the Episcopalian Church and he asked me to go along to some of the services. At one of the meetings, they invited me to stand up and say something. So began my career preaching about God – not 75

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specifically religion. I also did a spell of preaching in the Pentecostal and Evangelical churches. A Religious Instruction teacher in the congregation heard me and invited me to go and speak to his school class – and so my reputation soon spread. For a few years I gave talks in secondary schools on Comparative Religions, but the most popular topic was always ‘ghosts’, life after death and reincarnation. I didn’t much enjoy my time articled to a chartered accountant – I had had enough studying and being a spiritual person, I decided to volunteer to be a missionary in Africa instead. I was told to go and buy the Book of Isaiah (from the Bible) and read it, understand it and go back and tell them what I thought of it. However, it was so obscure that it put me off. I began to realise that religion isn’t all it’s made out to be. We aren’t here to convert others but to enlighten ourselves. In 1977 I became a Freemason. Technically there is only one qualification required – you have to believe in a divinity of some sort – in other words, God. Freemasonry is non-religious and non-political – these two subjects are forbidden. I had already decided that in order to know God I had to know myself, Masonry sort of fitted in with that. In Masonry, God is known as the Great Architect of the Universe. Anyone who becomes a Mason becomes a member of the Craft, but in addition there are various other side degrees. Knights Templar and Knights Templar Priests are two offshoots of Masonry which I belong to. In 1999 I was anointed as a Priest of the Order of Melchizedec. I have my own beliefs and knowledge which have come through my meditations. 76

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Knights Templar Priests are such a small – and refined order that it has a worldwide status, as opposed to others more numerous, which are broken down into many provisional divisions. There are some parts of Masonry I have found so very moving, especially in the ceremonies, that because of my love of God I am reduced to tears. Yet Masonry for me has been something of a hobby, it’s something I’ve followed, I’ve enjoyed the company and met many, many nice people. In time, I did get to understand these matters more deeply. It took me nearly thirty years to understand Karl Marx’s dictat that ‘Religion itself is the opiate of the people’. After much searching and meditation, I concluded that the only way to achieve any sort of union with the Creator was through knowledge of oneself – ‘Man know thyself ’ being a universal dictum. My life subsequently became a pursuit of that goal, and I am no longer attached to any particular church or set of beliefs, and I am very comfortable with where I am. Writing about me, the man, is simply factual, but the essence – the driving force – behind me has always been a spiritual one. This has affected how I have conducted business and dealt with people. A compassionate person, I have always cared for those around me and gone out of my way to help as much as possible. I am a very moral person, albeit to my own limits and not necessarily society’s. My spiritual beliefs have certainly helped me to understand my close family and my parents in particular. One year I found myself driving twice a week for MENCAP. The father of one of Adrian’s friends was moving to Cornwall and needed to find someone as a replacement and chose me! I would drive down to the local fire station in my Jaguar – I 77

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have always driven Jaguars – and would leave my car there and pick up the MENCAP twelve-seater minibus and then I’d go around to all the houses to collect the children and take them to the MENCAP centre where they had a fabulous evening, and I’d stay with them and bring them home again. This was quite a commitment which I managed to perform for about twelve months before I had to give it up. I am a ﬁrm believer in the spirituality of man and am currently writing a book about how to get to God without using religion. I have read and studied and meditated extensively all of my life. I know that we all come from the same source and that when we die, we just move from one form of life to another and always return to our original source. (Everybody has their ideas of just exactly what that source is.) Keith Moseley doesn’t matter, my life doesn’t matter, it’s the learning and what I gain from it that matters. In my ‘out-ofbody experiences’, I have learned that in that inner state, you don’t have any individuality, there isn’t any ‘you’, you are simply a part of ‘it’ and I have discovered that everything is serenity – the world of spirit is serenity –total bliss. This knowledge (Gnosis), has allowed me to go through the years from 1997 having suffered a stroke, a triple heart bypass, angina and several operations without any fear of death whatsoever, in many ways I am keen to move ahead

Racing dolphins. 2004

Casa Serendipity. 2006

Sophie and Sabre. Spain. 2010

Simba 2010

Raising 50,000 Euros for the Red Cross. 2012

Marrying my first couple. 2013

Club Class to Oz. 2014

Diving the Gt. Barrier Reef with Kelsey 2014

Santa. 2016

Kelseys Charity Ball 2021

80 years and still going! 2021

LIFE STILL HOLDS S ISES

here are so many questions we never ask our parents before they go, and there are a million questions I'd now like to get a hold of my father, Wilfred Norman Moseley, and say, "What about this?” and “What about that?" The main one being, "Did you know that I'm not your son?" The way he persevered in looking after me as he did was positively angelic - it was saintly that he looked after me all those years, through all that discord - he surely couldn't have known? I feel that it is very sad to know that most of my maternal family were aware of this situation, this anomaly, but no one ever told me until after I turned sixty, by which time all of the older generation had passed away. That's when my cousin, Betty, ﬁnally told me, and this, more than anything else, made me decide to write about my life... this fact that when I am gone, no one will be able to ask me any questions and at least they will have a reference work of some sort. I was shocked when I realised that I had, in fact, been abandoned by both my biological parents by the time I was three years old. Even more painful was the discovery that Wilfred wasn't my real father and the realisation that all my 'dad's' relatives weren't actually related to me at all. I suffered an abiding form of grief at their 'loss'. All Betty knew was that my real father was called 'Keith'. My son, Adrian, (a systems analyst), enabled me in my search. 91

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From 2000 onwards, together we went through hundreds of D.N.A. records and the ﬁrst connection to show up was my great grandfather, Jabez Galliford, through a D.N.A. match on the genealogy website Ancestry. Finally, in 2021, we were able to identify and contact my biological father's descendants and meet with lots of my 'lost' family, including a half-sister, Denise, who was then ninety-two years old (and who later passed away in April 2022). Back in the middle of the Nineteenth Century my biological great, great-grandfather, William Galliford, living in Barnstaple Devon, was a builder employing ﬁve men. Both my great-grandfather and grandfather worked as carpenters and joiners and remained living in Devon. My biological father was Keith Douglas Galliford, an aeroengineer working with Barnes Wallace who invented the 'bouncing bomb'. Later in World War Two he was posted to the Singer car factory which had been converted to making aero engines instead of car engines. Here he organised the development and installation of aeroengines in Wellington bombers which were being assembled at what was then Elmdon Airport and which later became Birmingham International Airport. At the time, my Aunt Ruth and my mother were working at the same factory. Mother and Keith met at a dance held at the factory. The affair must have lasted quite a long time as he followed her when the family were bombed out and re-homed in Edgbaston. It seems he used to visit my mother in our new home when my father was out working. The story goes that my Auntie Lizzie, (Rose's sister), and Cousin Betty went round to visit Rose... down an entry between the two houses and round to the back, and could see Rose through the French 92

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windows, in flagrante delicto with Keith. Lizzie immediately sent Betty up to the top of the garden with strict instructions not to come back down until she was told to. Lizzie then went into the house and remonstrated with Rose for doing things she shouldn't be doing and threw Keith out. My cousin, Betty, who was ten at the time, had noticed that there was a Jaguar car parked outside - I later found out it was an Armstrong Sidley. Rose used to walk my baby half-sister, Ann, to her sister, Lizzie. Betty became aware that Rose had a friend called Keith. Years later, Betty put two and two together as to why her little cousin, Keith Moseley, was also called Keith! Keith Douglas Galliford arranged for Rose to have her baby in the South Road Nursing Home at the grand expense of £9. 5s. 6d. (£9.271/2). I still have the receipt. I presume that Rose must have persuaded Wilfred that she had saved up the money for it! Wilfred certainly couldn't have afforded it, no one else had ever been born in a nursing home at that time - it simply wasn't done. Personally, I think that I have been very lucky in life. I’m satisfied with what I have done with myself, and I'd do it all again. Sometimes I envy my brother Bill; he had the parents, the money, encouragement and support that I never did. Conversely, I might not have grown up as spiritually aware if my younger years had been different. I have my own family now. My son, Adrian, has been in the Royal Air Force as an interpreter and analyst for most of his life and is now serving as a Group Warrant Officer. Adrian married Laura and they have a daughter, Constance, born in April 2006. She is a dear girl, and I would have loved to get to 93

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know her better, but she lives on the other side of the country and visitors are not normally welcomed there. Conversely, my son comes to visit me regularly and I do enjoy his company. All my other grandchildren belong to my daughter, Helen and her partner, Jason Poulton. Scott Benjamin Lee, born in October 1995, is a Marine Biologist by degree and now works in Plymouth, living with his partner, Becca Knee. Kelsey Ann, born in August 1998, has a degree in tourism but left that profession in order to join her great passion in life which is the Pageant Girl World. Samuel Bradley, born in August 2000, also has a B.A. and is trained in football management but is currently working in computer security surveillance. Then there is Jacob Joshua, the baby of the family, born in December 2006, who is still at school and taking life very steady. I love all my grandchildren, but I have come to the conclusion that it is sufﬁcient for me to worry about my own children and as such, I let them get on with their lives as best they can. Of course, I am always there to help but now that they have Google and Alexa, who needs a granddad? I am very, very proud of both of my children and everything that they have achieved. Looking back on my life, out of all my sporting activities, golf is what I like best, mainly because it is the one thing I was most adept at, but scuba diving always gave me the most pleasure. My favourite place in the world is Bermuda. But my professional life was my life! It was meat and drink to me, it just got better and better as I progressed through the years, ﬁnally reaching ultimate success with Lord Rothschild's group. founding partner I dealt estate planning very AsAsa apartner I dealt with estatewith planning for very for wealthy 94

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clients and travelling was a big part of that enjoyedI wealthy clients and travelling was a big part success, of that Isuccess, that aspect the reward enjoyed thatofaspect of the system rewardgreatly. system greatly. Now, as an older man, I regret toa say that my inability to get In 2003 I applied to undertake PhD Course in Theology aboutthe ensures that my perfect is to lose myself in a novel, with European Institute of day Management and Technology of Switzerland (a similar syatem ourthose Openwritten University), age particularly period dramas suchto as by Jane and the tenous state of health prevented me from completing Austen. thisBut course my life's worksoand reading I do but also after have learning a book toofﬁnish writing... I still have my disertation, Academic Council of their Senate decided things yet to do the - watch this space! to award my an Honorary Degree of PhD. One of the many highlights of my journey and one which is very much appreciated. Thank you to Gillian Monks for ghostwriting two books. Having now completed the course for the Institute of Advanced Motorists, I await the final examination with eager anticipation, 85 years and still going strong. Now, as an older man, I regret to say that my inability to get about ensures that my perfect day is to lose myself in a novel, particularly period dramas such as those written by Jane Austen. But I do also have two books to finish writing... so I still have things yet to do - watch this space!