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    He is known as Michael, and was born in London, England, on June 18, 1933, his parents returning to Canada the following year. After their separation he, with his mother and younger brother Jeremy, went to Sydney, Australia, where they remained until early in January 1942.
    They left Sydney for America at that time on the S.S. President Grant. The ship had hurriedly left Singapore because of the Japanese invasion, leaving most of the crew behind, the Captain safely navigating through the Australian Barrier Reef without charts. What would normally have been a voyage from Sydney to San Francisco lasting 14 days took 48 as the ship was chased by Japanese submarines for several days and had to take a zig-zag course down to Antarctic waters. Everything that had the name President Grant on it was thrown overboard, a successful ruse to make their pursuers think the ship had been sunk by one of the submarines. However, the much longer voyage led to shortage of food and fresh water, passengers surviving for two weeks on one meal a day of corned beef and having to drink condensed sea water. As a result, Michael and his brother and several other passengers needed hospitalization on arrival at San Francisco.
    For the next three years Michael and Jeremy attended various schools in America and then boarding school in Canada. In 1945 their step-father was posted to England and the family reached there by flying boat, starting at Baltimore, stopping in Newfoundland and Ireland, finally landing in Poole Harbour, the flight having lasted 17 hours.
    In England, Michael was educated at Beachborough Park Preparatory School, Northamptonshire, and Malvern College, Worcestershire, until 1952 when he started two years' National Service in the Army. After Basic Training with the Green Jackets, he was commissioned in the Queen's Royal Regiment and then seconded to the King's African Rifles in Kenya. This was at the time of the Mau Mau terrorist troubles. After completing his military service he worked on tea plantations in Kenya, eventually managing a 2000-acre tea estate near Nairobi until 1956, when he decided on a change of career and joined an American film company working all over East Africa.
    In 1958, this film company having gone out of business, Michael and his first wife returned to England where he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation B.B.C. for the next five years filming on various programmes, such as Panorama, and documentaries.
    He then went 'free lance' until 1978, his film work including coverage of the wars in Vietnam, Cyprus, Nigeria/Biafra, the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Israel and the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. During these years more peaceful assignments included the official film of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, and an international series of golf tournaments which took him to England, France, Spain, Portugal and Puerto Rico. One interesting assignment was on documentaries for the Hydrographic Department of the Royal Navy, shot around Fiji and the Solomon Islands. This work involved charting waters which had not been re-surveyed since the hydrographic surveys of Captain Cook, undersea volcanic activity having made many physical changes. Michael tells us that some Pacific areas have still not been resurveyed and that merchant ships are forced to use Cook's original charts.
    During his 'free lance' years he occasionally worked for American and Canadian national television news networks and for British Independent Television (I.T.N.). Eventually he joined the American ABC News International in a senior staff position. With them, he has been involved in filming the troubles in Beirut, the Iranian Revolution, the American hostage episode in Teheran, the Iran/Iraq War, the First Gulf War and its post-war Kuwaiti oil fires, the American bombing of Tripoli, the American invasion of Somalia and more recently in Bosnia where, tragically, a member of the ABC team was killed by a sniper.

    When not away covering all-too-frequent trouble spots, Michael lived with his family in a historic house on the North Downs of Kent near Rochester.