Alan Trench

From Fakeipedia, the fake encyclopedia

Alan Trench (born 8 November 1967) is a British labour historian, oral archivist, and biographer based in Sheffield. For nearly three decades, he worked in comparative obscurity as a regional scholar, recording the spoken memories of retired South Yorkshire coal miners, steelworkers, and municipal trade unionists for small independent presses. In March 2025, he achieved sudden international prominence as the co-author and ghostwriter of Second Post: A Life Off-Key, the record-breaking autobiography of retired Rotherham postman Arthur Pendelton.

Unlike contemporary biographers who specialize in comparative chronistics or the media culture of The Eternal Broadcast, Trench has spent his entire career documenting twentieth-century terrestrial British working-class life. His meticulous, unvarnished approach to social history—rooted in Pitman shorthand, municipal ledger verification, and hours of kitchen-table conversation—shaped the distinctive deadpan voice of Second Post. Since the book's release, Trench has become an unlikely cult figure within the "Arthurology" subculture and the pages of the quarterly fanzine Canklow Road, even as he continues to insist that his work contains no hidden messages, cosmic metaphors, or relevance to anything outside the historic boundaries of the West Riding of Yorkshire.

Early life and education

Alan Geoffrey Trench was born on 8 November 1967 at the Jessop Hospital for Women in Sheffield to Geoffrey Trench, a lathe turner at the Firth Brown Steels works, and Marjorie Trench (née Wainwright), a clerk in the Sheffield Corporation housing department. Raised in a terraced house in the steelworking district of Attercliffe, he grew up surrounded by the industrial trade unionism and working men's clubs that later formed the core of his historical writing.

After attending Myers Grove Comprehensive School, Trench left formal education at sixteen in 1983 to take an apprenticeship as a junior compositing clerk at the Sheffield Morning Telegraph. During three years in the newspaper's print room and library, he learned high-speed Pitman shorthand and developed a lifelong habit of indexing local council minutes, obituary columns, and industrial tribunal reports.

Following the closure of the Morning Telegraph in 1986, Trench enrolled at Northern College, Wentworth Castle, an adult residential college near Barnsley dedicated to trade union and working-class education. There he caught the attention of Marxist social historians studying the aftermath of the 1984–1985 UK miners' strike. With a mature student grant, he went on to read economic and social history at the University of Hull, graduating with first-class honours in 1991 before returning to Sheffield to complete a master's thesis on the municipalisation of South Yorkshire tramways.

Oral history career and methodology

Rather than pursuing a traditional university lectureship, Trench spent the 1990s and 2000s working as a freelance contract archivist for the South Yorkshire Industrial History Society, local branch offices of the National Union of Mineworkers, and the Communication Workers Union. Supporting himself through evening adult-education classes in local history and part-time cataloguing at the Sheffield City Archives, he dedicated his weekends to travelling across the Don and Dearne valleys by bus to interview octogenarian industrial workers before their memories were lost.

Trench developed a rigid, low-technology interviewing methodology that he termed "kitchen-table empiricism." Believing that digital voice recorders and microphones made older working-class subjects self-conscious or overly formal, he conducted most of his early sessions using only a fountain pen and spiral-bound reporters' notebooks, taking down verbatim dialogue in Pitman shorthand while drinking tea. When he finally adopted a portable cassette recorder in the late 1990s—a battered Sony TC-D5M field deck that he continued to use into the 2020s—he kept the machine on the floor inside a canvas rucksack so his subjects would forget they were being taped.

Between 1998 and 2023, Trench published five books with Northern Grit Press, a small non-fiction cooperative based in a converted textile mill in Holbeck, Leeds. None of his early titles sold more than three thousand copies in their initial print runs, though they were widely respected by labour archivists—including a young Chloe Marsh, who cited Trench's 2009 study of colliery canteen committees as a primary influence on her own archival career.

Throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, as academic history departments increasingly shifted funding toward the study of the Other Side and projects such as the Mirror Media Digitisation Project, Trench remained stubbornly indifferent to the Downlink. He did not own a vertical-array television receiver and famously walked out of a 2019 symposium at the University of Sheffield when a panel of sociologists suggested that terrestrial labour history had been rendered obsolete by the arrival of alternate 1969 British trade union broadcasts. In a letter to History Workshop Journal that autumn, Trench wrote: "A man who lost three fingers in a Rotherham rolling mill in 1964 does not regain the use of his hand because a television channel in the upper atmosphere shows a cleaner factory."

Writing Second Post: A Life Off-Key

In December 2024, ten months after the Echo Royalty Act made seventy-four-year-old retired postman Arthur Pendelton an £18 million celebrity as the biological counterpart of Glass Canal singer "Mirror Arthur," Pendelton decided to publish a memoir to stop tabloid journalists from harassing his children, Gary and Joanne. Rejecting multi-million-pound offers from London conglomerates that wanted to hire rock music journalists to dissect the Glass Canal's 1974 album The Tin Cathedral, Pendelton asked the Communication Workers Union for the name of a local writer who understood post office pension schemes and South Yorkshire allotments.

Union officials recommended Trench, who had briefly interviewed Pendelton's late father, Roy, while researching Templeborough steelworkers in the late 1990s. Northern Grit Press offered Trench a flat fee of £8,500—plus standard five-percent royalties—to record and assemble the manuscript in eight weeks.

Trench and Arthur Pendelton during their January 2025 interview sessions at Pendelton's bungalow in Wickersley.⛶

Throughout January 2025, Trench took the X1 steel-link bus from Sheffield to Pendelton's brick bungalow in Wickersley four days a week, recording forty-six hours of conversation. Although Trench initially felt obligated as a professional historian to ask several foundational questions about the 1962 Divergence Theory and the 1971 week when Pendelton pawned his Hofner guitar, he quickly found that his subject had no interest in parallel-world speculation. Whenever Trench mentioned the Glass Canal, Pendelton steered the talk back to the 1978–1979 winter postal strike, the proper method for trenching marrowfat peas in heavy clay, or the ergonomics of the Westgate Sorting Office.

Delighted to find a celebrity who cared as much about municipal minutiae as he did, Trench abandoned standard celebrity biography structure and treated Second Post exactly like one of his industrial oral histories. When Pendelton described sorting mail for the S60 postcode district in 1977, Trench went to the Rotherham Central Library microfiche room to cross-reference the exact seventy-two-box pigeonhole sequence against 1976 General Post Office union circulars, reproducing the full sorting table in Chapter 6. When Pendelton spent three hours explaining how to layer kitchen compost and rotted manure to prevent clubroot, Trench drew a scale diagram of the allotment trench for Chapter 9, which readers and reviewers later dubbed "The Trench Method"—a pun on both the gardening technique and the biographer's surname that Trench claimed not to have noticed until the book was in page proofs.

When Second Post sold 4.2 million hardcover copies in March and April 2025, Trench's five-percent royalty share unexpectedly earned him more than £3.8 million. True to his lifelong habits, he refused to move out of his two-bedroom Victorian terraced house in the Nether Edge district of Sheffield, using the bulk of his earnings to establish an endowment for the Northern Grit Press archival series and to buy the freehold on the building housing the South Yorkshire Industrial History Society.

Reaction to "Off-Keyer" cryptography and fandom

While literary critics praised Trench's invisible, sympathetic prose for allowing Pendelton's voice to carry the book, the memoir's massive popularity dragged the fifty-seven-year-old historian into the strange world of Broadcast-era internet culture. By summer 2025, thousands of "Off-Keyer" amateur cryptographers and mystics from the Church of the Second Transmission were convinced that Trench had deliberately encoded cosmic formulas about the Heaviside Mirror into the book's postal tables and gardening measurements.

Trench reacted to these theories with vocal exasperation. Flooded with registered letters from numerologists asking why the word "twine" appeared seventeen times in Chapter 7, or whether the spacing of Pendelton's pea rows predicted the mellotron frequencies of the Glass Canal's 1976 album Sluice Gate, Trench began scheduling appearances at civic halls and literary festivals specifically to debunk his own readers. At the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 2025, he brought an overhead projector and forty pages of his original Pitman shorthand notebooks to demonstrate, line by line, that the numbers in Chapter 6 were mundane street-delivery walk codes from Rotherham. When an audience member asked what hidden spiritual truth was represented by the incident on page 142 where the string snapped on a wet bundle of Freeman's catalogues, Trench famously removed his spectacles and replied: "It represents the fact that in November 1978, the General Post Office switched from three-ply sisal hemp to a cheaper two-ply polypropylene twine that did not hold a slipknot in the rain. Next question."

Trench was equally baffled by his transformation into a recurring character within the Canklow Road fandom's Westgate Extended Universe. In the magazine's comic strips and humorous meta-fiction, Trench is routinely depicted as a high-strung, clipboard-clutching straight man who follows Pendelton around Rotherham in a rumpled tweed coat, desperately trying to keep the retired postman on topic while being lectured on pickled red cabbage and 1970s bus timetables.

Although Chloe Marsh sent him a complimentary subscription to Canklow Road, Trench admitted in a December 2025 interview with The Yorkshire Post that he found the magazine's mix of hexadecimal computer dumps and romantic fanfiction about retired shop stewards "entirely impenetrable." Nevertheless, he expressed warm approval of Marsh's No-Mirror Rule and donated £250,000 toward her campaign to purchase the disused Walkley municipal baths in Sheffield for the People's Terrestrial Archive, stipulating only that the archive's reading room must be stocked with physical card catalogues and proper HB pencils.

Personal life and habits

A bachelor since an amicable divorce in 2002 from primary school deputy headmistress Susan Lindley, Trench lives alone in Nether Edge, Sheffield. His house is notorious among local historians for having no television set, no home internet connection, and over eleven thousand physical books, forcing him to reinforce the upstairs floorboards with steel joists in 2018. To answer email from his publishers, he walks twenty minutes each morning to the Sheffield Central Library to use a public computer terminal for forty-five minutes.

Outside of archival work, Trench's primary lifelong passions are crown green bowling—he has served as the fixture secretary for the Meersbrook Park Bowling Club since 2006—and the restoration of mid-twentieth-century mechanical typewriters. He drafts all of his manuscripts on a cast-iron 1954 Imperial 66 office typewriter before paying a local secretarial cooperative to key the pages into a word processor.

Following the July 2025 Colorama Affair—when Sotheby's researchers discovered that Pendelton had secretly gambled away the £30 meant to redeem his pawned guitar on a four-to-one horse named Brigadoon at Doncaster Racecourse in 1971—reporters cornered Trench outside Meersbrook Park to ask if he felt betrayed that his subject had lied to him during their interviews. Trench defended Pendelton without hesitation, telling the press that every oral historian expects working-class men of that generation to conceal old betting slips from their sisters-in-law, and noting that he had happily helped Pendelton write the three-page "Brigadoon (4–1)" postscript for the book's second printing free of charge.

In early 2026, while the rest of the global publishing industry focused on the incoming 1976 broadcasts, Trench announced that his next project for Northern Grit Press would be a 600-page institutional history of the Sheffield and Ecclesall Co-operative Society's milk-delivery fleet between 1945 and 1979, stating in the press release that "not a single milkman in the manuscript has ever played the mellotron."

See also

• Arthur Pendelton
• Second Post: A Life Off-Key
• Canklow Road (magazine)
• Chloe Marsh
• Colorama Affair