Havenswell – Personal site of Marcus Hazel-McGown – Education and Work

Find me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-mcgown-1b315120b/ for my full resume and other information.

Education and Work Background

I was born in April 1973, I was always a little hyper, a little over the top, maybe even a little too much, I remember being the odd one out at birthday parties and family functions. I had a few close friends but didn’t mix with most of my compatriots. I was at this point playing rugby for the town under 13’s, swimming for the Town, and running.

At the age of thirteen I, unfortunately, contracted Coriolymphatic Meningitis (Caught from swimming in the water where rats had been) for Nine months I was off school and went from ten stone to barely four stone. I thought I was going to die, but over time things progressively got better. The one thing I did notice is that I never fully recovered, my energy levels never returned to their previous levels. I could no longer be competitive in Rugby and Swimming, they were just too exhausting. I continued to run dominating the 18,000 meters and long distances and took to playing tennis and badminton. To fill my spare time and lack of real academic brilliance, after Christmas 1986 my Parents got me a book and a double cassette tape which was a compilation of Brass Band music from around the UK. I set to reading the book, entitled ‘Volcano Adventure’ by Willard Price, listening to the cassette, and it started me off in two directions. Of which I still love today. Earth Sciences and Brass Band Music.

On returning to school after the Christmas recess, I was approached to try out for learning a musical instrument. I already played Cello in upper primary school, so a chance to learn something new was just what I needed. I started with percussion, and in under 3 years, I managed to go from nothing to holding a Grade Eight! in percussion (no mean feat). Soon after I discovered I was useless at metalworking, woodworking, and the like, practical hands-on skills were not something I could easily master. Instead, I discovered Technical Drawing, which I was extremely good at, but my lack of a good teacher didn’t point me in the direction of anything I could do for a living. So we have a thing called options year, where you get to choose what courses you want to take to progress and develop a career, bearing in mind at this point the only things I was good at, was music, drama, and technical drawing, I didn’t see much hope, but let me come back to that in a minute.

In 1980 the British government, under the leadership of Margret Thatcher, had been on a purge of Coal mines and steelworks. My home town ‘Corby’ was a historical steel town, with a massive workforce, it was responsible for making the pipeline that helped send Oil to Europe for the D-Day landings a Project called “PLUTO” which we even named a local pub after! But in 1980 all that changed. Steel was no more, 90% of the population disappeared overnight. Those not employed in some other job, became unemployed. Thousands of houses became ghost town areas and crime soared. Violence and knife crime became prolific. By the time I entered high school to do my tests for admission, we were told: “Well as long as you can fill in a Benefits claim, you will be alright we don’t expect any more of you. To me, that became Soul Destroying, the fact I had been written off before I had begun.

I didn’t excel in Math or English, because I didn’t see the point, math I could add, multiply, divide, and subtract, I didn’t see the point, yet already something was beginning to stir in the back of my brain, see if you dear reader can work out what it is before I explain. English, yes I understood books, and words, and was told off by the head Librarian Mrs. Mcalvany because I was a vivacious reader. She thought that because I could read at an incredible pace and keep track of multiple books at a time I had “Issues”. At this time in my life, I was unfocused, nothing seemed to come clear to me, and the only thing that kept me sane was music. Over the summer holidays that year, I started playing Euphonium with the “Corby Town Band”

Our music department burned down that year, so I had to swap schools. All for the love of music, I had to drop Drama and kept music and added geography to my studies, what a mistake that Geography was for the course was not about Earth Sciences but more about Political Geography, which I had no love nor interest in. My music teacher said that although I was a good Euphonium player, I would better serve the school band by playing Bb Tuba, So over the next few years, I did exactly that, in fact playing on the contest stage at the Royal Albert Hall every year and our band taking the title every year. By the time it came to my final year at 16 I had to take my ‘General Certification of Secondary Education’ but we also got to do the old O’levels too so I gained before my CCSE’s a Maths O’level at Grade A, and a Maths O’level also at Grade A. To add to that I added my GCSEs to the score, but there were very few jobs for people without exam results which took months to come out, so when I finished school in April, I had to wait until September to get the results! So I found an assortment of temporary jobs, that would keep me in money and out of trouble. But I still hadn’t found a calling. So in September I went back to college and did A level Maths, English, Psychology, and Sociology and Music, for most people, three courses are enough, but for me, I just went from day to day with a satchel full of textbooks thicker than my waist and passed the courses. To be fair in hindsight I wouldn’t have expected anything different, but at the time I was wondering where my life was going. I’d already got my first tour with my rock band (I learned guitar for some reason) I now had started seriously writing music, which I’d never really understood. Yes, I understood the forms and shapes, the common patterns, etc but I didn’t see the linkage. That all changed. As my A levels were halfway through I was handed a newspaper by my grandfather he had circled an advertisement in the “wanted” section, which read something like. ‘Kettering Gold and Silver band, are looking for an understudy conductor’ I had already achieved my “Young Brass Band Conductors Certificate” so I thought why not, I applied, interviewed, and started that night. I got to teach brass, one on one, and to whole sections of the band, and the band as a whole. I had access to the Musical instrument room and a key. I was told I could go in any time I liked so for the next number of evenings and weekends when I wasn’t conducting I was learning new instruments from Bassoon upwards. Then one day the Principal’s wife phoned me to tell me he had been taken ill, and we had a contest in two days’ time.

Two days to prepare for a contest is not a lot of time, I had never conducted this piece before, so I studied it and listened to other bands perform it (LP libraries were a thing then thankfully) and I was extremely nervous, as was the band. The contest stage was a meter above the floor of the main concert hall, and the judges had a mezzanine and there was a massive audience in the main hall and the balconies too. It was all-or-nothing time. With butterflies and a tornado in my stomach, I warmed the band up, and we were ushered onto the stage. I picked up the Baton, tapped the lecture, and as they say the rest is history. When the results came in we had won by a clear margin! The band where euphoric that was their first contest win. Everyone praised me, but to be fair all I’d done is inspire them to teamplay and bring out the best in them. they followed my direction. For those seven minutes on stage, I was lost in a euphoria entirely.

I went back to Temporary work, raising funds for University, and sat straight through my B.A Musicology and my mentor Dr Samualson asked me about my master’s work on Dr. Ralph Vaughan Williams. RVW had been a passion of mine musically for some time, I’d acquired every printed book about him, his family, and his history. I was asked to write some material for a Radio Programme that aired on BBC Radio and World Service, this become the basis for my Doctorate thesis. I gained this in 1999, Although I had recently met VRW’s wife and been given access to his personal notes, I had become disenamoured with what I found in his personal life and it was a life-changing moment for me. I went into a dark funk swapping to Opera. During my time at university, I’d been using a Commodore Amiga for course work, in my second year at University it failed and I bought an Apple Mac. I started using Opcode Studio Vision for my music work but started digging into programming in C++ and other languages. I’d already been using the internet in academia and now wanted to use it at home. Because I had a Mac, I ended up having to write my own modem drivers, as nobody supported Macs in those days. I remember getting my first dial-up account with 5mb of webspace! My first thoughts were what can I use this for. So that was my beginnings in HTML, I couldn’t do what I could do on my own PC so I got talking to my provider who said they could give me access to a Perl folder on the server, but they would need to validate all my code. At £25 for a code snippet, it soon became apparent that this was foolhardy, and not only that they had started calling me for modem drivers and Perl script help. I ended up by the end of that year not paying for my dial-up or webspace but not benefiting from the support services I was providing. After graduating I moved to London.

The London Years and Beyond

I applied for a job with a company called Valleymedia, which I had been recommended, The interview was strained to say the best, there was me fresh out of Academia and my interviewer had never even been to college, but we made things work. My role was to design Dreamweaver templates, with heavy customization for SEO for small businesses, then to lead classes of up to twenty-five Small to Medium business owners to develop their own websites. Which often meant that I could also pick up work out of hours to finish what these people had a dream for and couldn’t visualize. All of our salaries came from the University of North West London, another project they had on the go was to become Learn Direct, on my lunch breaks my boss and I would often help the only man that was working on that project, which soon became shelved by the University and he bought it for the massive sum of £1-00. For two years I never heard much more about this but I did thereafter as the company had become one of the Government’s favorite poster-boys for Learning after school and college, a back-to-work incentive that made the owner a millionaire overnight.

I moved from this to working as what is now classed as a Scrum Master in those days it was lead programmer, developing ASP and SQL data solutions for blue-chip clients including Microsoft, Google, and many more. I then doubled my salary after being headhunted and became an Applications Architect, overseeing at my height as an AA 50 programmer. We were developing XML data structures and live booking systems, taking applications from offline to online, and more. In my spare time, I was writing code for a number of other companies. One of these I particularly enjoyed was using a mobile phone capture device to capture customers’ mobile numbers, and times and occasions they visited the venue, offering vai SMS money off vouchers for events they were interested in.

After that, I was fed up with being someone else’s employee, fed up with the annoyance of not getting training that I’d been promised, not the days of I required. So With some other friends we founded MHMData, we started by replacing massive teams with our already massive repository of code and set out to bring clients in-house. Marketing was kept simple if we didn’t know you, you had to be introduced by someone we did know. Before long we were no longer working like anyone else, we were recruiting people that we knew, I started interviewing and the strongest candidates I noticed was often not the best. So I created our own sourcing tool, that had three categories ‘Fit the bill, don’t fit the bill, and Wildcards” Believe it or not most of our employees come from the latter section, wildcards. People with degrees in things that just don’t work for IT or people with no formal qualifications but knew what they were doing. 1000 employees later and only five people that decided to quit for obscure reasons. I was happy. From my initial dabbling with the world wide web as it was then termed, I’d discovered something I thought unique, I discovered the value of Data, every single project I have ever worked on has sought a way to display every ounce of data for its value, I was working with what later became data science long before anyone had even started using relational databases on the WWW. I started with flat-file databases, which is odd as we now move into this NoSQL world of distributed computing, that I have foreseen for many years.

Then COVID happened: At first, it was a shock, what do we do, but people had been teleworking anyway so we continued. We survived. But my marriage didn’t. Time for a change.

In between, the last 21 years of working in IT, I also spent a lot of time working on film sets, notably the films Mary Queen of Scots, The Outlaw King, the series Outlander, Tornado (2025 release) and many other walk-on parts. I also was asked to model for a few different things, and I love doing that outside my day job. It shows a different side to me I feel.

Public Speaking, Conference organizing, and more

Whilst I have always been dedicated to my work, I’ve been involved in organizing community events, and whilst working for the Radio Society of Great Britain, I was responsible for organizing the “Scottish radio amateur Convention” the first national event in many years, we opened our doors to 1,500 clients, I arranged the venue, the speakers for the Technology talks, and also did two different talks myself. Part of the role for the RSGB was to visit local radio clubs and societies and listen to the concerns and or thoughts on the RSGB, and to have a series of both RSGB presentations and my own at hand for their consumption. My smallest audience was ten people my largest in excess of 2,400 there is more on this subject in the page on my outside work experience. Incidentally I go by the UK callsign MM0ZIF (Scotland) M0ZIF (England)

So what can I bring from experience to what I do?

Programming knowledge: From design to implementation to deployment and documentation

SEO and Marketing: I have been doing these since before the terms really existed on the internet

HR and Recruiting: I like talking to people recruiting the right person is the key to the role.

Passion: be it for work or knowledge. I am an avid reader, experimenter, and more.