Roger Wilmut - Biography

<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> <H2 ALIGN=right><A HREF="../index.html" TARGET="_top"><IMG SRC="../images/home.GIF" WIDTH=71 HEIGHT=28 BORDER=0 ALIGN=right hspace=2 vspace=2></A></H2> <H2>WHO IS ROGER WILMUT, ANYWAY?</H2> <P>If you found this page by searching on the name 'Wilmut' you may be looking for information about Dolly, the famous cloned sheep; well, she was the responsibility of my cousin, Ian Wilmut, and she certainly made him famous. My own claim to fame is fortunately more modest, resting on six books about (mostly) broadcast comedy - more about them on a <A HREF="books.html">separate page</A> (and I have written a <A HREF="history.html" TARGET="_top">separate page on the history of the Wilmut family</A>)</P> <P>I was born in <A HREF="slide.html" TARGET=Pictures>Stratford-on-Avon</A>, Warwickshire, in 1942. My parents moved there when they were married in 1940 and my father, who had been teaching in Caterham, Surrey, got a post at King Edward the Sixth School in Stratford. My mother was delighted because she was a keen theatregoer, and as a result of all this I saw many of the Shakespeare productions at the theatre - all of them from the late 1950s to about the early 1970s.</P> <P>I went to<A HREF="school.html" TARGET=Pictures> Warwick School</A> from 1953 to 1961; the school was chartered by King Edward the Confessor and could be described as a minor public school (and for any American readers I should explain that 'public school' in England doesn't mean the same as 'public school' in America - perversely, it means more or less a private school: I went there on a scholarship.) I didn't have a particularly distinguished academic record, leaving with one A-level, in Physics. The most enjoyable part of it all was the music - there was a good choral society, and I played violin in the <A HREF="orchestra.html" TARGET=Pictures>school orchestra.</A></P> <P>My hobbies were (and still are) music - classical and classic jazz, mostly - hi-fi, cinema, and record collecting; I learnt the piano and violin, though I'm very rusty on both these days. As a result of my interest in hi-fi I became a recording engineer when I left school in 1961, doing disc-cutting, and tape recording and editing. In 1968 I moved on to sound mixing, which I continued to do until I took early retirement in 1995: I still do it a few days a month on a casual basis, which is better than working full time!</P> <P>My record collecting has continued over the years, and I now have over 2,700 gramophone records, over a thousand of them 78s; and I've taken an interest in getting the best out of old recordings (hence the pages about the reproduction of 78s). I used to go to the cinema and the National Film Theatre a lot, seeing a lot of old films as well as modern ones, though I don't do as much of that nowadays. I also have a large collection of science fiction novels. My other hobbies are cycling (nothing spectacular, just local riding) - and, just latterly, constructing this web site!</P> <P>Writing books came about more or less by accident, and I have covered this on a <A HREF="books.html">separate page</A>.</P> <P><A HREF="../index.html" TARGET="_top"><IMG SRC="../images/home.GIF" WIDTH=71 HEIGHT=28 BORDER=0 ALIGN=left></A></P> <P> </P>  <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"> var sc_project=1579724; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_partition=14; var sc_security="d5b13e88"; </script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://www.statcounter.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://c15.statcounter.com/counter.php?sc_project=1579724&java=0&security=d5b13e88&invisible=1" alt="web tracker" border="0"></a> </noscript> </BODY>