User:Sue Welsh/sandbox

Thomas Armstrong was born 3rd September 1898 in Leeds, the son of Charles Plaxton and Anne Armstrong. His family had been connected with woollen manufacturing in the West Riding for generations. He attended Queen Elizabeth School, Wakefield and the Royal Naval College,Keyham.He served in the Royal Navy for the duration of the First World War. After the war he returned to the woollen industry, travelling the world in its interests. His initial writing had little impact but his first novel, in 1940, The Crowthers of Bankdam  was a best seller and the most popular of his works.This was a saga of three generations of the same family in the West Yorkshire wool trade. His second novel, Dover Harbour,appeared in 1942, and King Cotton ,published in 1947, was another saga but of the cotton trade. Other books followed : Adam Brunskill(1952),Pilling Always Pays(1954), A Ring Has No End(1958), Sue Crowther's Marriage(1961), The Face of the Madonna(1964), and his last novel, Our London Office(1966). He married Una Dulcie Bray in 1930 and he wrote most of his novels in Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales. He died in 1978.

The Crowthers of Bankdam was made in to a film,under the title The Master of Bankdam in 1947, and many of the scenes were shot around Huddersfield. The Ritz Cinema, Huddersfield, was crowded at the first showing of the film. . Thomas Armstrong disliked publicity so avoided the premiere in London, preferring to see it at the cinema in Darlington.