About the author

A PROFILE OF REX NEEDLE

Rex Needle worked as a journalist for over forty years with the national, provincial, trade and overseas press, radio and television. He entered journalism after five years as a regular soldier with the Royal Tank Regiment, serving at home and abroad, latterly in Malaya during the Emergency. 

On leaving the service in 1953 he became a reporter with the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser and Evening Telegraph, moving to the Daily Express and then the Daily Mirror in London. He was one of the reporting team to cover the famous Summit Conference of 1960 in Paris attended by the Russian leader Nikita Krushchev, the American President Dwight D Eisenhower and the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. 

In 1962, he returned to Peterborough to establish his own news agency and later opened offices in Stamford and in Cambridge. During this time, he became a regular contributor to the national press, a frequent broadcaster and television news reporter for the BBC. For five years, he also contributed a weekly newsletter to the British Forces Broadcasting Service which was heard throughout the world. 

Rex lives with his wife Elke in Bourne, which has been their home since he retired in 1983. Elke was born in Johannisberg, Germany. She is a member of the Eser family of wine growers in the Rhine Valley and left to study languages in Paris and then London where she met her husband. They have been married and have worked together for over forty years and she now acts as driver, map reader, note taker, proof reader and constant companion on outings into the South Lincolnshire countryside in the search for new material. Rex says: "She is my severest critic but she also makes the best gin and tonics I have ever tasted." 

Their son, Dr Justin Needle, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and the University of Dundee, now lives and works in London.

The Bourne Internet web site began in 1997 after he started sending photographs of the locality to email friends around the world, together with short descriptions about them, and Justin suggested that the material should form the basis of a web site for the town and he agreed to design and maintain it. Over the next three years, it grew to a massive archive of more than 250,000 words and over 500 photographs and in the process, won eight awards, one of them the prestigious Golden Web Award in July 2000 for excellence achieved in web design, content and creativity.

This progressed to the CD-ROM A Portrait of Bourne that has become the definitive history of the town and locality, superseding all previous publications on the subject, and currently containing 1,800 photographs and 500,00 words of text. Copies are available at the town's public library, the Lincolnshire County Archives and local schools where it is often used for social history studies. A complete copy of the archive is also included on the IT system at the Robert Manning Technical College and has recently been installed on a computer available for visitors to the Heritage Centre in Bourne.

Rex also writes on historical matters for the local newspapers and regularly produces display material on various subjects for the Heritage Centre as well as being a contributor to the Bourne Town Guide and several Lincolnshire newspapers and other publications.

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