Winter 2022
Winter 2022
Members’ Stories
Episode 2: Malcolm Thick
Malcolm was a civil servant but worked part-time for many years so that he could write history. His research area was 16th–17th century market gardening and agriculture; now he has diversified into food history. This is appropriate: he is an excellent cook but no gardener, except in theory. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
His first book was published in 1998, followed by various academic papers. Having got his much-desired early retirement in 2008, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2008/9. Since then he has, among other things, produced a major book on the Elizabethan entrepreneur, inventor, foodie (and more) Sir Hugh Plat, won an international prize for food history writing (the Sophie Coe Prize 2019), published articles in Petits Propos Culinaires (a food history publication) and written two privately printed detective stories and a pantomime (Dick Whittington) which can be seen on YouTube at this link.
Malc wrote a comedy about the Elizabethan humorous writer and traveller Thomas Coryate, which the Didcot Phoenix Drama Group staged in Coryate’s birthplace Odcombe in Somerset. He also produces humorous monologues for the group – but won’t act himself. In the pipeline are another pantomime, another detective story and, eventually, more history about vegetables, recipes, cookbooks and food.
Editor’s note: Curiously, Neat House Gardens were only a stone’s throw from the current location of Parkinson’s UK HQ, near present-day Victoria Station.