‘I was born in Rainham, Essex, in a rented 2-up 2-down cottage with the spider-infested toilet out the back and a tin bath in front of the fire on a Friday evening. My mother was second-generation Irish whose family came to Dagenham because that was where the work was. My mother and father met while they were both in the RAF just after the war; he came from Bournemouth, and the name Lashmar is English despite how it sounds. My first memory is that of seeing a red sky from my cot because from where we lived near the Ford factory you could see the glow of the pig iron being tipped at night from the foundry. My father was a “tongsman”, an incredibly hot and dangerous job, but he earned good money.
Mine wasn’t a great childhood. My mother had miscarriages and mental health problems and was often away for weeks. This led to a split with my father, and sadly he committed suicide when I was 8. I often lived with my grandparents in Dagenham, who like the rest of my family, worked at Fords. My mother remarried but I didn’t really get on with my stepfather until decades later. My ‘Nan’ worked in the canteen and was a shop steward, but she was a wily person and suggested that I could sign up with a false name, lie about my age and get casual work. So aged 13 (and again a year later) I became a kitchen porter during the summer holidays, earning £25 a week which was good money in 1968. The high point of that job was being commended by the directors of Fords for the quality of my crinkle cut chips.
My mother sent me to a Catholic school in Chingford called St Egberts, which exposed me to people who didn’t come from Dagenham, for example refugee classmates who’d come out of Czechoslovakia in ’56. We were a peculiar class because we didn’t play football, we would stand round and argue about things, which with hindsight was formative, and this was also the period when the “hippieness” starts to creep in. So I shifted from being quite conservative to enjoying counterculture zeitgeist, reading Oz magazine and discovering a love for music, which is something which has lasted all my life. I got in terrible trouble for hitch-hiking down to the Bath Festival at Shepton Mallet in 1970 to see Led Zeppelin et al. I’d asked my mother to write school a note to cover for me, which she did, but not grasping the point, told them I was at a pop festival. But Led Zeppelin’s 3-hour set was worth the bother.
When St Egberts closed down I went to technical college in Redbridge for three years, where I was social secretary. It was quite hippy, we had sit-ins, and I hung out a lot with bands, and despite having a fairly amazing social life managed to get an Ordinary National Diploma in the Sciences. Coming from the kind of background I did, I knew I had to get out of Dagenham, but how? I’ve always understood how hard it is for people from an economically deprived background to make a success of their lives, compared to those who have cultural or economic capital. Today when I teach, I go to even greater lengths for students without those advantages, to try and give them confidence which is all-important. I think it was an easier time for us back then, because we all had low expectations which were easily met, but now everyone has high expectations which are constantly being deflated, not least because of Brexit.
In ’72 I then fell into a job at a record company, working out how many vinyl ‘45’ records to press each day, like Rod Stewart, Slade and the Stylistics. Later I moved over to being a warehouse supervisor, still only aged 19. By that time I’d been to the Bath Festival, the Isle of Wight Festival, Hyde Park to see the Rolling Stones and Blind Faith, was around people with whom I could talk about the music of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Pharoah Sanders, and was listening to rock, blues and jazz, funk, everything that came my way, because we had no barriers. It was a fantastic period for music. In May 1975 I went on a trip with a flamenco playing mate to Spain, and meeting some other people crossed to Morocco in a classic hippy road trip in a rough old Transit with no windscreen, over the Atlas Mountains to Fez and Marrakesh. I was meeting people who’d had the benefit of university education, who knew about philosophies like existentialism and looking back I realise I’ve always been interested in the power of ideas that can change the world. I decided it was time to get myself better educated if I could.
Reading Time Out, I saw an advert for a course called Diploma in Communication and Design at North East London Polytechnic. The tutors there were full of radical ideas, such as making art and design more accessible to people from working-class backgrounds, and I’m still in touch with two of them. I had three years of extraordinary education there. One of my tutors became a mentor for me, a role which helped me no end having lost my father because it meant someone older than me took me seriously, which more than anything gave me confidence. Mentoring is something I’ve tried to do all my working life. As a side-line to the course, I helped one of the tutors as a researcher in his work as an investigative journalist, putting together a story about the Cold War which was published in the Observer. Jack Crossley, the news editor there, a tough old Fleet Street hand, was impressed with our work, and thanks to a recommendation from my course tutor, offered me a job as a researcher. Working for him meant I needed to learn how to write, and Jack seemed to like what I did, often asking me to rewrite the copy that other Oxbridge educated reporters wrote. When Jack left, the next news editor was Robin Lustig, who hired an investigative reporter from the Guardian called David Leigh, an extraordinary character, and suggested I work with him. David and I just clicked and thirty-seven years later we still do. Leigh and Lashmar we were the investigative team at the Observer, up against the other Sunday papers such as the Sunday Times who had much larger resources. We considered our task was to beat them every week, getting the stories they didn’t. We did Mark Thatcher in Oman, MI5 vetting at the BBC, several investigations into police corruption, Stalker, Spycatcher, Clive Ponting, the Belgrano, and many, many more. I learnt that as a journalist if you take on the government you don’t do so lightly, but in those days we were a gung-ho, fearless lot. Many of the people we went after were very rich, very powerful and had the best lawyers, and we had to out-think them. After I and many others left the Observer due to owner Tiny Rowlands’ interference, I went to work at World in Action on TV. There were some very exciting times, some too exciting, following stories on police collusion with organised criminals, being rammed by their cars, and travelling to Brazil to cover how street children were being murdered like vermin, following the death wagon to get footage as they went round in the mornings collecting bodies. That was a pretty hairy time, but perhaps my best story was investigating the Royal Family’s ability to negotiate how little tax they paid, a privilege which changed after we wrote about it.
Anna and I got together, in late ’93, married in ’94, our son Ben arrived in ’95, then Arthur in ’97. I wanted to make sure I was going to be a good father for them. The world of journalism was full of tough individuals and you had to be tough too, there was no paternity leave, the birth of one’s children was seen as somewhat incidental. I didn’t want to belong to that club. From 1998-2001 I was at the Independent and we lived in Crouch End. Having sworn that we were Londoners, Anna and I changed our minds and explored the idea of living in Dorset. What clinched it for Bridport was hearing the live music coming out of the Hope and Anchor as we crossed the car park. We subsequently went there on a regular basis, and through extraordinary landlady, Val Crabb got to know many Bridport characters. Anna returned to teaching and I was offered a job on the MA Broadcast Journalism course at Falmouth. Then 9-11 happened, and the Independent on Sunday asked me to cover it as I was the only journalist they could use who knew about terrorism, spies, etc. So I was able to do that, largely still able to remain in Bridport and teach at Falmouth.
In 2011 as three of the family were commuting daily to Thomas Hardye School in Dorchester we moved there. I also needed better access to London as I’d been taken on at Brunel University as a research academic and still teaching. I soon realised that to progress I would need a PhD, which took 3 years of hard slog because I got no time off to fit in the study, but I achieved it in 2015. In 2017, through the grapevine, I heard there was a job going at City University, which was considered the top journalism course. I got the job. If Dorset is my spiritual home, City feels like I got lucky at work. There are 500 students, 27 staff and 60+ visiting lecturers. Two months ago I was made Reader. And now from being Deputy Head, I’ve been asked to be Head of Department, starting in August. For a boy from Dagenham, it’s been a long but never dull journey.’

‘I was born in a small fishing town called Katwijk aan Zee in the Netherlands. My family was very religious; there was church twice on Sundays and prayers before and after every meal. The town itself was quite conservative, and my family fitted the community. I was number 6 of 7 children, and despite the emphasis on religion, it was a lively household, full of music. My 5 brothers all played an instrument, and I loved to sing. I have very happy memories of that time, and I still do singing and voice workshops. In my early life, my father captained a barge carrying freight along the many Dutch waterways, and if I was lucky I went along too for short trips, which I loved. Later he started a business supplying the large fishing fleet in our town with tackle such as nets, chains, etc., which was a great success. Things definitely looked up from then, my eldest brother joining the business. For my parents it was a big improvement in their circumstances, having come from very humble backgrounds. When I was only 2 my mother was diagnosed with cancer through which she lost her voice, which was devastating so that looking after all us children was extremely difficult. My eldest sister played a major part in managing the family, and my mother lived until I was 13. As I grew up, for some reason I was attracted to the weird and wonderful, and couldn’t wait to leave the constraints of family life.
We lived in a street which was owned by the air force, housing families from various different countries. There was a Spanish family next door, who had dug a hole in the floor to grow a palm tree in their living room and had pictures of bullfights on the walls, all of which was completely outlandish to my innocent eyes. Also at secondary school, I was mixing with people from all kinds of backgrounds, discovering the diversity I had been craving. And of course it was the sixties, there were hippies, and I just loved all that stuff; but I was the only one of my family that embraced the counter-culture of the time, which made me the black sheep.
When my father remarried I left home and got a job in the town, then moved to Leiden, a larger university city, and ended up in a squat there, in a street of condemned grand houses lining the canal, full of artists and musicians. It was very bohemian and psychedelic, but I moved out of that to be with a boyfriend and get a bit more on the straight and narrow. I had an aunty who was a very good dressmaker, who had been teaching me to make dolls’ clothes from the age of about 4. My parents bought me my first sewing machine when I was 10, so I was making things for myself from a very early age. I knew a lot of local musicians, and I began making clothes for them, revelling in the glam rock style of those days. I also became quite entrepreneurial, successfully selling a lot of clothes at that time.
Having turned out so different from my family, I had a strong sense of needing to belong somewhere. At first, I felt I belonged to the community in the squat, but when I began work in a nursing home I felt I fitted in there. They accepted me for who I was, and I felt valued. I did some training and began to help with creative and fun activities with the patients. Once a year they would hire a big boat, park it close by on the Rhine, and then with all the patients, including some of the quite infirm elderly folk in their hospital beds, go on a 2-week cruise all the way down the Rhine, having huge amounts of fun. They all loved it, and so did I. It was my first foreign trip.
I then worked at a number of creative jobs in Leiden, some with local kids from deprived areas, and later for the educational department of The Museum of Anthropology, working to pay the bills as I always have done. In my early twenties, I met a guy, an artist, and we had a son. After a lot of training, I was teaching handicrafts to young children whilst bringing up my son. That was also a period when I started to take an interest in Satipatthana Meditation, going to workshops with John Garrie Roshi. After I was divorced, it was at one of these workshops that I met Alan, and at the age of 28, having come for a long weekend, I moved to the UK and stayed.
We lived in a small village in Oxfordshire, quite a big change for me after Leiden. Everything seemed so tiny and rural and with the old pubs, it seemed like the middle ages. So I was in Oxford a lot, and got into Aikido, and trained in Shiatsu. I was still making clothes for people and using textiles as a medium for other creative projects. Then Alan and I went to live on a country estate in Brightwell Baldwin, in the servants’ quarters of a crumbling mansion. Alan had a workshop there, enabling him to develop his furniture making skills. We lived there for 3 years and then were offered this place in Askerswell, which has been our home since 1986. My son went to school in Holland, came here for vacations, and now lives in Amsterdam. He’s in the music industry, has two lovely children, and we see a lot of each other, either in Amsterdam or here in England.
Here in Dorset, I did a 2-year City and Guilds course in Fashion at Exeter College, then a year’s teacher training, during which I was teaching at the A Level Art and Fashion course. I also got involved with the drama department of Exeter University, making costumes for shows including a Japanese Noh production. After that, I decided to do a degree in Textile and Fashion Design, in Bristol, as a mature student. While I was there I made friends with a film director and worked on several productions here in Dorset, some Thomas Hardy-related productions, and a series called Harbour Lights. I worked with a German film company FFP Media on costumes, later sourcing extras and English actors for small roles. That was an incredibly busy time for both Alan and I, because we were producing work for Dorset Art Weeks right from the beginning. One visitor to our DAW show, Deirdre McSharry, was curating a 50th Anniversary exhibition at the American Museum in Bath, to which I was invited to contribute with my textiles. It was a lovely exhibition lasting 6 months, and my part in it was a Shaker-inspired collection. Deidre was very well connected, which led to some really good publicity for me, and I enjoyed 5 to 10 years of success with my work. Alan and I did many shows together, often opening our whole house to show our work together in joint exhibitions.
After 2007 the recession began to bite, making buyers more hesitant about parting with their money for what both Alan and I were offering. Dorset Art Weeks had become bigger and more expensive to participate in, and some of the local artists in our area moved on, making us feel a little more isolated, although I had one particularly loyal client who continued to buy my work, and who must have bought nearly a hundred outfits over the years. Since I first was interested in it, I continued to practice the Meditation and Yoga. In my late forties, I decided to train as a Yoga teacher which I did over a period of 4 – 5 years. I started to teach from the beginning of the course, which one is encouraged to do anyway to get teaching experience. I now teach here in the village hall, as well as Bradpole and South Perrott, and there will be a Summer Yoga programme in the Bull Hotel in Bridport, in July and August, for beginners and experienced yogis, where people can work with a different teacher each week. So the creative side of things has taken a bit of a back seat but has never really disappeared. Throughout my life, from when my parents first encouraged it, my life’s main interests have been creativity, music, and physical activities such as gymnastics and athletics when I was younger, and now Yoga.
I love world cinema, I was on the committee of Bridport Film Society for 5 years, and I love travelling, my particular favourites being India, Morocco and the Middle East. Japan was a big trip for me too, and I love going to places where I can discover textile processes. I prefer independent travel, opening up to expansion, so that it becomes an adventure, you meet the local people, and possibilities open up, connections are made.’