Name Conrad Bark Role Writer | Nationality British Died November 23, 2000 | |
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Born 9 March 1913 ( 1913-03-09 ) Books The Dry Fly: Progress, A History of Flyfishing, The New Encyclopedia of Fly Fis, The Shepherd file, The second red dragon | ||
Conrad Lyddon Voss Bark (9 March 1913 - 23 November 2000) was a writer and a correspondent for the BBC and the Times.
Biography
Conrad Voss Bark was born in 1913 to a family of Quakers in the Cottingham, East Riding of Yorkshire. He studied at Hymers College in Hull and at Bristol Grammar School in Clifton, Bristol. He started working at J. S. Fry & Sons, the chocolate maker from Bristol, and in 1935 started working as a journalist for the Hampstead News and the Golders Green Gazette. He was a conscientious objector and a volunteer for the ambulance services during World War II.
He started working for the Western Daily Press after the end of the war, and in 1947 became a writer for The Times. In 1948 he married Charmian, née Evers, (deceased 1964), with whom he had four children. He joined the BBC in 1951 and was between 1952 and 1970 the parliamentary correspondent for the BBC television, becoming "the first news reporter to broadcast the news live on television". Afterwards he worked for Charles Barker City, a public relations company and became the spokesman for the British Trawler Federation in 1973, during the Second Cod War.
As a fiction writer, he was best known for his series of Mr. David Holmes detective novels.
His non-fiction work mainly concerns fly fishing, and he gave lessons at the Arundel Arms fly fishing school in Lifton, Devon, which was the property of his fourth wife Anne Fox-Edwards, MBE (1928-2012), a former actress and the daughter of Sir Charles Wilfrid Bennett. He was a Times angling correspondent for twelve years after retiring from the BBC.