Autobiography

My name is H.J.P. Arnold (often known as “Douglas”). Many web pages are autobiographical to a greater or lesser degree so no excuse need be proffered for adding another – particularly as I can look back over years when I was privileged to be associated in an albeit minor way with great events like Project Apollo, during the later missions of which I was a member of the BBC Apollo studio team. In addition, I have been enormously fortunate to have spent most of my years, whether devoted to business or leisure, pursuing activities which have brought great enjoyment. Photography has loomed large in the story and I have often said that most of the time I have been paid to pursue my hobby. Not too many of us can claim to have had such pleasure!

But first some details. I am a Hampshire man and a modern history graduate of Wadham College, Oxford to which I won a scholarship from the Southern Grammar School, Portsmouth. Sport was important during these early years with rugby and cricket being the main attractions. After university, I was a Russian Specialist in Army Intelligence during my two years’ national service. My first job after university and the army was as a feature writer on the London Financial Times, where I ultimately became the F.T’s Foreign News Editor and its first Soviet Affairs Correspondent. During those years I also wrote as a side line on the technical and economic aspects of photography and this led in 1966 to management at Kodak Limited inviting me to form a new Public Relations Division. The challenge was highly stimulating and gave me access to a theme which would be highly important for the future. Eastman Kodak films and equipment were being used extensively by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the epic days of the Gemini and Apollo programmes and researching the problems presented by the space environment both gave me considerable insights into the subject and led to close contacts with NASA technical specialists as well as astronauts. (I was also much involved with photography in another direction although this was more for fun – that of motor racing.) After eight very enjoyable years at the company, I left in 1974 to set up my own picture library Space Frontiers Limited – a specialist library devoted to the subjects of spaceflight and astronomy. SFL was sold at the beginning of 2000 with what passes for my retirement but I continue to do much the same thing under the aegis of my new organisation Sol Invictus – the significance of which name being explored next on these pages.

Although running Space Frontiers Limited absorbed much time, I was nonetheless able to greatly develop my knowledge and practice of astrophotography and in an utterly different direction to devote time to a pastime which took me back to my days studying history at Oxford – that of Roman military re-enactment, another subject explored elsewhere here. Over the years I have written twelve books including an award winning biography of William Henry Fox Talbot, the man who gave us negative-positive photography as we still know it today. I have appeared quite frequently on television in connection with various subjects but the most consistent theme not surprisingly has been astronomy and space flight. (I have lost count of the number of times I have appeared on The Sky at Night with my south coast neighbour Sir Patrick Moore.) Considerable numbers of magazine articles have been written over the years but the connection which gives me greatest pleasure and one which continues to this day is writing as a technical correspondent for the British Journal of Photography – the world’s oldest photographic magazine – although, for obvious reasons, most of my review work there now is devoted to digital imaging rather than to photography as such.

What else? I am a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and Fellow of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetric Society. My memberships include the Institute of Advanced Motorists and British MENSA. I live at Havant in Hampshire with my wife Audrey, whom I first met during our school days in Portsmouth and has been by my side ever since. As it happens, she has had the major role to play in one of our much more recent projects which is another subject for these pages. Our daughter Ann Helen, who is in publishing, lives not too far away.

Read on if you would like to know more …………………