Mark Felton Productions
RIP Jack Higgins, who died yesterday aged 92. I’ve been a massive fan of his WWII thrillers since I was a young teenager, none more so than ‘The Eagle Has Landed’.
Jack Higgins was born Henry Patterson[4] on 27 July 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, to an English father and a Northern Irish mother.[1] When his father abandoned them soon afterward, his mother returned with him to her home town of Belfast, Northern Ireland, to live with her mother and her grandfather on the Shankill Road.[1][5] Raised amid the religious and political violence of Belfast, Patterson learned to read at the age of three, when he was tasked with reading The Christian Herald to his bed-ridden grandfather.[1] At night, he would crouch beneath a window and read by the light of street lamps.
I read Oliver Twist when I was six. Not because it was a classic, but because it was a book that was available. I probably didn’t understand everything in it—for years I used to pronounce the word rogue as rogger—but I didn’t care. I just loved reading.[1]
When his mother remarried, the family relocated to Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, where Patterson won a scholarship to attend Roundhay Grammar School for Boys.[6] He proved to be an indifferent student and left school with few formal qualifications. In 1947 he began two years of national service, at first with the East Yorkshire Regiment,[7] and later as a non-commissioned officer of the Royal Horse Guards Regiment of the Household Cavalry[8] doing security work on the East German border.[9][1]
After leaving the army, he returned to education at Beckett Park teacher training college in Leeds and studied for a BSc sociology degree as a London School of Economics external student, taking his finals in Bradford in 1961.[6] By day, he was working as a driver and labourer at night. He chose the university for its “history of nonconformism”.[1] He received his third-class degree after three years of study.[1] After getting a teaching qualification, he started teaching at Allerton Grange Comprehensive School. He accepted a job lecturing in social psychology and criminology.[1] He taught liberal studies at Leeds Polytechnic and education at James Graham College, which became part of Leeds Polytechnic in 1976.
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