Philip Hamlyn Williams is in his third career as an historian and writer. Before that he had held senior positions in the not-for-profit sector having previously been a partner in accountants Price Waterhouse where he looked after a number of manufacturing clients.
Writing entered his life when faced with the challenge of communicating with different stakeholders in the charities for which he worked. This took him on a number of courses before taking a full time MA in Professional Writing at University College Falmouth.
His first book fell into his lap in the shape of a family archive where his mother had painstakingly recorded his father’s war. His father had run key aspects of army supply in the Second World War and the archive was filled with rich material which resulted in War on Wheels published in 2016. The research triggered an itch which wouldn’t go away. His next book, Ordnance, explored army supply in the First World War. Taking the two books together, the shock was the number of names that appeared in both; these men had served in not one,but two, world wars. Who were they? Dunkirk to D Day tells their story.
It wasn’t just names that appeared twice, it was British companies, and this triggered the quest that led to How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World looking at the story of British manufacturing through the prism of the catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 at which his great grand father had exhibited.
His forthcoming book, Vehicles to Vaccines, looks at the British manufacturing story following the Festival of Britain in 1951, seeking to answer the question: what happened to British manufacturing?
Aside from these books, he wrote the story of the MacRobertsReply, a Stirling bomber given to the RAF by a grieving mother; and Charlotte Bronte’s Devotee, the biography of his great-great uncle William Smith Williams who first recognised her genius.
Philip is married to Maggie, a glass designer/maker, and they have four children and seven grandchildren. They live in a re-purposed former Severn Trent water reservoir in Leicestershire.
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