MIKE AND THE MECHANICS
If there’s one thing that many of us have discovered in this crazy year of 2020 then it’s you should never lose sight of your dreams. Life is far too short to spend thinking back to why you didn’t follow a particular vision and while it took Mike Ponsonby more than 30 years to take the plunge (plus more than six years of personal sacrifice for both him and his wife Martina) he certainly has no regrets. Achieving the goal of being able to train as a barrister was eventually reached when he was officially awarded his degree in law by the University of London. What a day that was.
He subsequently didn’t waste all that time he spent poring through all manner of law books and even now at 71 years young, he’s still passionate about a subject that means a lot to him. “My father-in-law David Stamford was killed on 16th January 1988 due to poor crane handling while working on a building site,” he says. “So of course, I make no apologies for championing the cause of very best practice when it comes to crane operation as naturally the activity is very close to my heart.”
Mike thanks his lucky stars that he did follow his dream but he wasn’t the first (or even the last) member of the Ponsonby family to do just that.
Wharf Road Tyseley
Mike was the eldest of four children to parents Denis Joseph and Eileen Ponsonby who had their home in the Birmingham suburb of Tyseley: “I can remember the local wharves were still being worked there with barges when I was a youngster with a lot of timber in particular being handled.”
Mike recalls his dad worked in a factory and seemed well secure
