Gender equality is rarely out of the news. From Women’s Week celebrations in Ghana to London City’s ‘shocking gender pay gap’ and a call by the Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner for local councils to improve representation of women within local government, the debate about women’s rights rages as much now as ever. One of the latest initiatives is a one-stop-shop for gender issues in astronomy and science. A new initiative called She Is An Astronomer (SIAA) has been launched, with a website of the same name. The site has a list of female astronomers over the ages, which begins with Hypatia of Alexandria who is credited with the charting of celestial bodies and the invention of the hydrometer. As one who lives with 5 females, not counting the dog, goat, chickens and other sundry farm animals, I may have a slightly jaundiced view of where the line for equality should be drawn. But a friend recently confided how he was delighted when a female engineer came to fix his washing machine. Initially she said it was going to be too expensive to repair, but after my friend’s wife veered towards a ballistic fit the engineer came back five minutes later to say she had magically fixed it. ‘Don’t know how’ she said ‘but it’s working now’. It strikes me that we’re missing a trick here. Since the first Chancellor of the Exchequer took office in 1316 we have never had a female Chancellor. Isn’t now the time for that magical fix that can only come about with a woman’s touch?
Sweet Be’mi’ster
Our Dorset dialect poet William Barnes wrote of Beaminster –
‘Sweet Be’mi’ster, that bist a-bound – By green an’ woody hills all round , ..
..Noo bigger pleace, noo gayer town, beyond thy sweet bells’ dyen soun’, ..
But was Beaminster really so sweet then? Last month we saw that before piped water and improved sewage, Bridport was anything but sweet.
Our late friend Marie Eedle in her “A History of Beaminster” tells us that the Board of Guardians noted an outbreak of cholera and in 1853 requested parish officers to appoint a board of health. However, a vestry meeting two months later, including a doctor, resolved that such a board was unnecessary. But another cholera scare in 1866 decided them to form a local board and visit house to house, to remove nuisances. In 1872 the Beaminster Rural Sanitary Authority was created and took over the cleansing of waterways and commenced covering some. By 1878 the District MOH reported that drainage was very bad, for example St Mary Well Street, where the water was stagnant and unhealthy and he thought the slaughter houses were a source of trouble and should be moved outside the town. In 1901 the Local Government Board asked the council about the town drainage and the Clerk replied that improved drainage and water supply were ‘hand in hand’. Again, in 1906 the Local Government Board asked for a report after cases of diptheria, proposing water-closets and removing river pollution. A parish meeting in 1907 was told that drainage would cost £4,000 to £5,000. Of 400 occupied houses less than 100 had water-closets, so the others would have the expense of fitting them and connecting to the sewer. The owner of Parnham opposed a sewage works near his grounds and the local MOH proposed a conservancy system, employing cesspools. A vote was taken after many had left and 10 voted for and one against. The Local Government Board rejected such a proposal and proposed that a competent engineer should advise. Nothing happened for 20 years! Then in 1927 the owners of Parnham complained about river pollution and offered financial assistance for a sewerage system. A plan was considered, which would cost £11,000 plus land purchase, but Parnham then changed hands. In 1929 the new owners objected to the proposed purification works site and by 1931 the proposal was ‘in abeyance’. It remained so until the 1960s !
The supply of piped water actually preceded the sewerage system. There had been a town pump near the market house from which people carried away buckets, but it failed by 1871 and was removed in 1886. Water was then obtained from ‘Flatter Chute’ in St Mary Well Street and there were ‘dipping wells’ in other streets. In 1897 the Council Clerk advised that Beaminster was ‘one of the healthiest towns in England’, but this did not satisfy the Local Government Board. Eventually in 1908 a water supply was provided from a spring at Little West Woods. There were ten standpipes, one within 200 feet of each house and some taps within houses, providing good pure water. All of these would pay a water rate, but anyone within 200 feet of existing pumps or the ‘Flatter Chute’ was not liable for the water rate, provided these supplies were not condemned. (By 1946 some households continued to use these, although they were condemned). Some areas were not included and by the 1920s supply was insufficient, because of greater demand. The MOH pointed out that in 1908 the town could only boast two bathrooms and by 1928 these had increased to 100. It became necessary to shut the water off at night on occasions. In 1931 the supply was extended. Inevitably provision of household water supply and so water closets, created more sewage passing into the river, until the sewerage system was installed. The MOH said that the sewage plus the Milk factory effluent had turned the River Brit into a sewer.
So it seems that Be’mi’ster was not always sweet ? In “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” Thomas Hardy wrote of it as ‘Emminster’ and as Tess approached the Church its square tower ‘had a severe look, in her eyes’. Perhaps it was how Tess viewed life at that moment, for Beaminster has many attractive buildings. In her history Marie Eedle describes 22 ‘gentlemen’s houses’ in a walk around the town, three of which Hutchins described as ‘neat houses’ of 17 to 18th Century and no doubt there are many more now. Maybe we should walk around the ‘now sweet Be’mi’ster’ ?
However, on Tuesday 12th May Bridport History Society will hear from Peter Bellamy, who last summer led a walk around Bridport. At 2.30 pm in the United Church Main Hall Peter will talk about ‘The Historic Towns Survey of Bridport’, part of a project recording the historic aspects of 23 of the major towns in Dorset. Visitors £2. Details from 01308 488034 or 456876.
Cecil Amor, Chairman, Bridport History Society. Tel: 01308 456876.
May in the Garden 2009
Recently I met a young head gardener fresh from completing his ‘Kew Diploma’, possibly the most respected horticultural qualification in the country. His enthusiasm and vigour made me wish that I had a set of gardening jump leads to attach to his green fingers to recharge my own plant growing batteries!
The month of May is a bit like that; it’s so full of life and rising sap that it’s impossible not to feel that anything is possible. Fundamentally it’s when the risk of severe frost wanes and your tender plants can be gradually moved outdoors, ‘hardened off’, providing that you can whisk them back under cover if a seriously cold night is forecast. By mid May onward it should be safe to plant out tender plants and border exotica like dahlias which are enjoying a new surge in popularity.
If you are in the habit of propagating a lot of plants, and therefore have numerous perennials in pots, it might be a good idea to make a ‘stock bed’ to plant them out because it’s far easier to water plants in the ground than those in pots. From this point on watering becomes one of those inescapable chores and you’ll have enough on your plate with bedding displays, summer flowering bulbs in containers and, most thirsty of all, hanging baskets, so the more that’s planted in the ground the better.
On the subject of watering I’d like to gently remind the reader (yes, I know who you are and where you live) that if a pot is allowed to dry out it cannot be rewetted by simply pouring water onto the soil surface. The only way to saturate totally dried out compost is to plunge the pot into a bucket of water, or tin bath in my case, until it is totally immersed. You will know when it is properly wetted again when no more air bubbles arise from the compost surface. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone how important it is to collect rainwater in water butts with the aid of ‘rain diverters’ fitted to gutter down-pipes.
Watering is only going to be a real problem if we actually get a warm and dry summer. Pests and diseases, on the other hand, can become a problem whatever the weather. In wet years fungal diseases may be the greatest threat to plant health whereas in drier, warmer, summers pests, such as aphids, may multiply at such a rate that natural predation cannot keep on top of them. That’s why you must keep an eye open for early signs of trouble now when swift intervention can nip the problem in the bud.
I’ve noticed that lily beetles (bright red beetles and their poo covered grubs) have been getting more and more numerous compared to a decade ago when I don’t remember seeing them this far west, having first spread from their epicentre in the Home Counties. The adults emerge as soon as the sun warms the soil, I’ve found them as early as February, so by now you will find adults and grubs ravaging your gorgeous lilies. Destroy the adults and larvae by whatever means you can stomach, if you don’t the infestation will get worse and worse until you have to give up growing lilies.
Controlling slugs and snails is also important and if you do not agree with chemical means then the warmer temperatures mean that biological controls, based on nematodes (microscopic worms), become effective. It would be very expensive to control a whole garden this way but used to protect the most susceptible plants, especially those in pots, is sensible. A similar biological control is available to control vine weevils and this is almost obligatory if you have dainty morsels such as primulas and auriculas in pots – vine weevils love these particularly (begonias too).
Herbaceous perennials will be putting on a growth spurt to muscle each other out of the way in the race to reach flowering height and the whole sordid business of procreation – they’re sex mad, these plants! To stop them flopping when the inevitable winds and rains descend, this is Britain after all, insert a support system, such as pea-sticks, if you haven’t done so already. To employ an indelicate metaphor, this is the gardening equivalent of ‘Viagra’; artificially supported plants will stay up for longer and give the little lady a more satisfying performance than plants which collapse before reaching their flowering climax. Sorry about that – I think the sloe gin is beginning to kick in.
If your garden is anything like mine then you’ll hardly have any time to admire all the abundance of May because you’ll be up to your ears in grass cutting and weeding. I also have rather too much in the way of Lonicera nitida hedging which demands trimming every five minutes at this time of year. The nesting birds seem to have got used to the disturbance and it hardly fazes them. I don’t do it as often as I should due to my inbuilt laziness and a desire to be pootling around in old cars when I should be gardening.
Ah, May! Half spring, half summer.
Bill Crumblehome
Robin Mills went to meet Bill Crumblehome in Upwey. This is Bill’s story.
“I started pottery when I was at Weymouth Grammar School. My big brother was at the same school, and he had fun with clay sculpting: he’d made pots with figures crawling out of them and I persuaded the teacher, Peter Goodson, to let me go to after-school sessions. I potted for relaxation during A-levels, teaching myself how to throw on the wheel and producing vases which were ideal for my mother’s flower arranging – nice and heavy with interesting glazes! My mother is quite artistic, she paints, and my grandfather was a plumber, a lead worker, very good with his hands: he could turn a sheet of lead into a ball, just by tapping it around, so I might have inherited some of his skills.
I was brought up in Weymouth, born into a fourth-generation family building business with a most inappropriate name! I went into it as a young man and worked there for twenty-odd years.
Diane, my wife and I moved to Upwey, buying Mr Lovering’s house in Elwell Street, which had been a butcher’s business. We converted the stores into a pottery studio and I spent my spare time messing about with clay, between bringing up two daughters and sailing.
My early work wasn’t that good technically, and I remember taking my pots to the Dorset Arts and Crafts show in Blandford, where the judges said I should maybe use a bit less clay and a bit more thought! I’m actually green colour-blind, which can be quite an interesting challenge: to my eyes a brown pot’s as good as anything!
Perhaps I’m not obvious material as an artist: but an engineering approach is useful. I think of myself as more of an artisan craftsman, or that’s what I’m working towards.
I started appearing at the Old School Village Hall, as a potter and also in the village pantomimes, which were splendidly stupid, but great fun. I am currently the chairman of the trustees that manage the hall. The Upwey Potters was established in the hall with locals Fil and Maggie Cooke, also involving Anne Ashmore, Pat March, Jane Taylor and Paul Sutton. We inspire and help each other to improve our work and learn off each other, trade together and run classes and workshops. We also encourage other creative people through classes and the village hall has built up a reputation as a venue for art and craft exhibitions and workshops.
We helped start the Dorset Pottery Group, with Alan Ashpool, famous for the annual October exhibition at Bridport Arts Centre and also the Millennium Ammonite in the rear yard there.
I became involved with managing the Dorset Art Weeks, promoting artists across Dorset who opened their studios. Through that I met many artistic people who have inspired me and delighted many others.
After stopping the day job, I really wanted to try and make some sort of a living from selling and teaching pottery, as well as having a complete change to my way of life. My wife was working as a special needs teacher, which helped with our income.
I started researching different ways of firing. I visited the Museum in Dorchester to look at the Iron Age Black Burnished wares. That got me into experimental archaeology, working with Peter Woodward at the museum with Kate Verkooijen and his volunteers, investigating and replicating ancient pottery.
I got involved with the Time Team dig at Friar Waddon in the late nineties. They asked us local potters to find suitable clay and timber fuel for their mediaeval expert to recreate pottery and I helped him build a kiln.
Then I worked with archaeologists at Bestwall Quarry near Wareham ahead of the gravel extraction. The Romans had taken over an Iron Age site, industrialised it, and were producing millions of black burnished ware pots per year near Poole harbour, with good clay, coppiced woodland and a handy port. Pottery from there has been found over a huge area, as far away as Hadrian’s Wall and northern France. I’d liken it to what Woolworths would have sold, or maybe Pyrex, basic but useful. It’s identifiable by its black shiny colour, with latticed decoration. The surface was burnished with a pebble, while drying, to make it shiny and harder.
We rebuilt a couple of the kilns at the Bestwall quarry and produced some pottery to demonstrate and investigate their methods.
Nowadays I’m using my involvement with archaeology as my inspiration. This has led to my running workshops on these ancient methods: we’re continually trying to understand how the work was made. The pots from Bestwall were incredibly black in colour: they were not fired like that, because the kilns weren’t black inside, so my theory is that they were blackened afterwards in a charcoal clamp, the charcoal being needed for metal working. Sometimes I’ll fire my own pots in a bonfire to get similar effects.
I was involved with an exhibition at the Dorset County Museum called Artyfacts, in which artists produced work in response to some of the items on display there. I was trying to make Bronze Age urns and beakers with wonderful shapes, decorated with zig-zags using a comb. I make versions using modern materials and glazes. I love those shapes and decorations and they’re great to drink out of!
Normally I’d make that kind of thing on a wheel, but of course you can’t do that if you’re trying to be authentic. So I’ve taught myself to do it joining three or four rings of clay together, and I’m getting quite quick at it now.
I think it was the Victorians who coined the phrase “Beaker Folk” for the people from that era, and I’ve borrowed the phrase for my website www.beakerfolk.co.uk, where I show this type of work, with other people doing similar activities.
Archaeologists and I learn from each other: when they see me actually making something, the whole process behind an artefact becomes an illustrated reality. But so much of early material culture is lost, the things made of wood and leather and other organic materials are completely gone. Kate and I have become involved with the Age of Bronze, which is a living history group that stages re-enactments – I have appeared near Stonehenge and at English Heritage’s Festival of History, resplendent in homemade costume and shoes!
My latest venture goes under the snappy title of “the Ancient Wessex Development Group”, which is an attempt to bring together people who work in the heritage industry, mainly with tourists, to collaborate with artists, makers and designers and see what potential there is for all of us to benefit. We’ve been talking to, for instance, the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty team with their South Dorset Ridgeway Project. They’re organising guided tours in the Maiden Castle area, where you might come across me making pots at the end of May. There’ll also be an event at Corfe Castle in late July and early August, with people making artefacts of ancient times and artists painting landscapes inspired by history. Then we are setting up at Maiden Castle in mid September.
I now run a business, Alacrify, undertaking website design and consultancy. I work with Jon Sloper: I do the business side of it, and some of the less complicated things. Jon does all the clever programming; I think his flair for design comes from his background as an artist. It is all about using modern tools to communicate and provide information.
I get so much from working with groups, combining different talents, where the whole of something is greater than the sum of its parts. That was why I got involved with Dorset Art Weeks, bringing people together to produce such a successful project which has grown and grown. It was genuinely inspiring to be part of, especially helping artists to actually make a living from what they create: it’s difficult enough to produce the work, but then you have to be skilled enough to actually sell it. This part of the world has huge resources in the number of creative people who are living and working here: we need to make everyone much more aware of that phenomenon, for the benefit of the whole community.”
Nic Jeune
Fergus Byrne went to meet Nic Jeune in Bridport. This is Nic’s story.
‘I was born in Jersey in 1954, which was nine years after the end of the Second World War – nine years after Jersey was liberated from Nazi occupation. My parents were both there for the entire war and like a lot of their friends they married after the war. My Dad started work at 15 when he got a job working as an office boy for a law firm. During the war he studied at night school and did his exams and after it was over he qualified as a Jersey lawyer and formed a law firm in partnership with two others.
He was brought up a Methodist and has been a lay preacher since he was 25 years old. My Dad was not a teetotal Methodist though. He can remember embarrassing moments when a slightly rickety cabinet would accidentally open showing bottles of whisky and gin when church people came to visit. ‘Medicinal purposes’ was a popular comment at those times. We come from a long line of Protestants. My father can trace his family back to Huguenots that came from Montpellier; to two brothers Philippe and Jean Jeune, who were tailors. They were part of a huge departure of Protestants out of France during the Catholic pogroms of the time.
As my father had done well, he was able to send me to school in England when I was eleven, an opportunity he had never had himself. And though I am in all aspects English I have this French root to me. I remember coming to school in England being a deeply shocking experience. The cultural change was huge. For example I had a very continental understanding of personal space. When I interacted with people I would get right up close to them. So much so that people claimed I pushed them into the hedge when I walked along with them. It took me about three years before I got to terms with the different view of personal space. So my life in England really started from age eleven. I remember being escorted across England by Universal Aunts. These were ladies who got a small income for escorting little boys from place to place. Occasionally I would get a train from Waterloo to the ferry at Weymouth and I remember how the train went right through the town. The tracks are still there. If you put your hand out the window then you could touch the houses as you went past.
Jersey went through a huge transformation in those days. Agriculture started to disappear, tourism lost out to cheap package deals to Spain and elsewhere, and fishing, like all fishing around the British Isles, shrank. So Jersey changed into a financial centre.
Although I was the first of the family to go to University – I went to The University of Birmingham to study law – it was a teacher from my secondary school that inspired me to act. He was called Stephen Sidall and he was passionate about theatre. So by the time I went to Birmingham I was pretty keen. We had a Guild Theatre Group and in the first year I was a Guild member, by the end of the second year I was running the group and in the third year we did seventeen productions. We did lunchtime theatre, evening shows, mini festivals and people like Jude Kelly and Victoria Wood would come to work on our shows. We did a lot of wacky theatre because this was the 70s and we were living in the legacy of Woodstock and all that.
It was around that time that I answered an ad in the local Birmingham newspaper and got the lead role with a production company to tour all over England ending up at the ICA in London. I started that two weeks after I had completed my finals, so I hadn’t even left University. That was when I decided that I wanted to become a professional actor. I got my degree but never practised the law. I was a solicitor’s clerk as an out of work actor though.
Next job came after I saw an ad in The Stage for a theatre company called Incubus which was based at the Oval Theatre, London, which at the time was considered a hotbed of new theatre. I got recruited into Incubus where we toured festivals playing pretty outrageous shows. There were festivals like the Hood Fair in Totnes, The Elephant Fair in Cornwall and the Albion fairs in East Anglia. It was essentially street theatre, you would get up in the morning and put on your costume and stay in character until the end of the day.
I have always believed that chance meetings and random moments can sometimes bring dramatic change to life. Going to an audition for an expenses only show at The Edinburgh Festival led to a five year stint of Shakespeare productions with the director, Deborah Warner. It was a fantastic time where I really learned how to perform Shakespeare in a way that actually engages people. We toured to places like Egypt and the former Yugoslavia. After that I had a good reputation and had the chance to play lead roles in many theatres but there was an increasing desire in me to get in earlier at the start of the creative process. As an actor you often get given your costume and told how to play the role, and that’s that. That could be very frustrating.
I then got a job with one of the few independent TV production companies around at the time. I did a film in California called Murder in Oakland with a Director called Karl Francis. Oakland was the size of Luton and had a murder every two days. We were to work with the homicide squad. As it happened Karl was still developing the story and I basically became his assistant for everything. Ving Rhames and Eriq La Salle were two of the actors in the film but the main character was a kid from the projects that Karl had found playing beside a railway line one day. I had to ferry the boy back and forth from the local projects to the set in the company Lincoln Continental – a car that stuck out a mile in the projects. It was an amazing learning curve because, not only was I experiencing a world that was a lot rougher than I had ever been so close to, but also I was immersed into film making by this Director that basically expected me to do everything for him.
The next big break for me was working with Peter Kosminsky as his assistant Director. We worked for over a decade together. Probably the most successful thing we did was The Warriors, a BBC 1 drama about a peacekeeping force in Bosnia which won awards all over the world. The work with Peter was tough and demanding and the results were lauded so I became known as a good person to have on difficult projects, so during this time I also worked on many low budget British feature films with a lot of ambition but not enough money.
In 2002 I moved to Bridport. It was very much a lifestyle decision. Anna and I both wanted to give our children the chance to live outside a city. The beauty of Bridport is that it lives its own life because it’s really outside the circumference of any city. It is a town that punches way above its weight. For a relatively small town, in a not easily accessible place, it has an unbelievably rich cultural life. You feel that people here want to be here and be part of the community, contributing to life. Whereas many of the London satellite towns are just places for people to spend time away from the sweaty city for the weekend.
I have recently set up a drama division of a company called Touch Productions in Bath. We are currently working on about eight projects. Mainly feature films at the moment. It has always been my ambition to make drama here but that has not happened yet. I also have a post at Bath Spa University, which is very innovative in its teaching methods and I run a business for the third year students to work with real clients. I manage the company and play the role of industry mentor. The idea is to make the students more employable.
I have also been working on From Page to Screen, a new film festival for Bridport. Look at any list of Oscar winning films and more and more are made from adaptations. So this will be the first film festival in this country dedicated to literary adaptations and it seems a natural development of the Bridport Literary Festival. This April will run a week of great films at The Bridport Arts Centre.’
Up Front 04/09
Occasionally we get a reminder of just how much most of us take for granted in life. Last week my five-year-old great nephew was walking to school with his mother. He had just had a minor operation to deal with a problem known as ‘glue ear’. As they walked along the road he suddenly stopped and put his hands over his ears. A look of fear covered his face as he asked his mother what the strange noise was. He began to back away getting more and more frightened, unable to understand what he was hearing. Perplexed, his mother tried to get him to explain the noise. There were no cars, no big trucks, no planes, not even construction work nearby. Eventually she discovered that the noise he was describing was birdsong. Little Danny had never heard birds sing before. Once he understood, he was so excited he asked if they could buy a bird so he could listen to it. He wanted to know if, after school, they could go and sit in the garden and just listen to the birds. Also this month, a temporary internet radio station that broadcasts a loop recording of birds singing, including blackbirds, swallows and robins, has decided to remain on air after over half a million listeners tuned in. Worrying, however, is the news that due to climate change many species of European bird may not survive. Indeed in his new book, Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, Michael McCarthy calls for action to stop what he sees as a wildlife tragedy. Much as I might not miss the pheasant that got me out of bed and sitting at this desk at 5.30 this morning, I don’t want to have to tune in to the internet to hear the sound of birds singing.
Up Front 03/09
A recent headline ‘Money may not buy happiness but neither does poverty’ seemed so daft it was hard not to read on. The article was promoting an event put on by The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) – the UK’s largest funding agency for research, data resources and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. The point of the event – a discussion regarding the social issues that will arise in the coming months as a consequence of the global economic crisis – was to highlight the impact of wealth on wellbeing and to discuss whether increased wealth led to increased happiness, as well as, to what extent economic growth improves psychological welfare. In the current economic climate it certainly has relevance. In the past 50 years individual levels of wealth have increased but so have crime, deprivation, depression and addictions to alcohol and drugs. Most of us believe that more money will make us happier. However, lately, it is more likely a release from debt that will do the trick. In the case of bankers with large bonuses I suspect the answers may be slightly different – a solicitor friend recently explained how pleased he was that at last there was now a profession that was hated even more than his own. I think most of us would like a shot at seeing whether increased wealth made us happier but few of us will ever know. So let’s hope those that participate in the ESRC debate reach a conclusion that at least makes them happier. The rest of us can take comfort in another quote from the anonymous ‘He who dies with the most toys, is, nonetheless, still dead.’
Jyoti Fernandes
Robin Mills went to Fivepenny Farm at Wootton Fitzpaine, in the heart of the Marshwood Vale, to meet Jyoti Fernandes. This is her story.
‘My life started in Iowa, in the Mid-West of the USA. My mother was Italian-American: her family had once been homestead farmers in Iowa, and my Dad was Indian, from a village in Goa. He was the first in his family to get an “education”, immigrating as an engineer to the US for a better life, maybe a bit of the American dream. Later we moved to Louisiana in the South, bible-belt country, where he spent years working on inventions to help the rural poor. My background’s not really a rural one: you could say more of an activist one.
My mother was blind, and quite early on she decided that wasn’t going to stop her from leading a normal life. She not only raised five of us kids, but also set up a civil rights movement for blind people in the United States. I remember my parents, as a mixed race couple, during my growing up years in Louisiana where there were quite a lot of racial problems, battling for justice in everything they did. My mother was into things like natural childbirth, and chose home births when at the time they were illegal in Louisiana. A burning cross was placed in our backyard once, the local Klan getting upset about us having a home birth to prove it was possible. She didn’t let that, or anything, stop her. I think it was from working alongside my mother I learned that if there’s something you really believe in, and you’re prepared to work for it, you can make things happen. My mother’s campaign had 20,000 members, and became the National Federation for the Blind.
I went to college in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied international development. I had been in the debate team in high school, coming first in the national championship, which brought me a college scholarship. This was a great opportunity to break out of the small town setting I’d been brought up in, because by now I really felt I wanted to achieve something in the world. I was in Atlanta for about 3 years, but began to feel the university was quite conservative in their teaching. The problem with international development, in the way it was taught, was that it seemed to be always about applying the “American path” to developing countries, which I thought was inappropriate. So, I dropped out of college, and began to talk to my father a lot about India: about the village where his family had come from and what their lives were like, and I realized how much he struggled with the consumerism of American culture and missed village life. I felt I needed to find out about Indian life, my father’s background: I didn’t even speak any of their language.
I travelled in India for about a year. The thing that really changed my life was visiting the Narmada Valley, in Gujarat, where there was a hydro-electric dam being built. There was a movement against the project and the environmental destruction it would create, led by activists who were followers of Gandhi’s philosophy. Involved in that movement I felt more passionate, more at home than ever before: I was 20 years old, I was working with people involved in non-violent direct action, who had their own ideas about development, which meant supporting local farmers and communities.
My Indian friends persuaded me that if I wanted to make a difference, I needed credentials, so I went back to university to finish my course. After qualifying, I managed to get a job with President Carter, at the Carter Centre for International Development, in the Latin American section. That was an interesting job, but they were trying to set up trade agreements which would have been detrimental to small farmers. They sent me down to Mexico, where I was able to help set up some cooperatives to help them continue with their traditional Mayan methods of agriculture, but also export just enough to give them money to live on.
It was there that I also discovered how much I loved farming. I’d been doing that for about a year, when I met my husband David. It was at a party in Atlanta: we were across a crowded room, one of those beautiful moments where I fell in love at first sight. He’s British, visiting his brother who lived in Atlanta, and being such a practical man he just swept in and sorted me out. I was living in a yellow school bus at the time, freezing half to death, and right away he put in my wood-stove, and made my life more comfortable.
It wasn’t long before I was pregnant with my first daughter, and we decided that we didn’t want to bring up a child in the city. We both wanted to live on the land: so we moved to a site near Glastonbury, in a beautiful woodland setting, living in a bender where our first child was born. We spent three years there: then we got a truck and lived in that for the next year, working on lots of different organic farms, travelling also to France and Spain. Our second daughter was born in the truck when we were working on a farm in Wales. Later, we moved to an organic farming community in Somerset called Tinker’s Bubble. We were there 5 years, and it was everything we had been looking for while we had been travelling. We had our own bit of land, and there was a great community with down-to-earth people, trying to make a living from land-based enterprises which didn’t use any fossil fuels. It was there that David taught himself to make green-wood furniture, and I learned things like growing vegetables and salad crops, milking cows and making cheese. It was also there that our 3rd and 4th daughters were born, the midwife having to battle her way up the hill to the little round-house we’d built for ourselves. It was an idyllic place for young children to grown up in, and we still feel part of that “family”.
We had been feeling that we needed a bit more land, to make our enterprise a bit more of a commercial proposition. So when we found our 43 acres here at Wootton Fitzpaine, which was for sale at auction, we had no money at all, with just 2 weeks to raise it! Our bank was really supportive, and had faith in how our plan for life on the land was sound. So the day before the auction, they gave us the go-ahead: just before the bidding started, David bit into a piece of bread which, strangely, contained a five-penny piece. “I’m going to buy this farm with all I have in my pocket”, he said, which is this five-penny piece”. To our great joy, our bid was successful. We built our homes here, with our friends Kerry and Olly, who share the farm with us, then started with our poly-tunnels, and vegetable crops. Later we added livestock, producing everything organically and selling mostly through market stalls. The whole enterprise is “off the grid”, meaning we have no need of mains services: we produce our own electricity from wind turbines.
Alongside my work as an organic farmer and a mother, I spend a lot of time campaigning for small farmers and their rights worldwide. In this country that means helping people through the planning system to enable them to live and work on the land. I try to share our own experience of getting permission to build our house to, hopefully, inspire others to do the same. Our own planning struggle was quite a stressful time, but we felt we had a right to live here, to be independent of the state in both housing and income. It can be hard work, but every single day, we enjoy moments of pure joy, affirmations of our way of life.’
Up Front 02/09
When it comes to big stories, such as the invasion of Iraq, the credit crunch, or more recently the inauguration of President Barack Obama – I think of my father. I wonder what he would have made of some of the events of the last decade. He was a man who made a difference to many people’s lives, whilst at the same time having his fair share of laughs. I recently reread a story about an escapade he and some friends were involved in. They had been solving the world’s problems over a couple of drinks in a bar when the landlord decided it was time to close. As all other bars had already closed, these friends hit on the idea of finding an international airport transit lounge in which to carry on their conversation. They contacted a local air taxi service and convinced the owner to fly them the equivalent of the distance from Puddletown to Exeter. As they took off, my father noticed two red lights ahead of the plane. He asked the pilot what the lights were for. “Oh that’s the wife” replied the pilot. “When she turns left I know it’s time to lift off or we go into the hedge.” They arrived to an empty international airport, apart from a lonely barman polishing glasses to kill the time. As it happened the local constabulary were in attendance and the sergeant turned out to be an old friend. He signed off duty, joined them at the bar for a few hours and waved goodbye to them as they set off for home in the morning. The tale was recounted by the pilot to many and picked up by a local paper. Whatever he would have made of the way we live today I think my father would have found something to chuckle about – they sure went to great lengths to solve the world’s problems in those days.
Peter Gostelow
Robin Mills went to meet Peter Gostelow in Godmanstone, in the Cerne Valley. Peter has spent the last three years returning from Japan, travelling through 30 countries, covering some 30,000 miles… on a bicycle. This is his story.
“I suppose when I was younger, travelling was always exciting: our family holidays often involved sailing, which could be pretty adventurous. After University I travelled alone in Africa for 8 months, using public transport. I loved it, but sometimes there was a sense of missing out on rich experiences by sitting in buses and trains as the countryside passed by.
So I returned to the UK, but I knew now I wanted to travel more. I trained as a TEFL teacher, and during this process the idea came to me of making a “big trip”, and doing it on a bicycle. Eventually I was offered a job teaching English in a Japanese school. During one of my holidays, to the complete bewilderment of my Japanese employers, I cycled round an island close to the school, about 1000 miles in 3 weeks. I found that an amazing experience, one which really confirmed that my idea might work, but the notion of actually cycling all the way to the UK was so crazy that I kept it pretty much to myself. Nobody likes to announce something like that, and then not do it.
On the face of it, planning such an expedition is impossible. I had maps plastered all over the walls of my room, and read a couple of inspiring travelogues, by German traveller Heinz Stucke, and the late Ian Hibble, an Englishman who was well-known in the cycling world. Stucke describes the simplicity of bicycle travel and how it allows the traveller to fully experience the richness of cultures and communities.
Getting visas for the countries I wanted to cross was only possible to a limited extent: I’d no idea how long it was going to take to get from a to b, so dates of entry and departure were a complete unknown. Some countries, used to western tourists, are easy: some, especially Iran and former Soviet states, need months of planning. I realised I couldn’t really make a specific planned route, with little idea of what to expect, but at a guess I thought it might last a year and a half. The equipment I took had been carefully researched, and as a keen photographer, a digital SLR camera was a vital part of it.
Leaving Japan on August 1st 2005, my first stop was South Korea, then by ferry to Eastern China. Although the most direct route from there would have been to head west across Central China, by November the weather would have been bitterly cold all the way, so I turned south and made for Southeast Asia. From then on, the weather became an important factor in deciding the route: cycling in cold or wet weather is really hard, as is camping out at night. However, I chose destinations for all sorts of reasons, but often simply because of striking landscapes, like Tibet, Western China, Pakistan: the photography motivated me, and when actually cycling I would be looking at the scenery as if through a lens. On a bike, the slow pace allowed me to see images and sometimes to go back and take the shot. Arriving in towns, I’d spend a day or more walking round, taking photos. From my maps I’d choose the smallest roads, hoping that the people who lived in the remoter places along those roads would be more excited to see a westerner on a bike, making the experience for me more interesting: fewer tourists, and more photo opportunities. Of course, despite the freedom of cycling, it’s often very limiting. Many amazing places were just too far away to get to in the time available. Sometimes I thought it would have been better on foot, especially for photography, and sometimes I wished I’d had a motorbike.
In some countries, like Thailand, where I’d been before on holiday, I never felt very far out of my comfort zone: in most places English was spoken, but in other places I could go days and weeks without hearing my own language. I had a Chinese phrase book, so that in remote China I could find food, directions and accommodation, but it was simple communication. I had lots of energy early in the trip, and I didn’t feel too isolated, just excited by the adventure. There was something about the nature of the trip which meant that the longer I went without something, the more I appreciated it when I got it – like company with other westerners, good food, or a hot shower. It did get harder for me though as the trip went on.
It’s true to say, generally, that the places with the fewest tourists are the friendliest. In Muslim countries, like Pakistan, hospitality is part of the religion. Being invited to people’s homes for food, or to stay in their house, almost made me feel a bit trapped, but I always felt incredibly indebted to them for their generosity. I can’t remember ever feeling really in danger: or if I did it was due to my misreading a situation, or some kind of prejudice lurking in my mind. Back home in the UK, with hindsight, I wonder how I actually coped with some situations, but at the time I just did. I also think back on places like Tibet, in the Himalayas, incredibly remote, where if something had happened to me there was no one to help for miles and miles. I rarely ever knew in advance where I was going to stay at night: it became a routine to just deal with situations as they arose. The trip showed me how we’ve become so security dependant in our world these days.
I headed south into India, to Delhi. My Mum flew out to meet me, and we took a trip by train to the southern tip of India. It was great to have a few weeks break from cycling. When she went home, I cycled back to Delhi, finding the diversity of culture, religion, language, and the intensity of the experience almost overwhelming. In northern India the temperature was rising, so it was time to head back into the cooler mountains – north through Pakistan towards western China. This route followed the famous Karakoram Highway, where my neck was often craning to look up at 7000m high peaks. From China, my route led across central Asia, through the former Soviet states of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, whose cultures are both Muslim and Russian influenced. With a little trepidation I was now heading into Iran.
I’d avoided the heat of the Iranian summer, but my direct route home from there would have meant a European winter, so I headed south, and extended my trip through the Middle East and North Africa for several more months. I crossed back to Europe by ferry from Tunisia to Sicily, and cycled through Italy, Germany, Switzerland and France in the spring and early summer.
The homecoming in England was going to be strange. While I’d been away, my Mum had moved to Godmanstone, in Dorset: it was a home I didn’t know. But that last day, in July 2008, almost 3 years after I left Japan, I cycled from Gillingham thorough wonderful scenery, past fields misty in the early morning sun. There was a sign in Godmanstone which, though my tear-filled eyes, I read as “Pete”, and I thought this must be it: it actually said “Fete”. There was of course a huge family welcome for me round the corner.
People often ask if the trip has changed me: fundamentally I’m the same person as when I set out, but I do think I’m more open-minded. I accept things for what they are now, having had all these experiences. Over the coming months I’m interested in giving talks/slideshows to schools, clubs and organisations about the trip, as well as planning my next adventure. If anyone wants to get in contact my website is www.petergostelow.com.”
