Portsmouth, U.K. was not a good place to be born in 1943. There was a war on. My father was at sea, surviving a torpedoed destroyer on the Murmansk Run. Mother was killed when I was months old.
• As an infant I spent time in my grandparents’ bomb shelter. There, my nanny Kate Bryan sang Welsh hymns to drown the din of bombs and ack-ack. My nanny? No, we were not wealthy. My birth-mother was killed in collision with a Royal Navy truck.
• Those Welsh hymns gave me a musical start. At the age of eight I won a choral scholarship to the choir of Salisbury Cathedral. Five years there gave me a Taoist persona and a great education.
• Canford School in Wimborne, Dorset, and the University of Bristol.
• In 1965, Carol Burtin married me in her hometown, Stony Point, N.Y. After that, life in North America. 50 years+ of wedded bliss.
• Next, CBC-TV in Toronto. I spent a decade as the series producer of CBC-TV’s flagship public affairs series, The Fifth Estate. Later I set up and managed ‘IBM Visions’ magazine on high-performance computing, for IBM. Japanese public broadcaster NHK retained me to re-edit and re-write Japanese science and wildlife films: NHK needed better competitive products for English-language markets.
• Medieval influences touch my fiction: Eleanor of Aquitaine dictates her long life’s memoirs in Power of a Woman. On the other hand, studying natural sciences at the University of Bristol helps me write about science and technology for clients.
• I wrote Dark Sovereign in English as our language was available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Dark Sovereign is absolutely true to the English of 1626. It is now the longest play written in Renaissance English.
• My webpage offers my memoir in progress, ‘A Life in Thin Slices‘. And LinkedIn tells more than you want to know about ‘Robert S.P. Fripp’. My Twitter site, @RSPFripp.
• I recently finished writing 40 short stories into two books, Wessex Tales, Vols 1, and 2. Wessex Tales covers ‘Eight thousand years in the life of an English village‘. Paste the search term “Smashwords Wessex Tales”, and the Internet will bring you nine of my stories. Read them! No charge. Return the favour. Do something pleasant for someone.
That’s a short summary of ‘Robert Fripp biography’. Reader, may your Fates be kind to you and yours.
– Robert