Biography

Born in the late 1940's and brought up in a working-class household in Sunderland, in the north-east of England, Tony succeeded in passing an exam at the age of eleven, which took him to the local selective Grammar School. He feels he “drifted” from there into the teaching profession, training as a drama teacher at a college in Nottingham, where he met his present wife, Liz. Lives are changed by the most ordinary of events and after two years as a teacher he was already becoming bored with life in an Eastwood Secondary School (Lawrence's home town) when someone in a bar suggested that if he joined the local police force they’d give him a house and his qualifications would stand him in good stead. Moved by a naïve desire to “do good for society,” a year later saw he was patrolling the beat in Nottingham in a police uniform and working shifts. For a while he enjoyed the job, ascended the learning curve and passed all his police exams, gaining a part-time LLB and trying to conform to the culture where, he felt, some of the detectives, were almost as devious as the criminals, bending the rules of fairness when it suited them. Due to his exam successes he was allowed to try for accelerated promotion but didn’t get it and had to work his way up the system the hard way, resulting in him getting only to the rank of sergeant and eventually feeling the frustration of seeing others going past him in the promotion stakes. The boredom of shift work soon left a gap in his life and he took up amateur drama and began writing plays for competitions, some of which he won and so began his desire to become a bona fide playwright. Two of his one-act plays were published by New Playwrights Network of Macclesfield, UK, and when he got his first refusal he decided to explore the idea of self-publishing. Since then he has published more than twenty plays, most of which have been performed by UK amateur groups and one, “My Brother’s Keeper” reached the final of the Pittsburgh New Play Festival and was later published in Holland and Belgium. He has also published novels and poetry for children and adults. At the age of forty he almost escaped the police system when he was moved to travel to London to audition for a place at the Poor School on a part-time course for actors. After several auditions on the day, he was the only one of his group to be offered a place but having teenage children and a mortgage he regrets that he didn’t have the courage to make the break. They say that the writer must suffer for his art. Tony’s desire to write finally got him into trouble with his employers when, returning to work as an instructor in the strict military-style environment of a Police Training Centre near Coventry, while his colleagues were out one night on a trip to a local brewery he used the ageing photocopier without permission to make some copies of his latest one-act creation called "Bill" and when challenged the next day, Washington-like, he told the truth, hoping for clemency. Instead they confined him to his room, carried out a full investigation with the rest of the staff and held a military-style discipline panel after which they expelled him back to his own force. He is pleased to say that he later had to return to Coventry to see one of his other plays being performed by an amateur group there. The end of his police career also wasn’t a happy occasion, but the British law of libel prevents him being able to say why.