Mike Griggs was born in  Essex in 1938 and grew up in a farming family. At eighteen he joined the Royal Air Force  training as a photographer, a career which took him to Norway and West Germany, Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, The Philippines, Canada and the USA.

His responsibilities included the supervision of automated reconnaissance and survey airborne camera systems, and mobile air transportable processing laboratories. Mike worked on most aircraft that were fitted with cameras including the Swift, Hunter, Javelin,  Shackleton and Canberra.

On leaving the Royal Air Force in 1979, he gained his associateship of the British Institute of Professional Photography, and set up home in Dover with his wife and their four young boys. Eventually he started his own photographic business and then freelanced for The Dover Express, later becoming their chief photographer. After some happy and at hilarious years on the local paper Mike branched out into commercial and industrial photography but continued to do freelance press work for the Press Association, the Associated Press, UK national and international newspapers and magazines.  

  In 1986 Mike was commissioned to take some of the first landscape photography between Dover and Ashford for the Channel Tunnel Group, and then in February 1988 Mike, along with David Giles  from the Press Association, and a two man TV crew, accompanied Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher down into the Channel Tunnel to the service tunnel boring machine to watch the historic start of the UK’s marine boring operation towards Sangatte on the French coast. Later Mike was awarded the tunnel photography contract by Transmanche-Link, which he held until the completion of the construction and hand-over to Eurotunnel on the sixth of May 1994. Since this date Mike has owned the Transmanche-Link photographic library and copyright.

Since coming to Dover  Mike has covered various incidents and events in the English Channel including shipping collisions, rescues and the exploits of  swimmers that come from all over the world in  their attempts to make the hazardous crossing to the French coast. Many of his pictures have appeared in international newspapers, books and prestigious magazines. Those of Alison Streeter MBE, who has forty crossings under her belt and dubbed ‘Queen of the Channel’ have featured  in The Smithsonian Magazine, The Readers Digest, The Times, Nature, and even a Japanese school text book! The Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney is currently displaying some of Mike’s photographs of Australian long distance swimmer Susie Maroney in their major exhibition ‘Watermarks’. 

In February 2002 Mike moved his business from Dover to Cullen in the north of Scotland where he joined his wife Margaret, a social worker. Three of their four sons also now live and work in Scotland. Andrew, a former Royal Air Force pilot  and captain of  a Nimrod  maritime reconnaissance aircraft, is now an IT Consultant for a major Scottish bank; Jamie, a former air traffic controller at Heathrow and is now approaching his finals at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary Medical School; Jeremy, also a Royal Air Force pilot based further north, was the British Tornado GR1 display pilot in 2000; and Jonathan, a former Army captain, and commercial helicopter pilot is now living in New York from where he has recently produced a documentary on sky diving. This has been shown recently on UK Horizons and is soon to be shown on Discovery (Canada).

Mike is still ‘hooked’ on Dover and will probably need considerable ‘therapy’ in order to make the full transition to the magnificent wilds of Scotland. However he might not be able to resist the ‘Call of the Channel’ and if you watch carefully you may be able to spot him in the summer season hanging over the side of a small boat in the middle of the Channel photographing the intrepid swimmers.