About the contributor

I am a person who lived through the Blitz in London in the 1940's. I lived in Hampstead with my mother and father, Josephine Christing Moriarty and Daniel Moriarty, who was a Staff Sergeant in the First World War and who became the Staff Sergeant in the local Home Guard in Hampstead.
I have posted a version of what I experienced during the time that led up to V-E Day under the title "My Wartime London".
I joined the Royal Air Force in 1952 at the age of 17 and spent my first proper posting at the radar unit at St Margaret's Bay near Dover in Kent. For the last part of my service, I was assigned to No 5 Ground Control Approach unit first of all at Wahn airport in Germany and then at Geilenkerchen, near Aachen with No 2 Squadren.
Following my serivice with the RAF, I took a course of shorthand and typing and eventually joined the Kent Messenger as a junior reporter. From there I went to the Central Office of Information for a period of four years. After that I joined a Fleet Street PR agency and during this time became the London agricultural correspondent for the Glasow Herald. I also wrote for The Sun newspaper working directly to the then News Editor, Brian McConell - the journalist who famously saved the life of Princess Anne in The Mall.
I have, from 1963, been a member of the Institute of Journalists - an organisation I joined from the National Union of Journalists. When I first joined the Kent Messenger, I was expected to join the NUJ, so I did. Unfortulately, shortly after a young journalist on the rival Chatham News was killed in a traffic accident, the whole of the Medway Chapel resigned from the NUJ because they refused any help to the journalist's widow because they claimed that he had been one month out of benefit - even though he had been a member for more than six years!
Since then, I have been active in the Institute of Journalists that in 1980 was awarded a secondary Charter from Queen Elizabeth II and became the Chartered Institute of Journalists. In 1999 I was honoured by being elected President. Currently I am the Chairman of the International Division of the CIoJ and am about to lead (on July 12, 2005) a fact-finding visit of 22 journalists to the European Union in Brussels. We will be travellling to Brussels from Waterloo by courtesy of Eurostar.
I now live in Islington, north London and am also the secretary of the Islington Branch of the Multiple Sclerosis Society; the publicity officer of the Islington Senior Citizens' Christmas Day Party Fund; publicity officer of the Archconfratenity of St Stephen - the altar servers' Guild.