Music was always a fascination to me. I remember going to Crystal Palace Park aged five and a band were playing on the bandstand. I wanted to do that. My father bought an old piano and I tried to teach myself. I got on well with the music master at school, who let me go into the music room during lunchtimes. That’s where I found a viola tucked away in a cupboard. Learning it was one of the best things I ever did because the viola uses an unusual clef in music, so I learned more than the basics fairly early on: a godsend for writing and for arranging music later.

I knew about my sexuality from the age of 11, but I didn’t have a word for it. There weren’t words back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. It was before homosexuality was decriminalised in this country. I used to look it up in the dictionary and encyclopaedias and found that one or two of the composers I liked were homosexual – people like Benjamin Britten, Tchaikovsky.

Two men living down the road were the first gay couple I met. I was 13. I did have a sexual relationship with them. You hear it often, older people enticing younger people. It was the opposite: I forced my way into their life. One had a classical music collection; the other played clarinet and I used to twist his arm to teach me to play.

I left school at 16. I’d always been interested in the ceremonial side of the military. I think it came from my parents who’d been through the war. The army agreed to take me though I couldn’t even run round the block. I said, the day I went to sign on, ‘You realise I’m not a sportsman?’ but I signed on my 17th birthday and left home the following month, January 1967. It was hard to start with, but I soon settled into a regimented lifestyle. It suited me.

Serving with the band of the Life Guards, I’d changed to playing flute. We were playing on the bandstand in the afternoon and I met a cast member of the Black & White Minstrel Show at Bournemouth pier. He invited me to see the show. We stayed in touch and wrote to each other at least once or twice a week. He used a girl’s name in his letters just in case anybody at the barracks saw. He lived in London and, when I was stationed there, we arranged to meet. But I was frightened of becoming close to somebody and terrified of being caught.

By 1979 I was bandmaster of the Parachute Regiment. I think I first took notice of HIV in 1985. I remember the government leaflet coming through the door. I thought, God, that’s horrific. It must be horrible living in America. But it went over my head. It had nothing to do with me. I didn’t frequent pubs or clubs, and to this day I hate pop music, so I kept well away from anything like that.

On 7th June 1986, a date I can’t forget, there was a knock at my door. It was the army’s police, the SIB – which wasn’t unusual because I had a band of 35 some of whom used to get into trouble occasionally. I invited them in, made them coffee, and they said, ‘We have reason to believe you’ve been involved in homosexual activity.’
My career ended that day.

They searched the house and took copies of Gay Times and Pink Paper as evidence. I was arrested.

That was the day my confidence disappeared from me. The loss of income meant I couldn’t pay my mortgage.

I found out there was a gay Switchboard in Bristol and volunteered. There was also the Aled Richards Trust, a support organisation along the lines of the THT. I met Stewart there on a training day. The affair was soon over, but he was at the onset of AIDS and was amazed that it didn’t bother me. I was more concerned with trying to get him back on his feet; he’d given up all hope. I helped get him back to work and was feeling proud of myself. 

Then, in September 1988, I began feeling unwell.

Stewart had cooked a meal and I suddenly couldn’t stand the sight of food. I arranged to go and see the doctor who took some blood tests for suspected hepatitis. Stewart was panicking because he blamed himself. It took a week for the bloods to come back. The GP told me it was, as he expected, hepatitis, ‘and we can treat that. But I also have to tell you that you’ve got the HIV virus.’  I had somehow picked up both in one go.

When I told Stewart, he said, ‘I knew it was my fault.’ He’d never had hepatitis so I knew it wasn’t him.

Back in the ‘90s you were told that you’d probably got two or three years to live. I’m not proud of this, but it seemed the right thing at the time. I got as many credit cards as I could and thought I’m going to try and live while I’m still healthy enough to do it. I went to operas. I got myself into horrendous credit debt. I went on holidays to Australia and South Africa. I paid for other people because I didn’t want to go alone. I didn’t think I was going to be around to mop up things up. Stupid, now, in hindsight. I had nothing to show for it, apart from a few memories, which I hadn’t expected to need.

I saw an advert for the Stonewall Group. They were interested in individual stories so I wrote them a letter. I couldn’t afford much – I think I put a pound note in with the letter, to help them. I explained I’d lost my job because the army had thrown me out. Months later, I got a phone call from Stonewall who were due to give evidence in the armed forces select committee. Homosexuality had been decriminalised in 1967, but not in the armed forces. Although I wasn’t charged with a criminal offence, I still lost my job because of it. They asked me to come and tell my story. I was introduced to Michael Cashman, head of Stonewall, whom I already knew from the first gay kiss on British television. I was awestruck to be meeting a a TV star. We gave evidence and afterwards Michael said, ‘You must come for dinner.’ During that dinner he and his partner suggested that it would be a good idea to try and get something into the gay press to find other people who’d been through similar. Stonewall wanted to build up a portfolio of stories to show that it wasn’t just a one-off.

I said, ‘I’ve written to the gay press before and just don’t print it.’

Michael said, ‘I guarantee it will get printed.’

The Pink Paper came out on a Thursday and a couple of weeks later my letter was there. In those days you put your name, address and phone number in a letter. I went out that evening to get a copy, had two or three pints, came back and was just about to go to bed when my phone rang. A lady called Elaine had been a nurse in the army and lost her job for similar reasons. I arranged to come to London to meet her. I started getting letters from other people. Elaine and I came to arrange social gatherings in London. We were trying to think of a name for the group, and I said, ‘When I was in the army I always called it the Rank Organisation, so why don’t we call it Rank Outsiders, because we’re not allowed in?’

By now, I was becoming poorly, deteriorating.  Little niggling things to start with: itchy skin and folliculitis that used to drive me insane. I couldn’t stop scratching. They started giving me AZT, which I had a bad time with. I decided I wasn’t going to take it after a few weeks. I said, ‘No. If I’ve, if I’ve got to get poorly, I’ll get poorly, but find something else. I can’t have that.’ I started getting more than just folliculitis when I moved to London. I’m still seeing the same consultant at the Kobler Centre well over 20 years later. I wouldn’t be alive without him. He saved my life twice. In the late ‘90s I developed a huge swelling in my leg. It was bright red and had a distinctive line across it. I developed a massive fever and was hospitalised. My consultant was totally baffled. They pumped me full of antibiotics and it all disappeared. I went home, and a day later it was all back again. This happened over a period of about three months. It virtually paralysed me. I couldn’t walk. One day the consultant said, ‘I think I know what’s wrong.’ He’d been reading an American medical journal with an account of somebody else who had the same thing.’ He said, ‘We think you’re the first person in England to have had this form of cellulitis in the leg.’ I was so poorly at that time that I really didn’t think I was going to come through it.

At the beginning of the new millennium, I started on regular drugs, and was being told, as everybody was, that there was a way of controlling HIV now.

But I had this horrendous debt. Eventually I contacted a government debt agency; 90% of my wages went out on debt each month. Once the European court ruled that government policy was wrong, it opened the flood gates for those of us who’d registered our names with solicitors to go for compensation. Still the government dragged its heels for years and years. I kept telling creditors I had money coming. Eventually, when it came, 90% of it went to clear debts and a large amount went to pay the solicitors.

I live in constant depression because of the past. But Rank Outsiders has served its purpose. I met somebody in a bar one day who recognised me. I didn’t know him but he’d been a musician in the army as well. He thanked me for what I’d been doing, and said, ‘I feel a lot safer now.’