Person

Whelpton, Tony

1933

Robert Anthony (Tony) Whelpton: Tony Whelpton was born in Nottingham, on 27 January 1933 ... taught French at Beckenham and Penge and Lowestoft Grammar Schools and in 1965 returned to Nottingham to take up a lectureship in French at what is now Nottingham Trent University; he left Nottingham in 1982. For 25+ years he was Chief Examiner in French at ‘O’ Level (later GCSE) and for ‘A’ Level Spoken French ... He later wrote two books on cricket and a history of the Cheltenham Bach Choir, of which he had been Chairman and from which he only retired from singing in March 2013, when he was appointed Honorary Vice-President. When he was over 75 he resolved to try his hand at fiction: the result was his first novel, Before the Swallow Dares, published in 2012, to which he added a second in 2013, entitled The Heat of the Kitchen. After this came Billy's War (2014), its sequel There’s No Pride In Prejudice (2016), A Happy Christmas (2016) and A Change of Mind (2017). But this only scratches the surface. Here are a handful of other things he has done: with the Cheltenham Bach Choir he has sung at the Proms and at High Mass in Chartres Cathedral; he was a Mastermind contender in 2009, his special subject being the life of Balzac (he came second to Gary Grant who took the Mastermind title in 2012; in 1990 he went to Vienna to represent Great Britain in the European Final of the World French Spelling Competition (the ‘Championnats d’Orthographe’), and came second; in 1968 he was Producer and Presenter of the first schools broadcast ever on UK local radio, Écoutez, les Enfants!, a French programme for primary schools which ran for three years on BBC Radio Nottingham