Nigel Gossop

Nigel has been one of our members for the past ten years and is our trusted audio-visual guru. We look forward to his August ’24 talk on John Keats “Eve of St Agnes”, the Chichester, Stansted and Bedhampton Connections.

Nigel has been a book collector, literary researcher and keen
writer for more than forty years. He has worked as a local authority arts officer, a freelance events specialist and taught event planning at a further education college. During his time served as an arts officer he worked several literature festivals that developed and expanded his interest in literary research, and fired his enthusiasm for learning about the lives and works of authors.

Nigel’s last talk for us (Nov ’22) was on Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) best known for her stories of rural village life published initially in the monthly The  Lady’sMagazine and later  in successful  book form as Our Village. 

Nigel is is the founder of The Westerman Yarns, an organisation with a global following that researches, collects and promotes interest in the works of the children’s writer Percy F Westerman (1876-1959) and his contemporaries from the ‘Golden Age’ of adventure writing. Nigel gave a talk on Westerman entitled ‘Pluck and Daring’ in March 2016.

He spoke to members in  2017  on the life and writing of Dr William Gordon-Stables, who was a regular contributor to both Boy’s Own Paper and Girl’s Own Paper and also wrote 130 adventure books. The title of his 2017  talk on Dr. Staples was called A Dog, a Butler and a Caravan.