The author Peter Kinsley was born on the 17th of December, 1934, and, a true Sagittarian, spent a lot of his life travelling and wandering before putting his experiences into eight novels and five volumes of memoirs.   His grandfather, Patrick Gillespie, emigrated to America from Ireland but returned to England after experiencing the terrible conditions for mine workers there and became a coal miner in Stanley, County Durham and named the family home Avoca House, and that is where Peter was born, named after his uncle Peter Gillespie who was killed in World War I.   During World War II he was a student at St Cuthbert's Grammar School in Benwell, Northumberland, and Skerry's College in Newcastle upon Tyne, then worked for an advertising agency before joining the Daily Mail in Newcastle as a trainee journalist.  The years 1934 to 1948 are covered in his first volume of memoirs "All the Fields are Covered with Snow"
     At 18, like all other young men in the United Kingdom, he was conscripted into the British Army for two years "National Service", and this period is covered in volume V of his memoirs "Gunner Strikes Back (see www.fontainebleauveteransassociation.co.uk) when he had an office in Napoleon's palace in Fontainebleau and covered the big NATO conferences in Bad Neunar, Germany, and the conferences of Marechal Alfonse Juin, the last of the French Marechals, in the HQ at Fontainebleau, between editing his army newspaper The Element Express distributed to men of Allied Land Forces Central Europe (A.L.F.C.E.)
     Back in "civvy street" he re-joined the Mail, then moved to the old Sunday Dispatch in Manchester, then back to the Newcastle Evening Chronicle to gain court reporting experience, before moving to Fleet Street where, at 21 he became a sub-editor on the Daily Mirror, but, seeking adventure as a reporter, re-joined the Mail as a holiday relief reporter, and moved to the Daily Express where the great Arthur Christiansen was just finishing his time as editor for Lord Beaverbrook. Peter covered general news and crime as a Scotland Yard accredited crime reporter (and met Christine Keeler and famous gangsters like Lucky Luciano and murderers like Donald Hume) until Nicholas Tomalin (later killed by a rocket on the Golan Heights in Israel) wanted a hard-news man on the William Hickey column.  Fleet Street was still a Street of Adventure, and Peter drank with Oscar Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, lunched with the Duke of Bedford in the Savoy Grill and at the Ritz Hotel, interviewed the singer Shirley Bassey in bed with her after she was held at gunpoint by a crazed lover (she told him to jump in because the room was cold as the central heating had been turned off during the police siege at the Cumberland Hotel).   He met Augustus John and  Lucien Freud and dined with Francis Bacon, interviewed Jean Cocteau and Alec Guinness, Trevor Howard, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Harold Lloyd, Robert Mitchum, drank with William Somerset Maugham and swam in the pool in Monte Carlo with Princess Grace.
     Peter's adventures in journalism in Fleet Street, the French Riviera and Rome ended when he resigned as a foreign correspondent in Italy.  His journalistic experiences are in "Don't Tell My Mother I'm a Newspaperman".   Back in Belsize Park, London, he wrote his first novel, Three Cheers for Nothing, in 60 days.  It was published by Collins/Fontana and E.P. Dutton in America and was sold to Hollywood for fifty thousand dollars, but the film was never made as John Schlesinger decided to do Midnight Cowboy instead, because he wanted to work in the United States.