UK’s secret LGBT island community that wasn’t known about for decades

As a teacher, a councillor and even a local mayor, Robin Ford was a public figure on an island where ‘everyone knows everyone’.

What everyone did not know was his crucial role as the gatekeeper for an ‘underground’ community and his ‘great unmentionable’ secret that he was gay.

Robin’s story is one among dozens of ‘hidden LGBT past lives’ on the Isle of Wight that were uncovered...