About Phil Griffin, author of Ursula's Maiden Army

Philip Griffin
author of
Ursula's Maiden Army

Born and raised a Man of Kent to the east of the northward flowing River Medway (as opposed to a Kentish Man from the west of the river), Phil Griffin still lives in the English county of his birth. These days he resides further east towards the Continent, in the quiet, rural hills outside Canterbury, on the North Kent Ridge, overlooking the mouth of the Thames Estuary and the busy shipping lanes of the English Channel.

Phil’s career in education has taken him far from his native soil. Originally a sociologist, he began his professional career as a high school teacher, working in South London’s, Brixton district, teaching humanities to groups of tough street kids. An important turning point in his life came in 1981, when there were serious summer riots across the UK, and some of the most serious uprisings were in Brixton. Phil was working evenings at the Brixton Community Centre at the time of the riots, giving black kids supplementary Sociology examination classes. The day after the worst rioting, he set the group the challenge of “analyzing the riots” at their very next meeting. The kids interpreted the task differently than Phil had intended, and the following week brought along the “better” weapons they thought they would need “next time” against the police, including guns (with ammo!), knives, machetes and chains. Still in his early 20s, Phil realized it was time to move on, and it became time to fulfill his burning desire to travel and see the world.

A pending family reunion in Adelaide prompted his parents to buy Phil a one-way ticket to Australia, which made his escape from the UK possible. His plan was to attend the reunion, then slowly “back pack” his way up through SE Asia, heading, ultimately, for China. Only two weeks into the great trek, after a night in a scientific research station deep in the Malaysian jungle, a “typical traveler’s tummy bug” turned into something much more serious, and the essential medical treatment that followed sapped his finances. He eventually recovered enough to get on a plane to Hong Kong, where he arrived only slightly better than half dead and stony broke. Staying with friends, he used his last few dollars to place an ad in the local press, offering his services as a tutor. The phone did not stop ringing, and within less than a week he was fully booked. His second career as a teacher of English as a foreign language had begun. While working hard, he penned a song with friends that became the #1 hit in Hong Kong. Sadly, Phil no longer recalls the tune or the people with whom he wrote it!

Phil found he made more Japanese than Chinese friends in Hong Kong, and two years later, when an opportunity to work for an English School in Nagoya presented itself, he snapped it up.

He spent the rest of the 80s in Japan, with one year (1988) back in England to complete his masters at Nottingham University. Along the way, he moved from the classroom into management, and he broadened his expertise to embrace general language teaching as well as cross-cultural and management training. At the start of the 90s, he was made branch manager for one of the large Japanese corporate training companies, and sent back to England to open their new branch in Oxford. Phil was just settling into making a nice home in the idyllic and poetic countryside of the Cotswolds near Oxford, not far from Modern Cirencester (the Roman city of Corinium), when a new chapter of his life dawned.

Germany beckoned in the form of an opportunity to work for that country’s, and Europe’s, then largest language school chain, to lead an exciting project to develop their new generation of language teaching materials. The project lasted over three years and gave Phil a chance to live in Wiesbaden and Mainz and develop a close affinity with the Rhineland. This coincided with the work he was doing on Ursula’s Maiden Army; aiding his research and informing his writing of the first draft, which he completed while in Germany. Indeed, it was his sudden “closeness” to the setting of the Ursularine legend that finally inspired him to put pen to paper. He had “stumbled upon” the lost story of Ursula and her 11,000 “virgins” while reading Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of The Kings of Britain in his first year in Japan. The women barely get a mention just one paragraph but Phil became hooked; he just HAD to find out what really happened! Six years of research enabled him to piece together what shreds of the original story had survived, and provided his imagination the time it needed to invent the rest. And now, here in Germany, where it actually happened, he knew he had researched enough. It was time to start writing!

When Phil returned to the UK in 1994, the first draft of Ursula’s Maiden Army was complete. Life, and a career in UK corporate training, including a stint as one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Adult Education, then kept Phil too busy to work on the book or devote sufficient energy to finding a publisher. Eventually, when he went online for the first time in 1999, he found time to tout the manuscript electronically, and that swiftly led to Beagle Bay Books.

Finally, nearly 20 years since the germ of the idea was planted in a tatami-matted, paper-windowed room in far away Nagoya, and after fully and thoroughly exploring the terrain that Ursula and her friends would have known and fought in; 1500 years after whatever really happened transpired, the work is complete. This fictional account of the lives of these incredible women has its own tale to tell. Phil has made the journey. Now you can, too!