Profile: Robert Anthony (Tony) Whelpton

About This Author

Tony Whelpton was born in Nottingham, on 27 January 1933. He went to High Pavement Grammar School, then, after National Service in the RAF, Goldsmiths’ College and Birkbeck College, London, obtained two degrees and a Postgraduate teaching qualification and the degree of Licence ès Lettres of the University of Lille. Then he taught French at Beckenham and Penge and Lowestoft Grammar Schools and in 1965 returned to Nottingham to take up a lectureship in French at what is now Nottingham Trent University; he left Nottingham in 1982. For 25+ years he was Chief Examiner in French at ‘O’ Level (later GCSE) and for ‘A’ Level Spoken French. He also wrote school text books, originally for Longman, in collaboration with Daphne Jenkins, many of which were best-sellers. He later wrote two books on cricket and a history of the Cheltenham Bach Choir, of which he had been Chairman and from which he only retired from singing in March 2013, when he was appointed Honorary Vice-President. When he was over 75 he resolved to try his hand at fiction: the result was his first novel, Before the Swallow Dares, published in 2012, to which he added a second in 2013, entitled The Heat of the Kitchen. After this came Billy's War (2014), its sequel There’s No Pride In Prejudice (2016), A Happy Christmas (2016) and A Change of Mind (2017). But this only scratches the surface. Here are a handful of other things he has done: with the Cheltenham Bach Choir he has sung at the Proms and at High Mass in Chartres Cathedral; he was a Mastermind contender in 2009, his special subject being the life of Balzac (he came second to Gary Grant who took the Mastermind title in 2012; in 1990 he went to Vienna to represent Great Britain in the European Final of the World French Spelling Competition (the ‘Championnats d’Orthographe’), and came second; in 1968 he was Producer and Presenter of the first schools broadcast ever on UK local radio, Écoutez, les Enfants!, a French programme for primary schools which ran for three years on BBC Radio Nottingham. Who knows what the future holds!