Safeguard Our Flank

Terence Kearey was born in North Harrow in 1935, one of three children of a hard-working lower middle class family. In the 1950s he embarked on a career in the printing and reproduction industry, but dismayed by the industrial greed and strife of the 1960s and 70s, he abandoned a successful career to become a college lecturer. Along the way he developed a keen interest in history and spent many years researching the story of his own family, all the way back to the Irish Ciardha clan of the Dark Ages from which the family name is derived. He has taken a similar interest in his mother's family, the Collinses of Chard in Somerset. Having studied the lives and times of his forebears over the centuries, he has woven their stories together into a fascinating narrative thread which reaches all the way from the Irish clans of the early centuries AD to his own personal experiences of love, life, work, marriage and parenthood in the 20th century. He is now working on a film script involving moments from the first three of this quartet, Country Ways, History, Heroism and Home and A Changing World. His new book 'Safeguard Our Flank' focuses on a key campaign of the First World War in which his father, Regimental Sergeant Major (later Major) Albert Kearey, played a key role.