Douglas J Lindsay left his public school in Edinburgh soon after his fifteenth birthday and attended the T/S Dolphin at Leith Nautical College before going deep sea in 1957 as a cadet with the Clan Line – a major cargo liner company – operated to Africa, India and Australia. He settled into a merchant shipping career of which the highpoint was being appointed Captain at the young age of 28, on the large ro-ro freight ships of the Tor Line. Later, he worked in the family shipping office before setting up his own ship management business. In 1985, this business collapsed and the author and his wife lost everything. They moved to Berkshire where his wife found work as a housekeeper, a position which provided a roof over their heads.

The author then took up shipping consultancy and with an interest in square-riggers started sailing them intermittently between consultancy jobs.  Working on big sailing ships, mostly as captain, became a major part of his life until 2008 when he retired.   In the 1990s, work as a ship repossession superintendent produced some adventurous moments. The author has had vignettes from his own life published in The Marine Quarterly drawing on his life in the maritime world.

As well as his years in commercial shipping, the author was for many years a reserve officer in the Royal Navy, sailing as watch officer and/or navigator and gaining a thorough understanding of the Navy’s ways and mores. It is with his depth of marine knowledge combined with naval understanding that the idea was born for the Wren Jane Beacon and War series of well-researched books about the boat crew Wrens during the war years. He knew there was a wonderful story to be told about them.

He has had a lifelong passion for writing. His first published piece, in 1965, was titled rather grandly Improvement of Navigation Lights and Signals published in the Journal of the Institute of Navigation. In the 1980s he attended creative writing classes run by John Fairfax and Sue Stewart, who founded the Arvon Foundation.  He has written essays, short stories and poetry and too many reports.