The Author
Bryan Lightbody is a policeman of 20 years of varied experience working in the field of Royalty Protection and now turned author. He therefore is able to draw heavily on his own experiences when it comes to his literary work bringing with it a huge sense of reality. He was born in February 1968 in Chadwell Heath, Essex to a school teacher in business studies and a Metropolitan Policeman, who at the time was involved in the investigation of the Kray Twins. His family heritage on both sides has roots in East London and on his father`s side Scotland. Both his maternal and paternal grandfather`s served in the British Army in India in the 1920s prior to discharge. They were both recalled but with very differing roles for World War two. His paternal grandfather, Robert Lightbody whose family origins lie in Edinburgh, served initially in military training for the army in Wales before being deployed to Europe after D-Day to engage in the hazardous business of `urban clearance` of enemy forces in villages that the main advancing armies bypassed for other objectives. Clearing small pockets of German resistance was a dangerous task. His maternal grandfather, Alfred Gyseman, entered the RAF and had a mysterious existence. It is believed his job was to travel the country and de-brief downed German pilots as he was a fluent German linguist and a brilliant mathematician, his other time was spent lecturing British trainee pilots and air crew. On his rare visits to home he used to sit Bryan`s mother on his knee as a little girl and teach her German. Frequently the RAF Provost would knock on his wife`s door in Strahan Road, Bow asking if she had seen him. He divorced his wife, Nancy, after the war leaving her to raise Bryan`s mother and her brother in a war ravaged East End. Nancy took whatever jobs she could to support her children, Catherine and Michael. Michael attended the same school as the infamous Kray Twins but had no association with them as they were a few years older.
Catherine met Bryan`s father Stuart in 1954 while she was a medical secretary at the Royal London Hospital and he was working there as a porter. He was living in East Ham at the time and his sister was initially somewhat put out when he began dating a girl from Bow, the `East End`. Stuart did his National Service between 1956 and 1958 in ibya and a peripheral role in the Suez Crisis in the armoured cavalry unit in which he served. In 1959 he joined the Metropolitan Police serving in North Woolwich around the busy docks during his formative years. Eventually with a background in police motorcycling he became one the first surveillance motorcyclists within the `Met` under `Nipper` Read during the investigation of the Kray Twins.The role was demanding professionally with long hours and he eventually left the department after the investigation was concluded to return to more regular shift work and the chance of a more settled family life.
Bryan is Catherine and Stuart`s second child, the first son Mark was born in 1962 and is a highly qualified and well respected civil engineer. Bryan`s schooling took place in the outer part of East London rich in multi-culturalism. He left Warren comprehensive in 1986 and began work for just short of two years with the Security Service.He left there and began with the Metropolitan Police in May 1988 and was posted to Ilford, in the outer part of the East End of London, after his initial training. It was at the same time as the end of his initial training that the one hundredth anniversary of the Whitechapel Murders took place. The coverage of this fuelled his first interest in the subject. He remained at Ilford for five years before transferring to traffic duties around the boroughs of Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets bringing him to work for the next five years directly within the area in which the Jack the Ripper`s murders took place. He got to know the geography of the area on an in-depth basis, the area's social strata and its problems and observe that one hundred years later the goings-on in Commercial Street were not so different outside the famous Ten Bells public house to those in Jack the Ripper`s day. After five years in the East End Bryan became an instructor at the Police Driving School, Hendon where over the next six years he worked teaching Response car level up to Advanced Car and Motorcycle. From Hendon Bryan applied for the internationally renown Special Escort Group, part of Royalty Protection, who deal mainly with London`s high profile Royal and VIP motorcycle escorts.His application and subsequent training regime were successful and he has been serving there since October 2004.
His interest in the subject of Jack the Ripper never waned from the time he first joined the police. It was around the time of the millennium celebrations that he first considered writing a historical novel on the subject; something that would entertain as well as inform any reader of the events of autumn 1888, in much the way that Bryan had learnt much about the history of conflict in Vietnam from Anthony Grey`s `Saigon` while studying A level history. The idea germinated into `Whitechapel` written roughly over a two and a half year period with much consideration and research to be as historically accurate as possible. It is the first of a trilogy of books that follow the career of a fictional policeman from the East End called `Robert Ford`.