The autobiography of Bernard J Harris

In the middle years of my life I discovered that it seems to be a sort of family tradition to write down one’s life-story. We have in our collection an autobiographical letter by my great-great-grandmother, and the autobiographies of my great-grandfather, two great-Aunts, and my father. So after four consecutive generations, it would seem remiss of me not to add a fifth.

The other factor is that the set of life-stories seem to me to bring to life the periods described, in a way that no history books could. My Great-grandfather (T W Moores) lived in the day of horse and barge transport, when the railways were new; I have been working in the computer age, seeing them come from pioneering instruments, to the lab, into business, and then into the home. Things seem to be changing exponentially faster all the time, and perhaps some family members, in 100 years’ time, will look back at my life in the quaint times of the late 1900’s and early 2000’s, with as much curiosity and fascination as I have read my Great-grandfather’s life-story of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. If that is so, the effort in typing it into the computer will not have been wasted.

I have divided it into sections for web-browsing … an autobiography designed for reading online. By doing that, the reader can either follow it through sequentially, or take a topic such as music and follow that through to the end. I don’t know if that method will be a success … as we have said in computer development for many years, you never really know until you do it!

So here are the sections, with time-periods going left to right and topics going down. Start where you like, and see where you end up. Or, you could be really conventional and read it in sequence … start at the top left and at the bottom of each page click “next chronological”!

	My early years	Growing up in Rawdon 1946-61	College years 1961-65	Working in Romsey 1965-68	Back to Yorkshire 1969-71	Buckinghamshire 1971-81	Woodley 1981-2011	Retirement in Skipton 2011-
Home and family life	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read
Church and faith		Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read
School and work, including Katie’s work		Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read
Music		Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read
Other hobbies		Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read
National events	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read

Link forward to the first chronological section, or return to the family documents index.