Angela Wigglesworth

Are writers born or made? In my case, born. I've always written and always non-fiction: I recently found a scrap of lined, green-edged paper with my account, at the age of 9, of My Sunday Walk. My first travel article?

I went to schools in East Preston, Guildford, and a rather unambitious one in Little Chalfont where everyone left at 16. University was not mentioned and no careers staff in those far off days. I went to a secretarial college in London, rather grandly named Mrs. Hoster's.

My early jobs included working at literary agent Curtis Brown; at Central Press (a features agency syndicating articles world-wide); for a W.H.Smith magazine; doing publicity for a publishing company. I spent six months as an au pair in Sweden, a year in Paris studying at the Sorbonne.

Later I began writing general features and travel articles for national and regional newspapers and magazines and was sent to some wonderful places: the Antarctic, Spitzbergen, Iceland, New Zealand, Alaska's Inside Passage, the Icefield Parkway in Canada, Tristan da Cunha, and St. Helena, to name a few.

It was in 1986 that I was invited to the Falklands, four years after the war, to write about it as a travel destination. The wildlife was spectacular - penguins, elephant seals, walruses – and the people, so British, so far away: English garden gnomes in very English gardens. On a later visit, I was asked by one of island cooks, why journalists always interviewed councillors and didn't write about people like them? In 1990 I went back, interviewed ninety islanders, and my book: 'Falkland People' was published 1992, the tenth anniversary of the war.

Other books followed: 'People of Scilly', 'People of Wight', 'Lewes, a photographic history of your town', 'The Chair Man', 'Not Just Another Swan', 'The Sheffield Arms, the Life of a 200-year-old Sussex Coaching Inn'.

On the non-writing side, I have been a Substitute Parent for a handicapped child at Chailey Heritage, a Manager at schools in Fletching, Chailey and Lewes, and have campaigned for the Liberal Democrats for many years. My former husband, a playwright and TV script writer (The Onedin Line, Poldark, Doomwatch, Microbes and Men) was the first Liberal on Wealden and later elected to the County Council.

My former husband, known professionally as Martin Worth (he deleted the ‘Wiggles’) was a playwright and TV script writer (Poldark, Doomwatch, The Onedin Line, amongst others). He persuaded Winston Graham to allow the BBC to adapt his Poldark novels for TV, and his 'Microbes and Men' was a prize-winning documentary series.

For many years I ran a B&B and was a founder member of the Lewes Bed and Breakfast group, rebelling against the English Tourist Board's (at that time) stipulation that all B&Bs should have the same facilities. Now, over twenty years later, I have become the President with the Right to Interfere!

I have lived in Lewes for thirty-eight years, have three grown up children, all doing interesting things and happily living not too far away.

Angela Wigglesworth has contributed features to the Financial Times, the Observer, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Good Housekeeping magazine, Country Living, Brighton Argus. At one time she syndicated her travel articles to eighteen regional papers.

She has written articles for the AA's 'Book of Britain's Walks', 'Great Voyages of the World' (St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha) and The Gazetteer for the 'Ordnance Survey Leisure Guide to the South Downs'. 'Craftwork on Orkney' was published in 'Essential Scotland' magazine.

For Burke's Peerage publication 'By Appointment', she wrote 'Poles Apart', about a 5,000-mile journey from Chile, to the Falklands, South Georgia and Elephant Island, the whaling stations at Grytviken and Stromness, now ghost towns, the British Antarctic Station in Signy.

Her travel destinations have included Svalbard in the Arctic, New Zealand, Alaska, Kenya, Iceland, Ecuador, Brazil and many more.

In 1986, four years after the Falklands war, she was invited to visit the islands to write about them as a holiday destination. Her first book, 'Falkland People', with a foreword by Lord Shackleton, for which she got a 3,000 pre-publication order, was published in 1992 on the tenth anniversary of the war. Publicity included twenty-eight radio and a TV interview.

Other books on the people of small islands followed: 'People of Scilly' with a Foreword by Leslie Thomas, and 'People of Wight' with a Foreword by Cliff Michelmore CBE.

Francis Frith, the Victorian photographer, travelled round the UK taking pictures of towns and villages. Over a century later, in 2002, The Francis Frith Collection commissioned Angela Wigglesworth to write 'Lewes, A photographic history of your town' with Frith's pictures.

In 2016, she wrote 'The Chair Man', the life story of Romany gypsy, John Lee, who caned chairs on the streets of Sussex. Two years later, she wrote 'Not Just Another Swan', the life of dancer Silvia Ebert whose father-in-law, in 1934, was Glyndebourne's first Artistic Director.

Her latest book, 'The Sheffield Arms, the Life of a 200-year-old Sussex Coaching Inn', now the home of Trading Boundaries near Sheffield Park, was published in March 2021.