Keith Ditcham (1976-83) joined the Kent Police, rising to Detective Chief Inspector before transferring to work in international policing.  He spent over 20 years living in and working as a diplomat in the Americas and Western Europe, combating organised crime.   He speaks Spanish and Dutch.  He was also the leader of the Organised Crime and Policing research group of the Royal United Services Institute Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), the world’s oldest think tank.  He holds an MSc in International Criminal Justice and a doctorate, where his thesis focused on child criminal exploitation.  He has been a school governor for 15 years, and is the joint vice chair and the safeguarding link governor.  He has been married for 31 years.  He is 60 this year and marked the occasion with a party for family and close friends (including friends from the school with whom he is still in contact).  Keith is semi-retired and enjoys learning the piano, sailing, walking his dog and attempting to play golf. 

Both his children were pupils at the school, William (2009-2016) and Jonathan (2011-2018).   

William graduated with a distinction in his master’s from LSE in Comparative Politics and is currently a Policy Officer for the Greater London Authority.  In 2024, William married Sarah, a German national whom he met when both were interning at the UN in New York. 

Jonathan holds a Master’s in Biochemistry and, after a stint conducting research at Cambridge University, is now studying for a PhD at UCL.  His research focuses on developing Mass Spectrometry methods for studying protein interactome changes under disease states on a single-cell level. He is also focusing on developing computational analysis methods for this multidimensional data.  

By Keith Ditcham