Ray Markham

Ray Markham is an author, speaker, teacher, musician and Test Match cricket scorer.

Ray was born in Doncaster in 1947. He has always been keen on sport, particularly football, rugby, athletics and cricket, and he once played in a schoolboy county rugby match on the Leicester Tigers ground.

When he left school, Ray trained to be a teacher, and was awarded the Bachelor of Education degree by Nottingham university. It was while at Nottingham that he met Sheila, who was also training to be a teacher, and they married in 1970. They have two sons and four grandchildren. During his teaching career, he was head of Religious Education in two comprehensive schools, also taught French and P.E., and ran sports teams. After 28 years in schools, Ray took early retirement when he was 50, and that’s when his writing career began. To date he has written nine books, the latest of which is full of humorous stories drawn from his experiences of scoring cricket matches at different levels over a number of years. The other eight books all reflect his deep, personal faith in God, and his desire to help people understand what the Bible teaches, and how to apply it to our lives.

Ray was in church leadership for many years, preaching, teaching and leading worship. He plays the piano, keyboards, guitar and accordion. He writes musicals and songs, some of which have been published and recorded, as well as drama sketches, which have been performed all over the world. He enjoys acting, taking a lead role in several plays when at school, and has performed in church drama productions. He has sung in and conducted choirs and singing groups, for which he recorded backing tracks. He has studio-recorded his two ‘thought-for-the-day’ books, which have been broadcast by various Christian radio stations. He is much in demand as a speaker, both in churches and other venues.

Ray is a professional cricket scorer. He scores the Test Matches and many other internationals for the world’s press in the media centres at cricket grounds all over the country, including Lord’s. This gives him the opportunity to meet many illustrious characters from the world of cricket, including the radio and TV commentators. Prior to that, he was a club scorer for over 10 years and a university scorer for 7 years. He has also scored minor county and M.C.C. matches.

Ray is also a member of Gideons International, for whom he conducts training courses besides distributing Bibles, and has done voluntary work for the Leprosy Mission and the Children of Honduras Trust. He devises games, and one of them, ‘Give Me Five’, is currently available in the shops and online.