About Roger Guttridge
Roger Guttridge was born at Redhill, Surrey, and brought up in the Sturminster Newton area of Dorset. He went to Blandford Grammar School before beginning a 48-year career which has embraced a wide range of media work including newspapers and magazines, book writing and publishing, PR and marketing, radio and television. He is a former district reporter, chief reporter and deputy news editor of the Bournemouth Daily Echo, the author of 20 books and the editor of several others. He is a former director of local history publishers Red Post Books.
Roger is particularly well-known for his books on Dorset and for his local history columns, which have appeared regularly in various newspapers and magazines over the last 30 years including the Bournemouth Daily Echo, Southern Daily Echo, Stour Valley News, Blackmore Vale Magazine, Stour and Avon Magazine and, currently, Dorset Life: the County Magazine. He is also well-known across Dorset as a speaker. His popular talk My Family and Other Smugglers has been heard by tens of thousands of people since 1983.
Roger’s other specialities include the sport of swimming. He was the Bournemouth Daily Echo’s swimming correspondent from 1988-2018 and has contributed to Swimming Times, the national swimming magazine, since 2000. He has also written about swimming for several other newspapers, including the Daily and Sunday Express, and co-authored the London 2012 Training Guide: Swimming with fellow swimming writer Kelvin Juba. Roger has covered three Olympic Games (Athens, Beijing and London), two Commonwealth Games (Manchester and Glasgow) and many World and European Championships. He was press officer for the Great Britain Swim Team in 1999 and 2000
Roger Guttridge has taken part in or advised on many television and radio programmes, including a BBC Radio 4 programme about the real-life smuggling influences behind J. Meade Falkner’s classic novel Moonfleet. During 2018, he appeared on the BBC 1 series Murder, Mystery and My Family, in which he revealed newly discovered documents to the grandson of Charlotte Bryant, who was hanged in 1936 for poisoning her husband with arsenic; the BBC 4 series Beach Live: Jurassic Coast Revealed, in which he discussed Dorset’s smuggling history; and The One Show on BBC1, who used part of his contribution to promote the Murder, Mystery and My Family series. Roger can also be seen on both parts of the two-part DVD Dorset: Along the River Stour, presented by Bonny Sartin of The Yetties folk group. He can be heard on the Roving Ear Audio Guide to Dorset.