Example sentences of "had been a [noun] [noun] [conj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Bill had been a Beatles roadie and then became a manager , of The Mojos and Badfinger — which is how he came to be the owner of studios in Denmark Street . |
| 2 | The very existence of the interment camps had been a state secret and virtually all the materials on display would have been ‘ classified ’ before the recent revolution . |
| 3 | It would be equally grave if it had been a burglary charge but he was facing one of the most serious allegations you could make . |
| 4 | Giving evidence in court , he said that it had been very crowded because there had been a karaoke session before people started watching the boxing match . |
| 5 | I remember when after a few months in uniform duty , walking the beat , I was on West End Road , next to the Olympic Theatre , where there had been a building site and there was Collins World Fair there . |
| 6 | There had been a gas explosion and there were several casualties . |
| 7 | Harris , who had been a cavalry trooper before a French cannonball had crushed his left foot at the battle of Corunna , laughed at the naivety of the question . |
| 8 | Laba , who was later to become one of our shipmates , had been a fruit farmer and had only recently taken up sailing on the advice of the local shaman after a string of close calls with pythons . |
| 9 | Before the war , it had been a fruit market and bus station ; one side of its nineteenth-century Levantine façade had served as the entrance to the souk . |
| 10 | His grandfather had been a master baker and , in one of the many family stories Mark had heard at his grandfather 's knee , he had been told of how his great-grandfather had served Benjamin Disraeli with a standing daily order of twelve French loaves , burnt and rasped . |
| 11 | He had been a mining engineer and away for months at a time . |
| 12 | He was the son of a woman who had been a nightclub singer and briefly married to Juan Gómez , that was all my tired mind seemed able to grasp . |
| 13 | She had been a walking ruin when she came to him , and he had made her better . |
| 14 | Her mother never tired of speaking of her own father , Don Humberto , who had been a gentleman adventurer and a favourite at the court of King John , but she had never met Dom João and could only assure Sara that if he was at all like his grandfather or his Uncle Pedro ( the one who had died at sea ) he would be a man of great charm , intelligence and wit . |
| 15 | Shreeves , who had two years in charge during the mid-Eighties , had been a surprise reappointment as team manager after Venables moved upstairs last summer . |
| 16 | But when she had washed her hair and dressed in a new pair of designer jeans and a silk shirt that had been a Christmas present and which she 'd never worn before — it was n't to Eva 's house that she went but back down into the town , towards the theatre and the Franz Joseph . |
| 17 | He had been a Borough Councillor and Magistrate , a Director of Swain & Co. and Christy & Co. , and a Liveryman of both the Fishmongers ' and Felt-makers ' Companies in London . |
| 18 | ‘ It 's funny you should say that , ’ said Miss Mack 's Solicitor , from a resumed recumbent position , rather dreading his appearance as No. 11 in boots too small for him , ‘ because an uncle by marriage of mine took me once to tea with some cousin of his who had been a county cricketer and this county chap said middle and leg was best because it gave you room to cut . ’ |
| 19 | Part of his motive in undertaking to edit the Criterion had been to establish his own position within metropolitan culture and , since he had been a bank employee when he had begun the paper seventeen years before , in this he had triumphantly succeeded . |
| 20 | His appeal to the Court of Appeal contained five separate strands , contending that the verdict of the jury was unsafe or unsatisfactory , or that there had been a material irregularity or that there had been a wrong decision on a question of law . |
| 21 | Presumably he had been a football fan but it has not been possible to discover whether he supported Liverpool or Everton . |
| 22 | The 23 remaining ex-Croydon cars were soon put into service on the various routes based on New Cross depôt , but 396 had been a war casualty and 376 damaged beyond repair in an accident just after the war . |
| 23 | I leant out of the bedroom window and there was a man waiting there who said there had been a car crash and could he telephone . ’ |
| 24 | Christopher Hill had always acknowledged that it was doubtful that there had been a Ranter organisation and difficult to define what ‘ the Ranters ’ as a group believed as opposed to individuals whose views came to be labelled as Ranters . |
| 25 | His sisters had curtsied to the vicar ; his brothers had gone to war in 1914 , and one of them had died at Vimy Ridge ; his father had been a farm bailiff and died in 1911 after being bitten by a horse ( misnamed Lucky ) . |
| 26 | Grandmother , still living , though a good age , had been a Mademoiselle Touzeau and a refugee from the French revolution . |
| 27 | In any case , it is too difficult for me , and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics ’ . |
| 28 | I saw that she still wore an engagement ring , but she told me very quickly that her fiancé had been a bomber pilot and he was dead , and it was not the same man she had been engaged to when she joined up . |
| 29 | For Courtney this was a return to Africa , for he had been a big-game hunter and had once canoed down the Nile from Lake Victoria . |
| 30 | It had been a Saturday afternoon and there had been a crush round the lingerie counter , eager hands rummaging among the panties . |