A Potted History:
Born in Malaya in 1949 and brought up on a garrisoned rubber
plantation during the ‘Emergency’, Alan Gilliland’s first, mountaintop,
boarding school was reached by means of a 1930’s American armour-plated
car, WWII Dakota aeroplane and Saracen armoured personnel carrier. A
year later, aged six, he was transferred to a new school, memories of
whose white hot sandy beaches were to remain ingrained upon his psyche
long after leaving for this drizzly island we call home. With his
departure, Malaysia became independent and its anti-colonialist
insurgency lost its rationale. Alan quickly learned the uses of the
cricket bat, macintosh and other essentials of integration into English
society. Performing passably well throughout his boarding-school years,
he fell at the final hurdle, being expelled for revising for his art
A-level exam. Undeterred by this setback, he did not go to art
college, preferring devious paths to the realisation of his creative
ambitions via film-making, architecture, photo-journalism, newspaper
cartooning and news information graphics – with 18 years and 19 awards
as graphics editor of The DailyTelegraph – before finally arriving at
the decision to write and illustrate fictions less ordinary than his own
life. Casting himself adrift with his long-suffering wife upon a tiny
barque of of talent with its pencil-mast, he draws from the very winds
the inspiration to fill the sheets and carry them across the ocean of
scepticism that lies between hope and fulfillment. On the shoreline,
his six children and three grandchildren, wave their little hankies,
literally wondering if ever he will make it.
His former boss at the Daily Telegraph, Sir Max Hastings said of him:
“… an exceptionally gifted artist and illustrator… I can endorse as simply ‘the best’,”
