Tony Clayton

Lincolnshire, England

Greetings and welcome to my web site. I produced my own web page for the first time on Thursday 12th December 1996 and I seem to have been working on additions almost daily since then! The site has received at least 18,000,000 hits, and at present has over 500,000 visits per month.

I am a retired Physics teacher, formerly Head of Computing at Charterhouse in Surrey, having taken early retirement in July 1996. Until recently my occupation was as a self-employed Physics and Mathematics Tutor, but I have now fully retired. I was for several years an Examiner in Physics at A-level for Edexcel, and also at GCSE level for AQA. I am a Churchwarden and also an Authorised Lay Minister for the North Beltisloe Group of Parishes in Lincolnshire.

I have three main hobbies: collecting stamps (principally Italy, Italian Colonies and GB); collecting coins (principally UK, Canadian and Roman); and a long-standing love of canals, which I and my family used to navigate in a 19-ft Dawncraft Dandy cabin cruiser called 'Linton', until we finally sold her in 2004. For some of our early adventures have a look at our BCN Trips pages.

My wife and I chose the name 'Linton' because we were married in Linton-in-Threshfield Parish Church in the Yorkshire Dales, and Linton Lock on the River Ouse, also in Yorkshire, is famous for its unusual history.

I have made a special study of the long derelict Shrewsbury and Newport Canals, and a selection of photographs of these and many other waterways are available on the website www.tonycanalpics.co.uk.

My main sporting activity is rifle shooting, and for 19 years I have had the honour of being the Chief Range Officer on Century Range, one of the largest in the world, for the National Rifle Association's Annual Imperial Meeting at Bisley. In 2013 I moved to Stickledown Range, where I was in charge of the Final of Her Majesty the Queen's Prize, the flagship event of the NRA. This year (2019) was my 26th and final year as Chief Range Officer. I am also Vice-Chairman of the Old Malvernian Rifle Club, and recently retired as a Member of The General Council (and the Shooting Committee) of the National Rifle Association. I was made a Vice-President of the NRA in 2019.

I have also had the honour to be selected to officiate as Chief Range Officer for the Full-Bore Target Rifle events in the 2002 Commonwealth Games, for the 2003 World Long-Range Target Rifle Championships (known as the Palma), and the 2004, 2006 and 2008 European Long-Range Target Rifle Championships, all held at Bisley, and in 1987 travelled to Canada as Commandant of the British Cadet Rifle Team, known as The Athelings.

I am a fully qualified High Muzzle Energy Range Conducting Officer and Assessor.

Until my move away from the area in 2005, I was Captain of the Farncombe and Godalming Rifle Club. Since the move I was for a time a member of the Springfield (Ancaster) Rifle and Pistol Club and am now a member of the Sleaford Small-Bore Rifle Club. I am President of the British Schools Small-Bore Rifle Association, and organise their Veterans Match.

The computer I used to use for many years was an Acorn StrongArm RiscPC, which had not only its own operating system (RISCOS) but had a 586 co-processor so that I could use it as an IBM machine with Windows if I really wanted to. It would do this both in a fully dedicated mode, where the machine behaved exactly like a 586 IBM machine, or in dual mode with Windows in a standard Acorn window running at the same time as my usual Acorn programs. I have now gone over to a Windows machine running VirtualAcorn-SA, which means I run all my old RISCOS programs on a PC, and can switch to the programs such as Mozilla Firefox which are best run on a Windows PC.

I have created a number of web pages, all of which are hand-coded using a text editor. This accounts for the fairly simple and readable design, and also the fast download times that you will encounter (larger images excepted).

The main sites are as follows:

• Metals used in Coins and Medals, which has had good reviews and is now in its 54th edition;
• www.coins-of-the-uk.co.uk which deals with the history of Coins of the UK since the time of the Anglo-Saxon King Edward the Elder, and is considered by many to be one of the leading sites on the subject. This has been updated and improved so many times since 1996 that I have lost count!
• www.ukcoinvalues.co.uk, giving values of UK Coins since the Civil War, is also part of the above site, and includes reasonably up-to-date values. It has also got the facility to download the value information in the form of Excel files or alternatively, CSV files which can be loaded into any suitable database or spreadsheet program. Do have a look!
• My Coin Picture Library www.ukcoinpics.co.uk has been re-integrated with the main coins site. It had been split away when the host of the original site set new limits to site size and the amount of downloading permitted which were less than half of the existing traffic.
• www.italianstamps.co.uk which deals with postage stamps of Italy and its Colonies, mainly using examples from my own collection.
• www.austrianstamps.co.uk which deals with postage stamps of Austria.
• www.hungarianstamps.co.uk which deals with postage stamps of Hungary (at present limited in scope).
• www.tonycanalpics.co.uk which contains pictures taken on a very wide range of UK canals and rivers from 1970 to the present day.

These pages are continually being updated as more information comes to hand.

A variety of links to my own and other users' pages which I have found to be of interest can be found on my Links Page.