Black Horse Western author
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AGAINST ALL ODDS: BILL FOORD
Steve Holland
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Black Horse Western author
profile |
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| Bill
Foord's career as a western writer was unfortunately
brief. Foord had been writing since the 1950s but always
in circumstances that would have made most writers give
up all hope. Foord's action-packed tales of the wild west
were a world away from his life in Hucclecote,
Gloucester, where his days were a constant battle against
crippling arthritis, diagnosed in the 1940s. For the rest
of his life there would be periods when he was bedridden
for months at a time, unable to walk or even hold a pen. Born in Sandgate, near Folkestone, on April 17, 1925, William Spencer Foord developed an interest in writing at school, encouraged by a schoolmaster who preferred to promote reading in his pupils with Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace rather than William Shakespeare. Leaving school in April 1939, he was too old to be evacuated but still too young for the Services. But the war was only a matter of miles away across the Channel, and 14-year-old Foord began writing stories between helping his father run his one-man milk haulage business and dashing about as a police messenger. He would scribble down descriptions of incidents, of people he had met and things he had heard and seen.
After being demobbed, Foord worked with his father until the business was sold. He then found work with the Milk Marketing Board and, during his spare time, began writing again. His first stories were for juvenile markets, and he proved so adept that he was able to turn full-time in 1962. He was writing a story a day and had sold some 250 by late 1963, when his arthritis surged and spread to the point where his hands were crippled and he was unable to write. Seven months of treatment improved his hands to the point where he was able to return to work. He joined the Civil Service and took up writing again and began penning romantic thrillers of around 40,000 words each. He drew on his experiences to create stories of strong human interest, using the Channel, boats and the Services as a background as well as his life on land and in hospitals. In three years, forty of these short novels had been published and were being translated in Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, France and Germany. By now he was living in Gloucester and was writing a novel a month. Unfortunately, a combination of a printers' strike and action by postal workers put his publisher out of business, and Foord had to find a new market for his work at a time when his arthritis was flaring up again, affecting his mobility. He produced five serials for women's magazines published by D.C. Thomson (mainly for Red Letter) before switching to hardcovers, writing six novels for Hale in thirty months, which were subsequently translated and sold in French, German and Italian editions. In November 1978 Foord lost the use of his hands. A condition known as “dropped fingers” meant that he was unable to hold a pen, and he was forced to take early retirement from the Civil Service at the age of 53. In early 1979, Foord underwent surgery that involved transplanting the tendons in his hands and months of physiotherapy and occupational therapy, which resulted in the partial restoration of movement in his hands. Using splints on his hands and wrists, he was able to start typing again, and used a special pen-holding device to make notes. Although his cutlery was especially designed and he could not pull up his own sock without the help of his wife, Jean, Foord slowly increased his output from a half-page to 2,250 words a day, and sold his first new novel in 1980 and quickly followed it with three more. It was around that time that Jean's mother died. “My father decided to move into our home which threw a spanner into the works as Bill had to give up his little den where he worked,” says Jean. “My father then became hard work as he developed dementia, and it kept us on the hop. Bill was only able to go back to his writing after my father passed on.”
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