I was born in the seaside town of Scarborough, Yorkshire, England in 1959 to my parents Ian and Rosemarie, both aged twenty-three, so you could say that the coast was always in my blood. I was Christened on the north west coast, in the small ancient church of St Peter’s, in Heysham, Lancashire, where my grandparents, Jack and Florence lived.  Jack, who was born in 1898, and reminded me of Fred Astaire – born one year later – was a member of ‘The Morecambe Players,’ a professional repertory company based in The Royalty Theatre, Morecambe (demolished in 1969) and used to act alongside Thora Hird there, in the thirties and forties, as well as in the Grand Theatre, Blackpool (still one of the two largest theatres in that town).  Acting was the love of his life, even though his main job was to manage the family business called ‘Cherry’s Dry Cleaners’  in Penny Street, Lancaster.  In 1975, my parents and I visited Thora Hird backstage at Drury Lane, London – where she was playing a cleaning lady in ‘No, No, Nanette’ – and she said to my father “I’ve always wanted to know if you woud be as handsome as you father, Jack”  She struck me as being a no-nonsense person, but not unfriendly.  Jack actually joined the British Army at the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, at the age of just sixteen! (when the minimum legal age was eighteen) but my father said he never once talked about any of his expeiriences, during that war.  My German grandmother, Oma, her two sisters, Minni and Trudel, and her two daughters, my mother and Barbel, were thrown out of their large house in Breslau, in eastern Germany – now part of Poland and renamed Wroclaw – by Russian soldiers, at the end of the second world war.  They were all put on a cattle train and transported hundreds of miles to the village of Harpstedt, in northern Germany, where all except my mother stayed until the early eighties.  My mother dated my father, who was doing his national service a few miles from Harpstedt, in 1957, got married a few months later, and came to live in Lancaster in 1958 and then worked as a nanny for a doctor’s family in Hest Bank.  In 1962 we moved to a semi, in Old Marston in Oxford, and my sister, Monica, was born in the Churchill Hospital, Oxford in January 1964.  While there, I attended the St. Nicholas Primary School, from April 1964, and a girl in my class, called Karen Hosier, was my first real friend at that time.  In 1966 we moved to Woodstock, seven miles north of Oxford, where I attended the Woodstock Church of England  Primary School.  My best friend then, was a boy in my class called David Drewett, and we used to spend most weekends and holidays in the park of Blenheim Palace, like a latter day Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn!  I was about nine-years-old when I started taking photographs with my father’s Olympus Pen half frame 35mm camera loaded with Kodachrome and Agfachrome colour slide films, which started my life-long passion for photography.  The continual soundtrack to our childhood in the sixties was, of course, music by The Beatles: their newly released single ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was playing on the radio, when I returned home after my first day at primary school.

In October 1970, when I was eleven, we moved to Colchester, Essex, and I attended The Philip Morant School.  Moving from a quiet village Church of England primary school to this secondary school, with twelve hundred pupils, came as quite a shock to me.  The newly released, Marc Bolan’s ‘Ride a White Swan’ was playing on the radio when I got home, after my first day at school.  Our urbane and likeable headmaster, Bill Burton, seemed to run his comprehensive school as if it were a minor public school.  It was just not done for boys to sit next to girls in class, only boy-boy and girl-girl on twin desks, which in those days were in regimented rows facing forward.  The short tubby, balding bespectacled deputy headmaster, who had a deep Welsh accent, was known as Dubber by all pupils.  It was ‘compulsory’ for every single pupil to do a vocal impression of Dubber – even me – usually with the catchphrase “Hey boy, I’ve got my eye on you!” due to one of his eyes having a squint.  Dubber was also the school’s chief ‘executioner’ with a cane, in the good old days of corporal punishment, but this could not detract from the fact that he was a figure of fun.  During music lessons we were required to sing, in a group, songs  such as ‘Dirty Old Town’: of course we all chorused ”Dirty Old Man” much to the teacher’s annoyance.  One day in music class, before the teacher was there, Charlie Richardson put on a colourful inflatable PVC swimming ring complete with a front protruding smiling duck’s head.  The problem was that the ring had stuck tightly around his waist by the time the music teacher arrived, and he was immediately sent to see the headmaster with the ring still firmly in place!  Our young German language teacher once so despaired at our class’s ineptitude that he knelt against the classroom wall looking heavenwards with his hands together as if praying.  In that exact sublime moment, Dubber opened the door,  immediately looked down and said with a straight face “Very interesting!”. The whole class, of course, erupted into laughter.  The one person I can thank for really teaching me how to write, was the no-nonsense Miss McAlpine.  Her favourite phrase, often directed to the whole of her English class was “You’re too immature!” – to comprehend this or that piece of literature.  From time to time, a wrestling battle worthy of Agincourt would break out between many of the twelve hundred pupils of my school and many of the nine hundred pupils of the adjacent Catholic St Benedict’s School, on our linked playing fields. The two ‘armies’ could be differentiated by Philip Morant wearing green blazers and St Benedict’s wearing black blazers.

At the start of my first year at Philip Morant School, aged eleven, I became friends with a quiet, beautiful boy just one month younger than me, called Donald Clark, who was slim with straight brown hair, hazel eves and pale flawless skin.  I used to sit next to him in class, and remember thinking ‘I’m so lucky to be sitting right here, right now.’  We soon became best friends, and remained so for the whole of the seventies.  In July 1978 we went to stay at the house of my German grandmother, called Oma – where her two sisters, Minni and Trudel also lived – in the beautiful village of Harpstedt, in northern Germany, and we happily cycled, almost every day, around the many villages of Lower Saxony.  On one warm sunny morning in September 1979, we set off to cycle from Colchester to the north Norfolk coast, via Suffolk, Norfolk and the Norfolk Broads.  We cycled 75 miles on the first day ! when we spent the night at the Norwich Post House Hotel, conveniently on the main road south of the centre of Norwich.  We chained our bicycles to a small sign on two posts, in the car park, and forever afterwards our joke was that the sign only said ‘Do not attach bicycles to this sign’  On the second day we cycled 32 miles, stopping of at Wroxham village and taking a sightseeing boat trip on Wroxham Broad, before staying overnight in the seaside town of Cromer, in a small boarding house – Cromer was simply where East Anglia ran out, as we never planned to stay there.  While we were sitting in the boarding house lounge that evening, Donald lifted the landlady’s cat onto his lap and stroked it lovingly.  I resentfully thought ‘Why can’t you just stroke me lovingly, instead?’  We walked along Cromer pier in the twilight, but hardly spoke, after those two physically exhausting days.  Looking back, I think that the evening walk on the pier, marked the beginning of the end of our friendship.  On the morning of the third day, at Donald’s insistence, we took a train back to Colchester.  Donald decided to stop being friends with me ten months later, in July 1980, but would not tell me the reason why.  I found out that he got married in April 1983, and has had children.  I last met Donald by chance, in May 1997 in Frinton-on-Sea with his wife and nine-year-old son ( calling him Dad, which made an impression on me ) and daughter of about seven, when we had a friendly five minute chat, and I was able to look into the hazel eyes of my first love once more, but I have not seen  him since – in the words of Rod Stewart “I ain’t forgetting that you were once mine”  But, unfortunately, we never became boyfriends and I was never even brave enough to try to kiss him.  Now back to the 1st of April 1981, and I can tell you the following story which features Donald, who was then working at a small branch of one of Colchester’s building societies, in Eld lane.  On several mornings previously, I had been photographing from a hide, a wild kingfisher in our garden, which originally took small goldfish from our pond but which I later ‘trained’ to dive down from a perch and take tiny goldfish I had put into a tank of water.  For this purpose, I now and then bought very small goldfish from the pet shop in Eld lane.  One day, I held three goldfish in a clear plastic bag full of water, when I walked into the building society – I really did want to withdraw some cash – and went to the till where Donald was serving behind glass, with the usual stainless-steel trough between him and the customer.  I placed the bag of goldfish on the counter where it stayed upright for a few seconds, but soon slowly capsized, like in a bad dream, decanting its flapping fish and water into the metal trough!  Donald laughed, while trying to make a joke of it with his colleagues, but how the fish were re-captured, and the water dried out, are erased from my memory.  This was such a personal bitter-sweet incident, that I told no living soul about it, until writing this account in my website in 2022 – I thought I might as well make it available to five billion people, if they’re interested!   In December 2022, I found out Donald’s address, and sent him a short letter, basically saying’ I have just written about you in my all-new website and would very much like you to contact me’.  According to Google Analytics, on the day he got my letter, only one person visited this website and they spent 25 minutes on it, so I can be as certain as I can, that Donald has read the above paragraph ( as only a former friend would spend so long on my website ) Predictably, he replied with a brief hand written letter ending  ‘Don’t attempt to contact me again.’  I decided to make this third paragraph ‘all about Donald’ and depart from events in chronological order, so that visitors to  petercherry.com  might actually bother to read about an important ten years of my young life.

In my first year at Philip Morant School, I joined the 1st Colchester Scouts, and was in Panther Patrol with my good school friend Christopher Eves, who lived just a couple of hundred yards from me, and two other boys.  I remember that Christopher and me used to play table tennis for hours on end, in the garage of his house.  In February 1973, I went on a two-week Mediterranean schools’ cruise: this sounds very posh but the ship, The SS Nevasa, was actually a converted troop carrier.  We sailed from Venice and visited Naples, Pompeii, Piraous, Athens, Crete, Knossos, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo and The Pyramids.  We were rudely awoken at 6-30 am every morning by a stern man called Jimmy, bellowing “You’re not on your daddy’s yacht now!”  Christopher Eves became my ‘best friend’ for the journey, as Donald was not there, and he became keen on a girl he met at an on-board disco.  There was a small cinema in the ship, which showed  Carry On Camping  and other less memorable travelog films.  The ship once encountered a force ten gale, in mid ocean, but it had no stabilizers, and virtually everyone on-board was seasick, including me, so we were fed a hot Bovril drink and ship’s biscuits as a remedy.  The deck of the ship would then tilt at alarming angles, making it difficult to walk upright along the gangways.  I recently found out from the internet, that the SS Nevasa was broken up, two years to the month, after our so called ‘Educational Cruise.’

Autumn 1973 marked the start of fuel shortages due to the combined effects of the British miners working to rule and the OPEC oil embargo caused by the USA deciding to supply the Israeli Military.  Petrol was rationed, and the Three Day Week was announced by Prime Minister Edward Heath, effective from 31st of December 1973.  This meant that all business’ were only allowed to work for three consecutive days, in order to conserve the dwindling fuel stocks of coal and oil.  At home, this meant scheduled power cuts in the evenings on many days, and so my generation has memories of the whole family wrapped in overcoats, huddling around a single candle in the sitting room, with the lights, television and gas central heating off ( because it required an electricity supply to work ) night after night, in the winter of 1973 – 1974 !

Seventies music reached a zenith in late 1975 with the release of  Queen’s astonishing  ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and 10cc’s atmospheric  ‘I’m not in Love’ both, unusually, six minutes long.  In July 1977, I invented and made – in the school workshop – an aluminium device for coupling a low-cost compact Kodak 110 camera to most binoculars, in order to take telephoto photographs.  In the following month my metalwork teacher, Leonard Westwood, drove me to Aston University, Birmingham, where my invention was entered in the first ‘Young Engineer for Britain’ competition, and I eventually won second prize.  While there, my device was demonstrated by presenter Donny MacLeod on the BBC television’s ‘Pebble Mill at One’ programme, and my colour print of lion’s head – taken using my device – appeared on screen for seven seconds, for over three million viewers to see.  While in the green room there, I was thrilled to meet the five members of the pop group ‘The New Seekers.’  Just after I left school in June 1977, my family and I went to see the latest Bond film, ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ and the title song ‘Nobody Does It Better’ is now an evocative reminder of the time when I left the security of school life behind.

In October 1977 I started a three-year B.Sc  degree course in Engineering Science, at Lancaster University.  The Morecambe Bay Area was only a short bus ride away, so I started taking photographs around the bay with my Olympus OM1 35mm SLR camera loaded with Kodachrome 64 colour slide film.  My friends at Lancaster University were Dave Ward and Alan Ledbetter, and all three of us used to go orienteering in The Lake District: I particularly remember an event at Great Tower, near Lake Windermere, in the snow.  I graduated with a B.Sc honours degree in Engineering, in June 1980.  Just before I graduated, in April and May 1980, I finally succeeded in a project I had started five years before, which was to photograph nesting Great Tits, from a purpose built hide. I subsequently had a cover photograph – with the title ‘The Great Tit’s Secret Life’ – and an article with several photographs and text – my first published writing – in an issue of the RSPCA’s ‘Animals’ magazine, of which I was immensely proud, in particlar when I saw a copy displayed in a newsagent within Liverpool Street train station, in London.

In October 1981, I started a one-year M.Tech Master’s degree course in Engineering Design at Loughborough University.  I was reunited with my good school friends from Philip Morant School, who were Chistopher Eves, David Hosford – the coolest boy in our class – Charlie Richardson – our class joker – and Clive Schofield – who was always a Rod Stewart lookalike – in the New Year’s Eve of 1981.  It was at the Sun Inn, Lexden, which was the pub nearest my parent’s house, and I met them quite by chance early in the evening, and stayed there until midnight.  We drank every form of alcoholic drink, including Beer, Tequila, Rum and Cokes, Whisky and Baileys.  The after-school warm camaraderie was touching and wonderful, in fact, it was the best evening of my life! but sadly never repeated, even though I went to the same pub exactly a year later, but none of my friends were there.  When I walked home, I had double vision for the first time, and in the following morning I awoke with my first serious hangover!  I graduated with an M.Tech Master’s degree in Engineering Design, in June 1982.

In April 1982, aged twenty-two,  I went to see Cedric Robinson ‘The Queen’s Guide to the Sands of Morecambe Bay’ since 1963, and his wife Olive, at Guide’s  Farm, in Grange over Sands, Cumbria, to ask for their help regarding my book project, to photograph the people and landscape of Morecambe Bay.  Cedric readily agreed to take me out on the bay to photograph his fishing activities, and gave me the address of a Flookburgh  shrimp fisherman,‘Tant’ Wilson, whom he said was ‘a decent sort’ and would surely be glad to help.  Most of my photographs of the fising activities on Morecambe Bay were taken in that month, during my Easter holiday, while at Loughborough University.

In August 1983, aged twenty-four, I joined Ilford Photo Ltd in Mobberley, Cheshire, as a Development Engineer working on several photographic equipments.  I then lived in a small detached house in Wilmslow, Cheshire, seven miles away.  My good friend at Ilford was Dave Aspaturian, who lived in Warrington with his wife Karen and his three girls, in an impressive house he designed himself.  In August 1984, I met a tall, slim, very good looking, twenty-one-year-old, called Andrew Brown, in the ‘High Society’ night-club in Manchester.  That night, I had my first kiss, age twenty-five! and we danced to ‘Careless Whisper’ ‘Relax’ ‘Two Tribes’ and ‘High Energy.’  Andrew was a student nurse, and became my first boyfriend, so I often used to visit him at his Tameside General Hospital’s nurses’ home, in Ashton Under Lyne, for the best part of a year.

In July 1986, age twenty-seven, I published 4,000 copies of my first hard back book ‘On Morecambe Bay’ about the landscape and people of Morecambe Bay, which contained 78 of my colour photographs and 8,700 words of my text.  This gained me Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in the following year, and I appeared on the BBC television’s ‘North West Tonight’ programme, on location on the bay, with my good friend Cedric Robinson.  A quote from the commentary was “Morecambe Bay is the canvas for Peter Cherry’s photographic art” which pleased me.  I also received many excellent magazine reviews, praising my photographs as well as my writing: decribed by ‘Cumbria Magazine’ as ‘Lyrical prose.’

In February 1989, I summoned up enough courage to fly the 6,000 miles to Thailand, on my own.  During my two-week stay there, I visited Bangkok, Phuket, Chang Mai and Chang Rai, and I certainly experienced the meaning of the phrase ‘culture shock.’  In January 1990, age thirty, I joined Boots PLC at their head office in Nottingham as a Senior Technologist, developing many Boots Brand 35mm cameras.  I then lived in a new detached house in Belper, Derbyshire, a one-hour commute away by car.  In September 1991, age thirty-two, I became friends with Chris Buck, a primary school teacher, who was two years older than me, and lived in the same estate as me, just two hundred yards away.  We were to be the best of friends for the next seven years, and we travelled extensively around Europe using Inter-Rail passes, and visited Egypt, New York, Niagara Falls, Washington, Orlando, New Orleans, Las Vegas, The Grand Canyon, Hollywood and San Francisco. 

1998 was a bad year for our family.  In the summer, my mother was taken into Colchester Hospital digagnosed with stomach cancer.  Thankfully it was soon found to be a lymphoma insead, which was much less serious, and after a stomach operation and chemotherapy, she became cancer free after several months.  My elderly great aunt Trudel – who was living with my parents –  had to go into the same hospital while my mother was there, and sadly died, from an intestinal hernia wihin a week.  My father, my sister and I had to keep this sad news from my mother, until she returned home.

In 2009, aged fifty, I drew on my company pension and moved into a new detached house in Banbury, just twenty miles north of Oxford, which I adored since my childhood days.  My sixty-year-old friend and neighbour there, called Charlie, claimed to be a Sultan, and the absolute ruler of thirty-five million of his ‘subjects’ in the Uthura province of Bangladesh, where he lived in a grand palace with his young wife – when not living in Banbury, of course!  Not only that, but he also said that his father was ‘The Duke of Burgundy’ when he was born, and and he inherited this title, and retained it for several years after his father died – it is true he had the Belgian surname; Vervoort, as I have seen many of his envelopes when I would sometimes save post for him.  In May 2011, I published 4,000 copies of my second book ‘Cherry’s Morecambe Bay’ depicting the landscape and people of Morecambe Bay, which contained 110 of my colour photographs and caption text.  This also attracted many great magazine reviews.

In February 2013, age fifty-three, I moved into a detached house in the north of England, and am still living there in October 2024, aged sixty-five, single and retired.  I am very fortunate, in that my mother aged 88 and my father aged 89, are still healthy and active and continue to live in their own house, just three miles from me.  Also, my sister Monica lives only two miles away.

2 October 2024 – Just finished watching the three hour long  Phillip Schofield Cast Away  on Channel 5 – in which Phillip spent ten days alone on a tiny deserted ‘paradise’ island – which moved me to tears, more than once.  Phillip is sixty-two, just three years younger than me, and said in the programme  ‘Life is so short, and I want to make the best of what remains’  &  ‘If people don’t like the way I am, they can just Fuck Off‘!  both sentiments being ones I completely agree with.  I might only live for another 20 years, and that’s only a small number of summers.

3 October 2024 – Just watched the third series of  Heartstopper  which was released on Netflix today.  My main, slightly melancholic feeling, as with the two previous series, is best described as  ‘what might have been’ – paragraph three above, will tell you why.  You don’t think that when you’re eleven years old, and you become friends with another eleven year old boy, that from then on – now fifty-four years later – no one you have met since, would compare to them.

My favourite films:  The cinematic masterpiece  Death In Venice  by director Visconti – starring the exquisitely beautiful, fifteen-year-old Swedish boy, Bjorn

                                  Andresen & the classic British comedy  Withnail and I  starring the brilliant actors; Paul McGann, Richard E. Grant and Richard Griffiths

My favourite TV drama:  Heartstopper  Netflix 2022/3/4  24 x 26 – 40 min episodes – I wish these 3 series had been made when I was eleven !   

My favourite books:  The Folding Star  by Alan Hollinghurst  &  Moab Is My Washpot   by Stephen Fry – the first part of his autobiography

My favourite classical composers:  Mahler,  Beethoven,  Vaughan Williams & Benjamin Britten  (his opera  Peter Grimes  is a work of genius)

My favourite music groups:  Electric Light Orchestra – ELO,  Roxy Music,  Queen  &  Marc Bolan / T-Rex

My favourite solo singer – songwriters:  David Bowie,  Elton John  &  George Harrison

My favourite places:   The Morecambe Bay Area, The Lake District, Woodstock & Blenheim Palace, Oxford – in particular, The Trout Inn – Colchester,

                                      Brighton and Harpstedt – in northern Germany   

My main interests:  Photography, music on CDs: classical and rock & pop from the sixties to the nineties ( I have 585 CDs )  films and TV

                                  on DVDs and Blu-Rays ( I have over 500 titles ) driving in the countryside in my silver Porsche Cayman S, watching     

                                  snooker on Eurosport and tennis on the Sky Tennis Channel.                    .