Example sentences of "had been a [noun] [noun] [prep] " in BNC.
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| 1 | Goh Chok Tong , 49 , had been a shipping executive before entering politics . |
| 2 | There had been a committee meeting on 20 February , only seven days before the children were taken away . |
| 3 | They all laughed , for Breeze 's untidiness had been a school joke for years . |
| 4 | A lively lad in his youth , Thomas Borrow had been a champion wrestler in his time , but his fondness for the martial arts had led to his enforced banishment from the county . |
| 5 | She had been a champion skater at St Moritz , until her pilot husband had rescued her from what was becoming a very dreary grind . |
| 6 | Father had been a champion cyclist in his youth in Wales and saw that we were all given good bicycles when we reached years of discretion . |
| 7 | Ireland — home , as Joseph called it — had been a powder keg since the Easter Rising three years ago . |
| 8 | A transformation has taken place in the productivity of British shipbuilding because of privatisation , because there was no bottomless pit to which shipyards could turn , and because of the sheer reality that none of those yards would exist unless there had been a quantum change in working practices . |
| 9 | Mr Nightingale had been a wartime soldier in a fairly respectable regiment ( George 's opinion as an excavalryman ) and while he had filled out to a pink-and-white chubbiness he still wore a small military moustache that had stayed loyally ginger as a reminder of the Desert campaign . |
| 10 | Philip Snowden , who had been a harder-line pacifist during the war than the more pragmatic Macdonald , was now Labour 's Chancellor , and he stood like a rock against all attempts to introduce new economic thinking . |
| 11 | Johnston had been a founder member of the Irish Workers ' League ( the Communist Party in the Irish Republic ) , and both were involved with the Connolly Association during periods spent in England . |
| 12 | Gramoz Pashko , Deputy Prime Minister in June-December 1991 , who had been a founder member of the DP , accused his old party of diluting and altering the reform programme especially as regards privatization , and described the new party as a liberal formation of the centre-right committed to institutional , economic and cultural reforms . |
| 13 | Mr Toombs had been a founder member of the British premonitions Bureau in 1967 ( it registered 500 premonitions , most of which were concerned with major transport disasters ) . |
| 14 | An active guerrilla leader since the early 1960s , he had been a founder member in April 1966 of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia ( FARC ) , which had developed into one of the most durable guerrilla groups on the sub-continent , maintaining an estimated 60 fronts across the country and a force of 4,000-6,000 . |
| 15 | Her father had been a history master at the local grammar school and Dotty had kept house for the old man until his death , when she sold their home , bringing some of the furniture , all the books , four cats , two dogs and a collection of medicinal herbs to her new home . |
| 16 | And Forne , merchant of York , who had been a master coiner at Nottingham now for years , and had thought his fortune made , no doubt , when he married the sister of Duncan — King Duncan , the last one to rule Alba and Cumbria . |
| 17 | Australia had been a whaling country until 1978 when an official enquiry , which was supported by all political parties , concluded that the public wished to see an end to whaling . |
| 18 | Once there had been a fairy costume from a neighbour . |
| 19 | The two ladies had each paid 500 dollars for the privilege of a ten-minute consultation , during which one was told that she had been a quartz crystal in a former life while the other was informed that she had been an E flat ! |
| 20 | I had been a gang leader in Harehills — first administering the lives of younger children , then by brass , bossiness and imagination extending judgement even over older boys . |
| 21 | In his will he left sizeable sums for schools he had built in his home parishes , as well as for Christ 's Hospital , of which he had been a donation governor in 1833 . |
| 22 | He was far more at home in jeans and a sweater or the favourite scuffed old flying jacket he had inherited from his father , who had been a Spitfire pilot in the war and he wore them whenever he could . |
| 23 | He had been a share salesman for just a week and a half , and the deal put £200 in his pocket . |
| 24 | The most important was Richard Mynours , who had been a gentleman usher of the prince 's chamber in the mid 1470s and entered Richard 's household in the same capacity . |
| 25 | The most important was Richard Mynours , who had been a gentleman usher of the prince 's chamber in the mid 1470s and entered Richard 's household in the same capacity . |
| 26 | His mind was the richest repository of the past : he had been a child oblate at Canterbury before the Conquest ; he had heard all the gossip of the older monks as a child , and he remembered as an adult all that he had heard . |
| 27 | An interim Prime Minster , Jean Jacques Honorat , who had been a government minister under former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and was one of Aristide 's bitterest critics , was installed on Oct. 10 ; a new Cabinet was announced on Oct. 16 . |
| 28 | Mahdi , 52 , had been a government minister in the 1960s , but was imprisoned after Siyad Barre 's takeover in 1969 . |
| 29 | She had been a childhood friend of William Egan and though no one could truly mourn such a man of violence , still she had her loyalties , and he was a man who had known how to trade on them . |
| 30 | Several hours before the escape there had been a drinking session at the prison , paid for by Bibit , involving inmates , guards and female visitors . |