Iain Taylor
Having recently retired from a career in corporate media and public relations, I was honoured to be asked to be Treasurer of BALH as of 1 January 2019. I graduated in history from Exeter University in 1980 but part of me always regretted not having done any postgraduate work. Becoming self employed in 2002 also gave the time to complete an MRes in Cultural History at Goldsmiths, University of London, which was most enjoyable, and I was able to take a PhD at Royal Holloway a few years later. My thesis was on Early Modern Bible Commentaries (an important source thus far completely overlooked by both historians and theologians) and I was very fortunate to have the outstanding Prof Justin Champion as my supervisor. During that time I wrote several articles and gave a number of academic papers and I was subsequently asked to become the Secretary of the Christianity & History Forum.
After that David Killingray encouraged me to become more active in writing articles on local history in general and the Sevenoaks area (where I lived until very recently) in the long nineteenth century in particular. So far I have had articles published in peer-reviewed journals on the lengthy struggle to put in place the West Kent public drainage system; the personal and social dislocation resulting from the mismanagement and collapse of smaller local friendly societies; the reasons some Sevenoaks farmers in particular were targeted during the earliest stage of the 'Captain Swing' riots of 1830-31; and the idiosyncratic ways in which one local tenant farmer pursued his campaign, against leading members of the West Kent aristocracy, to end the Extraordinary Tithe in the 1880s.
One of the key factors linking this body of work is risk - who assumes it and why, and how and when those people might seek to transfer it onto other groups or individuals better able to bear it, either willingly or unwillingly. Risk is also the meta-theme of a new book on nineteenth century Sevenoaks David and I have just completed and which we hope to have published by the end of 2019.
I hope my business background will allow me to bring some additional commercial and marketing expertise to BALH in future.
Iain Taylor, Trustee and Treasurer