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Barry Germain

I was born in 1939. all through the 1940s and early 1950s I waited with bated breath for Rock 'n' Roll to be invented. When it hit England like a tornado, all the way from America in 1955 I instantly became a teenage rebel. The music was fantastic, Little richard, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley etc. My favoutite singer at the time was Little Richard, in fact he's still my favourite singer to this day, a voice you could drill holes with!

In 1954 I went to art school for 18 months, it should have been 2 years, but i got expelled for having too much teenage angst. I then got a job as a poster and signwriter. In late 1957 I got a motorbike and became a ton-up boy. I started going to cafes where other bikers went, as well as Teddy Boys. It was great, good music on the juke-box and plenty of girls. In 1961 I had a serious crash on my 650 Triumph doing about 80mph. Broke both wrists, right thumb and left collar bone in 3 places. When I finally healed I found that I couldn't write posters as well, due to the damage to my right hand.

I got a job as a gardener for Lancashire Education Committee. Working with a small team of men looking after the grounds in all the schools in Ashton-under-Lyne, my home town, and also in Mossley, a town a few miles away. I really enjoyed the job. In 1963 I got married and in 1964 I got interested in art again and started painting. To my surprise people liked my work and started buying it. I sold a lot of my work in Davey and Sons, a gallery on John Dalton Street in Manchester.

In the late sixties, Solomon and Whitehead Guild Prints Ltd, who were along with Frost and Reed, the largest fine art publishers in Great Britain, bought the reproduction rights for four of my paintings and put them into print. I felt very honoured at the time to be alongside artists such as David Shepherd, Benjamin Leader RA, S. R. Percy, Herring Senior etc.

I only painted at weekends, as I was still working as a gardener which I still enjoyed. In 1971 I opened a professional boxing gym, the fighters trained from 6pm until 7.30pm, I then opened for the general public from 7.30pm until 9pm. This was every night through the week. Not long after opening my gym, I started training with the fighters and loved it. I had the gym for over 30 years and I very rarely missed a night's training in all the time it was open. I was super fit and loved every minute of training