During the Second World War she was sent as a child evacuee to the West Country and finished her secondary education with four O Levels.
In 1957 she took a job location catering for such films as The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and The Bridge on the River Kwai, the latter resulting in a six-month stay in Sri Lanka.
[1] In 1963 she took a job at the Science Museum, London, as an assistant with the Navigation and Meteorology collections.
From 1961 to 1979 she successively attained a diploma in archaeology, a degree in geography, a master's degree in history of technology and a doctorate from the University of Leicester, which appeared in print as No Sea Too Deep, The History of Oceanographic Instruments.
[2] She began writing in 1980 and published works particularly on the history of oceanography and British scientific instrument makers of the 18th and 19th centuries.