William David “Bill” Goldman, Blake scholar, was born in 1950 in St Pancras, London, the first child and only son (there are two younger sisters) of Joan and William Goldman. Bill’s father, Willy, born 1910 in Mile End Old Town, was a significant memorialist of the Jewish East End. Willy Goldman married as his third wife, Mavis Joan Allsop, in St Pancras, London, in 1950.
Bill entered Sir William Borlase Grammar School in 1960, a good grammar school in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. He left aged 16 with 7 GCEs and one O/A level (Use of English, A-grade) to work for BBC Publications, sorting and delivering office mail. By 1970 he had acquired the qualifications for university entrance and went to the University of Essex to study English Literature. Bill dropped out after two years. I don’t recall him ever speaking about the period following except that it led to his religious conversion around about 1977, of which he wrote “I met Jesus my Saviour and acknowledged Him as such … I love the Bible and regard it as God’s Word as it claims to be”. (To me, this kind of talk is close to meaningless. If the Bible is God’s word, then God is a really crap mathematician. See 1 KINGS 7:23.) I can see that conversion gave Bill’s life a stability it might otherwise have lacked but I think it also made him vulnerable to the Christian flat-earthists, worshippers of Blake’s “old Nobodaddy aloft”, who were/are a feature of the Richmond church he joined.
