Bucket on t' Stairs is the story of a deaf kid in West Yorkshire in the 1950s and 1960s and life in a one-up, one-down house in industrial Batley in West Yorkshire. He got his first hearing aid at eight and moved from bottom to top of his class. He was awarded a place at Batley Boys Grammar School without having to take the 11-plus examination. He graduated from Reading University and spent his working life as an Environmental Health Officer. Many of his legislative innovations were adopted n...

Oliver Cromwell (1599 – 1658) was an English military and political leader and later Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Born into the middle gentry, Cromwell was relatively obscure for the first 40 years of his life. After undergoing a religious conversion in the 1630s, he became an independent puritan, taking a generally tolerant view towards the many Protestant sects of his period.

An intensely religious man—a self-styled Puritan Moses—he fervently be...