Memoirs of a Yorkshire Bastard: A Chronicle of the Life and Times of a Gay Medieval Historian Book

Born in 1944, the bastard son of a neurotic divorced mother and an unknown father, Keith Dockray was brought up by working class foster parents in Huddersfield. Poeverty and insecurity dogged his early years but, in 1955, he passed the 11 plus, became a grammar school boy and, eventually, a history student at Bristol University in 1963. Theatre-going and social drinking soon became regular features of his lifestyle; however, an ever more powerful homosexual orientation, condeming him to membership of an opressed and widely despised minority, blighted his teenage and undergraduate years: indeed, it took him over a decade to come to terms with his sexuality, longer still to embrace its pleasure potential without inhibition. After a short spell as a public school master and residential house tutor at Plymouth College, Keith obtained a lectureship at Huddersfield Polytechnic in 1972, where enthusing students about medieval and early modern history in general, and encouraging working class undergraduates to reach their potential in particular, soon became his overriding mission. Following early retirement in 1994 he returned to Bristol, taught part-time until 2004, and developed a real taste for writing academically respectable yet firmly accessible history, most notably source books on Richard III (1997), Edward IV (1999) and Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou and the Wars of the Roses (2000), and historiographically-orientated studies of William Shakespeare, the Wars of the Roses and the Historians (2002) and Henry V (2004).Read More