Trust People - Barrie Brinkman, Master of The Trust website - TrustNews August 09
Continuing the series of articles about people who work behind the scenes for the Trust.
Barrie Brinkman, Master of the Trust website
I spent my formative years living in Putney, South London and went to Cambridge University to study Engineering. My wife Lesley and I with our two children moved to Winchester in 1983.
From 1987 I ran an electronics company in Southampton that was Venture Fund backed. We grew the business to 250 people and sold to a Stock Market Listed company in 1998. In 2000 I semi-retired but continued as a Non-Executive Director of part of the Group on the AIM Market, which I continue to this day.
I joined the Trust in 2004 after meeting Pat Edwards and showing an interest in Winchester developments. In 2005 I took over the fledgling Trust website. I had done little website design before this date so it was a baptism of fire! I struggled for a few weeks but soon learnt the basics and have been learning ever since. The website has grown from a few pages to well over 250 pages now with the TrustNews back issues from 2002, all the Trust publications and the start of a gallery of old Winchester photographs.
As well as my role with the Trust I am a volunteer at Winchester Hospital where I manage a group of volunteers who examine all the patient literature that the Hospital produces to ensure it can be understood by the average patient and is written in good English. This has required building a database to track the publications and I have to copy leaflets and send out to the panel members then co-ordinate their comments back to authors.
My other activities include Family and Local History. I started tracing my family in 1970s. but lack of time and the internet resulted in little progress. In recent years I have put this right and continue the process. I finished a Diploma in Local History at Oxford University in 2004 which was run over the internet. I have subsequently started a history of the parish of Weeke where I live. This ongoing project has resulted in a website www.weekehistory.co.uk
.I have also started the transcription of all the census records for Winchester. I am hoping with some local knowledge I can produce better transcriptions than those produced already. I have to-date completed 1841 to 1891 and am about to start the 1901 census. I have found various errors in the microfilmed records and the National Archives have had to go back to the original records to find some of the missing pages.
All these activities mean that like many retired people I now wonder how I ever hac time to work.