Early in his life he worked as a forester. From 1948 to 1950 he served in the military, he then studied briefly at an agricultural college, worked as a bartender and managed the family farm. Place lived much of his life on the sea. In 1953 he sailed to
South Africa where he worked in a copper mine. In 1955 he returned to
England and worked as a journalist. In 1958 he sailed to
New York City and from 1958 to 1961 lived in the
Bahamas. In 1961, he bought his first ship and sailed it through Miami and England to
Mallorca. During the Algerian War, he was a smuggler. The years 1962 and 1963 he spent in
Bilbao and
Madrid. In 1965 he captained a sailing ship built in the Netherlands to Lisbon. In the following years he drove several ocean races with
Juan Carlos the future King of Spain. In 1966 in
Denmark he turned a barge into a yacht and in 1967 and 1968 he ran a yacht charter in
Malta for wedding couples and regularly sailed the route via
Lampedusa and
Tunisia. In 1969 he was a consultant for
Forte International Hotels in
Sardinia and
Greece before he organized a fishing fleet in
Ecuador. Shortly thereafter, he fled to
Peru on charges of alleged piracy. He then worked for the Manu River Project and for similar projects in
Brazil and
Panama. In 1971 he returned to
England before working for time in the Canary Islands as a photographer. In 1973 he traveled to
Mexico to write an ultimately unpublished novel. While struggling with the novel he took up poetry as a relief from working on the novel. Place was an editor for Poetry Circle, a forum for contemporary poetry in the United States. In 1976 he moved with his partner, Dorothy, and the stepson, Paul, to
Mallorca. He died in
Huddersfield, England in May 2020, at the age of 90. == Works ==