Gavin Bantock was born at the Grey Cottage, 36, Bittell road, Barnt Green, near Birmingham, B45 8LY, in 1939. When his father Raymond Bantock bought the house about 1930, it really was a cottage then. Over the years, as his family grew bigger, he had extensions built on several occasions until the house became the longest in Barnt Green! In the mid-1980s, the Grey Cottage was sold and demolished and now two new separate houses occupy the site.

Soon after GB’s birth and the outbreak of the Second World War, the family moved to Traethdy, a wooden house in the sand dunes at Harlech, Merionethshire (now Gwynedd), which RB had bought during the early 1930s. GB’s first memories go back to those early years by the sea.