About the Author
| Rex Needle worked as a journalist for more than forty years with the national, provincial, trade and overseas press, radio and television. Born in 1930, son of a working class family from Old Fletton, Peterborough, he was educated at the local elementary and secondary schools and after a spell working as a wages clerk, signed on as a regular soldier with the Royal Tank Regiment, serving for the next five years at home and abroad, latterly in Singapore and Malaya during the Emergency. On leaving the army, he became a reporter with the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser and Evening Telegraph, moving to the Daily Express in Manchester and then the Daily Mirror in London. |
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| He was one of the reporting
team to cover the famous Summit Conference of 1960 in Paris attended by
the Russian leader Nikita Krushchev, the American President Dwight D Eisenhower and the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan,
and also completed many other assignments overseas.
In 1962, he returned to Peterborough to establish his own news agency and later opened offices in Stamford and in Cambridge. During this time, he became an
accredited correspondent to the national press and a regular radio broadcaster and television news reporter for the BBC. For five years, he also contributed a weekly newsletter without a single break to the British Forces Broadcasting Service which was heard throughout the world. He has been researching the history of Bourne for the past ten years and the results have been committed to a CD-ROM A Portrait of Bourne. There have been previous histories of the town but this archive now surpasses them all, containing almost 3,000 photographs and over a million words of text. Some of this material is on display at the Heritage Centre, the town's museum, and is also used in the town guide, while other web sites that have an interest in Bourne, both in Britain and abroad, continually seek permission to include subject matter relevant to their own interests. Regular illustrated articles written by the author are also published by The Local newspaper in Bourne and in various magazines in Lincolnshire and elsewhere. Copies of the CD-ROM have been made available to Lincolnshire County Archives, public libraries and schools for use in social history studies while a companion book, The Bourne Chronicle, was published in the summer of 2005. The constantly expanding genealogy section has also put many people in touch with lost relatives while the discussion forum is highly regarded as one of the liveliest and best informed in the region and a model for other community web sites. |
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Rex lives with his wife Elke in Bourne, which has been their home since he retired in 1983. Elke was born in Johannisberg, Germany, a member of the Eser family of wine growers in the Rhine Valley, but left to study languages in Paris and then London where she met her husband. They have been married for over 45 years and she now acts as driver, navigator, note taker, proof reader and constant companion on outings into the countryside in the search for new material. |
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Their son, Dr Justin Needle, who was educated at Stamford School, is a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, the University of Dundee and the London School of Economics, and is now a Research Fellow at the City University in London. He has been Webmaster of the site since its inception and was responsible for the initial design, continuing to advise on content and changes. Since those early days, it has become the acknowledged source of information about Bourne, continually consulted from around the world. |
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