Peter Langford

Peter Langford was born in Welwyn in England in 1947 and grew up in the village. He was born in Brocket Hall, the ancestral home of the Lords Brocket, at that time one of the biggest landowners in the South of England. He naturally assumed he had been born into a life of privilege and was later disappointed to learn that the Hall had been converted into a maternity home in the war. This led to the delusional idea that he would become rich by working as an academic psychologist, to which end he studied psychology at University College London and Liverpool Univesity, afterwards working in the psychology department at Birkbeck College, University of London.

In 1975 he moved to Australia, after seeing a documentary in which there were two gold miners, one of whom said to the other, on seeing the documentary maker "Another bloody pommy hoping to stub his foot on a nugget of gold." I missed the irony of this and thought that the pommy's expectation was reasonable. After teaching at two Australian universities, La Trobe and Tasmania, I realised that this was not the path to riches either. While the hierarchy thought of nothing but money, we labourers saw only modest amounts. Though all is not lost: if you buy my books in sufficient amounts, my dreams may yet be realised.