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. Poverty 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, condemning him to membership of an oppressed 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 maximum 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).
‘I have known Keith Dockray for over forty years but still cannot say what he actually is: a gregarious misanthrope; a homosexual who enjoys the company of women and would have liked, perhaps, to be a father; a lecturer who no longer wants to lecture; a writer who seems reluctant to write; and a hard drinker who can stay sober for days or even weeks at a time. Yet, beneath his cynical carapace, lies a generous and sympathetic friend, highly moral in his immorality.’
Peter Allender, July 2004
234 x 156 mm | hardback | 446 pages | 100 b&w photos
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