George William Tremlett is an English author, bookshop owner, and former politician.
Writing
According to his own mini-biography, after leaving King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon Tremlett worked for the Coventry Evening Telegraph from 1957 as a TV columnist and pop music reviewer. In 1961 he became a freelance rock journalist and in the 1970s he wrote a series of superficial paperback pop books, including The David Bowie Story, the first biography about the musician. In the early 1990s, he also published a rather flattering biography of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He is a biographer of Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin. He interviewed Caitlin at her home in Catania for the book Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas. He has argued that Thomas was "the first rock star." In 1997 he published a book with James Nashold, The Death of Dylan Thomas, that claimed that Dylan Thomas' death was not due to alcohol poisoning but rather a mistake by Thomas' physician in prescribing cortisone, morphine and benzedrine when Thomas was actually in a diabetic coma. Tremlett runs the Corran Bookshop in Laugharne, "a shrine to the poet", after moving to the town in 1982. The shop also offers tourist information and was nominated for the Carmarthenshire Business Awards in 2005.
Politics
He was a Conservative member for Twickenham on the Greater London Council. He served as head of Housing Policy under Horace Cutler and was Deputy Leader at one time. He opposed its abolition against the view of his own party, and was forced to resign from the GLC group owing to this disagreement. Tremlett wrote in the Morning Star that "During her first premiership, Mrs. Thatcher became obsessed with Ken Livingstone; she regarded him as a danger to the state. It was she who committed the Conservative Party to the abolition of the GLC by personally writing that commitment into the general election manifesto." His work as head of housing policy was profiled in the sixth episode of the first BBC series The Secret History of Our Streets. In 1979 he wrote Living Cities, a book critical of Conservative party housing policy.
Personal life
His wife Jane is an independent County Councillor. They have a son, Jack.
