The u3a radio podcast is back, with an episode that features an interview with Islington u3a member Rosemary who travelled in the footsteps of Victorian explorer Nellie Bly, new Third Age Trust Chair Liz Thackray and more. The u3a radio podcast is created by our team of talented u3a members with radio experience. u3a is a UK wide movement where older adults come together to learn, continue their interests and have fun. Listen to previous episodes of the podcast on the u3a YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrqc8qYDZ4U24lq0J4qx0fQ Not yet a member of u3a? Join us now - https://u3a.org.uk/join
- [Nick] Hello, and welcome to the return of the u3a radio podcast after our summer break. We hope you've been suitably refreshed and are ready to listen to some more stories from the u3a organization nationwide which, after the recent AGM, now has a new chair, whom we'll be talking to in a moment. I'm Nick Bailey, and in the rest of this month's episode we hear how a u3a member followed in the footsteps of the Victorian adventurer Nellie Bly, by going around the world in under 80 days.
- [Rosemary] I wanted to choose someone's footsteps to follow around, and Nellie Bly literally jumped out of the computer screen, and that was it. It was me and her, we clicked, we're still together.
- [Nick] We visit the working farm at Tatton Park in Cheshire, to hear about their field to fork story. And we debunk the myth that when it comes to music, u3A members only like Vera Lynn and Joe Loss.
- [Lee] If you look back to those wonderful sort of Ready, Steady, Go programs in the sixties and you've got Otis Redding and The Supremes playing, and, you know, there's, you know, there's women in miniskirts dancing to them. Well, they're our age now and maybe older.
- [Nick] At the recent u3a AGM, Dr. Liz Thackray, from Mold in Wales, was elected as the new chair of the Third Age Trust. And after the meeting, she chatted with Ela Watts about her life and visions for the future of u3a.
- [Liz] Like most people, I'm a very ordinary person. I grew up in southwest Lancashire, I did go to university, which was the sort of done thing if you were at grammar school back in the late sixties. I've got a career background that has involved working in social services organizations, particularly with relation to community development. I've worked for a number of big voluntary organizations in senior roles. I made a drastic decision, just as I was turning 40, that I actually wanted a child, and my son was born when I was 41, which led to some serious changes of direction. When he was a year old, my husband and I moved to Germany with my husband's job, and stayed there for four years. Learned a lot about what it meant to live in a different culture, even though it's still a north European country. Also learned that my son was a little different than many of the other little boys of his age, and came back to find that we were basically getting into the special educational needs system. My son ended up with diagnoses of Asperger's and dyslexia, and yes, he was quite a handful when he was young, but he's a great guy now. I realized as well, we returned to the UK, that I couldn't work at the same level as I had done previously. Thought through what could I do. I'd been interested in computing and had introduced computer systems in two of the organizations I'd worked in in the past. Did a conversion degree into management information systems. At the time I finished that degree, I had thought I might try and do a PGCE, but I'd really gone back to school for too long, I thought. So instead I found that the Open University were advertising for associate lecturers for one of their new degree courses on 'you, your computer and the internet.' Applied, became an OU tutor and, at the same time, got a post at a local girl's school as their IT manager. Not a teaching post, but a technical post. Stayed at the school for about seven years, but continued to do a lot of stuff with the Open University, not just on the course I'd originally been teaching, but on a number of other courses, including research with children and young people and various other things. Gained a lot of different experiences. I've got a lot to thank the OU for because they gave me opportunities to get involved in national programs and organizing an international conference and doing various things. And during that time, it went through my mind that there were people who were doing similar things to some of the things I were doing, who were getting PhDs on the back of it. So I spoke to somebody I knew at the University of Sussex, which was my local university where we were living at the time, and she sort of welcomed me with open arms to do a PhD. So I described my PhD as my retirement preparation, and it focused actually on the battle that parents and others face when getting the needs of children with special needs met.
- [Ela] So what do you see now as the direction of travel for the u3a, because we've had a lot of disruption in the past year, and it sounds as though you are most ably qualified to take us in a new direction. What have you got planned?
- [Liz] That's a very interesting question! If I said I've actually got a blank sheet of paper, you probably wouldn't believe me, but that's fairly true. I've got some ideas about the direction of travel we need to be going in, and that sort of thing. We need to be ready to move with the times. At the AGM, I spoke of the u3A being a bit like a river. And the illustration I used was of the Danube, which starts from a very, very, very tiny spring in a crazy little town in the middle of the Black Forest. I was there two years ago and it was fascinating to see this little tiny spring, which, as it travels through Germany, becomes slowly a really big river. What we do know is that if we are going to continue to grow and to develop, we need to bring new blood in and we need to look at how we effectively market ourselves to those people who haven't yet discovered us. How do we raise our profile so that people actually know what we're about? And that we are a living, lively, but large community of people who are all wanting to make the most of the latter years of our lives, whatever age we are, it doesn't really matter.
- [Nick] Liz Thackray, the new chair of the u3a Trust. In 1889, a trailblazing young woman journalist successfully took on the solo challenge of going around the world in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg in fewer than 80 days. Inspired by the story, Rosemary Brown of Islington u3a, decided to follow Bly's example. And she's been explaining to Joanne Watson more about the little known Bly and how she achieved her goal.
- [Rosemary] Well, the original Nellie Bly, if you want to be specific was Elizabeth Jane Cochran. And she changed her name to Nellie Bly because back then women journalists had to have pen names. She pioneered a new kind of brave journalism called investigative journalism. She went undercover in an insane asylum for women to determine what was happening to them because there were atrocities happening there and she actually experienced the atrocities. She ended up staying for 10 days. In the end, Joseph Pulitzer, the famous publisher had to send lawyers to get her out.
- [Joanne] She then came up with this great idea of going in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg, who of course is fictional, but how did she sell that to her very skeptical editors?
- [Rosemary] They said, fantastic idea, but you can't go. We have to send a man. A woman would not be able to do this. You'd have to have a chaperone. You'd have so many trunks for your clothes that it would slow you down. You don't speak any languages and you are a woman. So Nellie Bly thought about it and said, fine, send the men. I'm going to the competing newspaper. And let's just see who wins this race. They both looked at each other and they knew that she would win the race, but then they waited for more than a year before they asked her to go. She was on that ship on the 14th November, 1889 with one small bag, we call it a Gladstone bag, but it was 16 by seven inches. So very, very small.
- [Joanne] What was interesting about that bag, Rosemary, was what she had in it. She had a tennis blazer.
- [Rosemary] I know, that I don't understand. The thing found the most difficult was her giant jar of cold cream. But back in her day, women did not use cosmetics. They used cold cream and she would need cold cream to protect her face from the elements because she was never downstairs or hiding in some cabin. She was out on the deck. What's in her bag is unbelievable. And I actually took a bag of a similar size, but you can imagine today I could fit in things that are waterproof, windproof, mosquito proof. They pack down to nothing. You stick them in the sink and they're ready the next day. She had one outfit, one gown and one coat, and then lots of undergarments. But for the equivalent space I had about 14 mix and match things. So it was far easier for me.
- [Joanne] We've got ahead of ourselves because what you haven't told us is why you decided to do this.
- [Rosemary I decided that I would like to promote women explorers because I was quite frustrated. My millennial daughter and her friends were more interested in celebrities. To me, the true role models are people like Nellie Bly and Isabella Bird, and Mary Kingsley, and the people that went traveling around the world on their own when women didn't do those things, to me, that's what we need to have as role models, not celebrities. I wanted to choose someone's footsteps to follow around. And Nellie Bly literally jumped out of the computer screen and that was it, it was me and her. We clicked, we're still together. And I'm really pleased because I do believe I've been able to get her back on the map, which was my goal. Her motto was nothing is impossible if you put the right amount of energy into it. And I think that's something we really need to hold on to, especially now, especially going through a pandemic.
- [Joanne] Now, Nellie went by ship. You went by planes and of course, the places that she went to, which were very British, which she didn't actually like very much. What were the similarities that you found, or the places that you found, that Nellie had also discovered in her trip?
- [Rosemary] The places where I felt the closest to her were in the study of Jules Verne in Amiens, France. She traveled 180 miles out of her way, but it was all worthwhile because Jules Verne and his wife Honorine and his dog Follette, they all fell in love with Nellie Bly and she fell in love with them and they followed her race through the newspapers the entire time, and when she got back to New York, there was a telegram from the Vernes saying, 'Bravo, Bravo, Bravo.' And the time that I felt closest to her in Japan was inside the belly of the Great Buddha in Kamakura. Now I knew that she'd been able to walk into this Buddha and climb all the way through his body to the top, to look through his eyes on the surrounding countryside. But I never, ever dreamed that he is still open and you can only go as far as his belly, but I was in the belly at the exact same place that she was. Now of all the travels of all my, whatever, 22,500 miles, those are the only places where I could be a hundred percent sure that she and I had stood in the same place.
- [Joanne] Now in Singapore, she bought herself a very unusual souvenir. A monkey called McGinty.
- [Rosemary] Yep. But it was a huge mistake because that monkey hated Nellie Bly and the monkey hated any humans that came in contact with, and in fact, he harmed some of the people that worked on the ship. But she stuck by him and she took them all the way back to New York. We do know that he wrecked her apartment, but we don't know what happened after that. Perhaps they say she was given to the zoo.
- [Joanne] We've spoken how courageous Nellie Bly was to do this trip. You did this trip as a solo woman in an era 120 years later, that is still quite a tricky one to contemplate.
- [Rosemary] Like Nellie, I have an innate sense of adventure and I'd already done things like climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Her goal was to complete the race faster than Phileas Fogg. My goal was to get Nellie Bly back on the map as a role model. And on the very island where she pioneered investigative reporting, they are now going to, shortly, unveil a most spectacular installation as a tribute to her. Finally, Nellie Bly is going to be a heroine.
- [Nick] If you want to know more, Rosemary has written about our adventures in a book called Following Nellie Bly. If you're into pop and rock music, you may be familiar with the name Lee Wellbrook from Thanet u3a who has given many workshops on the subject, but Peter Clift wanted to find out about his personal taste, and how he got into pop music in the first place.
- [Lee] It started very long time ago. At the age of about 14, I started listening to music in a different way. I kind of, in my head trying to want to understand how music worked. I don't read music. I haven't been trained in music, but I kind of wanted to work out how all the bits fitted together. I have also taught myself how to play a number of instruments so I play guitar, mandolin, banjo, various other things, again, all by by rote and trying to work out what makes the sounds sound like they do. Why does some music appeal to me in some ways, and other music and music appealed to me in different ways?
- [Peter] What would you say as your, as a youngster, was your favorite kind of music to listen to?
- [Lee] It went through a number of phases, actually. I think from my early teenage years, I really got into a lot of Motown, Tamla Motown music. In fact, the first live gig that I ever went to was The Four Tops at Lewisham Odeon. So I spent quite a bit of time, very sort of into that sort of Motown music. But then as I got into my sort of later teens, my hair got a bit longer and I started developing interest in sort of the, more the heavy rock stuff with the Led Zeppelins and the Deep Purples and whatever. And my big favorite through that time, The Who. I was an enormous Who fan, I got to see them play a number of times, particularly down at the Valley, Charlton's ground, where they played two big concerts there. And I saw them when they were touring Quadrophenia. So again, astonishing live band to see. One of my big influences, Bruce Springsteen. I'd just discovered Springsteen when the Born to Run album was released and I had this sort of epiphany of, you can write music like this? You're allowed to do this stuff? And yeah, my music tastes is developed over the years. So it's gone from Motown stuff, which I still love. And I still love that, that sixties, seventies, soul music, not so much that heavy rock stuff that's disappeared into the background a bit. I suddenly got caught up in some of the punk new wave things in the sort of mid-seventies. Latterly, I've been listening to an awful lot of sort of Americana music. So American roots music, a very strong interest in blues as well. So yeah, a reasonable sort of mix of stuff. I think I remember saying to someone a little while ago that, you know, old punks never die, they just grew up to like Country and Western music.
- [Peter] Talking about punk, and about all these other music types of music, it seems quite long way from the usual kind of idea I think of many people have of u3a, of people just sitting around listening to, well music from the war really, or the pre-war. So do you think we should try and dispel that image?
- [Lee] Oh, absolutely. Because you have to remember that if you look back to those wonderful sort of Ready, Steady, Go programs in the sixties, and you've got Otis Redding, and the Supremes playing and there's, you know, there's women in miniskirts dancing to them. Well, they're our age now and maybe older. So, you know, they, they were the ones who were listening to that kind of music and for them, the likes of, you know, Vera Lynn and Glenn Miller and Joe Loss and whatever, was the music of their parents and very much the music of my parents. So the music that I sort of closely associate myself with is sort of anything from about 1967, particularly to sort of the mid seventies, early eighties or whatever. And that era is, you know, if I was going to put my hand on it, yeah, apart from going back to real early blues stuff, the 1920s, but, you know, that's the music, that I grew up with. And I think anybody who grows up, the music you hear when you are 16 or 17, is the stuff that I think that resonates and stays with you. And we have to remember that, you know, for me, I'm in my mid sixties, you know, that that would have been the late sixties, the early seventies, that would have been the music that was worked for me.
- [Nick] Lee Wellbrook. I would like now to introduce you to a new member of our team Val Dawson from Knutsford u3a in Cheshire, who for many years was an army wife abroad, but during her return visits to the UK, she managed to achieve more than her 15 minutes of fame. Ela Watts wanted to know how she achieved this so-called stardom.
- [Val] Hardly, hardly! I think just a frustrated newsreader that never quite made it. I think whenever I got back to UK and had spare time, I would, starting off with hospital radio which lots of people did in those days. And that was so exciting, I really, really enjoyed it and had my own program every week, learnt a lot, met some really interesting people. I happened to be a Liverpool at the time, at Liverpool Radio Royal, no longer exists, I'm sure, but I had some wonderful guests in the studio, including Carla Lane, would you believe, I was thrilled to meet her and had a lovely chat with her. Then we're talking mid seventies here or early seventies. The other person I met was Eddie Braeburn, who was the script writer for Morecambe & Wise. He came in, they came into the studio live and chatted away to me, very, very happily and ending up with Pete Murray who had then a very popular lunchtime program. And he came to Liverpool and did a, did an outside broadcast and a fun thing. And I was invited to go on that. So met him and interviewed him. So got the interviewing bug around then, thanks to Pete, Pete Murray, who said, you're good. He said, you should go on the radio. So he gave me a lot of contacts. And from then on, I sort of badgered the BBC until I tried to get some bits and pieces over the next 20 odd years, really.
- [Ela] But you also broke into television, didn't you?
- [Val] Yes. That was a bit strange. That was much later, certainly. I think the first one was the holiday program, which was in the nineties, we're going to the nineties now, got into it in a very strange way. A friend and I had been discussing being single. I was then single, of a certain age. She was 10 years younger. And then we decided there wasn't many holidays available then for our sort of age group. So the holiday program was on and I just was obviously bored one day and faxed them and said, we're here, we're two young ladies. We'd like a holiday for singles. What are you going to do about it? And to our astonishment, they wrote back straight away and said, we think the idea is a good one. We don't feature singles holidays much. Why don't you come over and we'll video, you know, we'll audition you and see if you'd be any good. So we did, and off we went eventually to Television Centre, had our little audition interview and obviously got the job. And she and I went off on a Caribbean cruise, which was delightful. This was summer 1999, had a super time. And it was all filmed on the telly a few weeks later. So we had a great fun.
- [Ela] And I think you also made Woman's Hour, didn't you, which is a very iconic program.
- [Val] Oh, I did, yes, I was thrilled with that. I'd had the odd interview on Woman's Hour years before. While I was in Germany, the Woman's Hour program was on the the BFBS on the daily sort of program output. But for some reason or other it was stopped and this was in the, golly, when would it be? Mid, late seventies, I suppose. And we got very cross about it, and we ran a campaign to re-institute Woman's Hour back on the schedules. It took six months, but eventually they did get it back for us. And so we were so thrilled. We could sit down at two o'clock in the afternoon, we wives, and listen to a Woman's Hour, which was great. Then they got to hear about it, of course, they talked about it and invited me to London, to the studios, which, eventually I got to see them, meet them, and really got on really well with one of the producers. And I got onto a freelance interviewers course, then, which again came out of the blue and short music program for World Service came out of that. Yeah. From then on I've sort of kept going really, every opportunity that presents itself.
- [Ela] Do you ever get a chance to fulfill your main dream? Which was to be a newscaster?
- [Val] No, no, I never did. But the last one, I think I must tell you about, of course, is moving in recent years to a shed in my son's garden. I now live there, I'm fully retired, and for various reasons moved into my little lodge, which is in his back garden. And I wrote about that to various people. Woman's Hour again, took it up. So they decided that it was worth having a chat with me. And Jane Garvey, I spoke to Jane live on the air once, and that was super, that was about four years ago now.
- [Ela] Well, what's next for you then?
- [Val] What's next? Well, who knows? Could be u3a and a podcast. I mean, you never know, that would be exciting! Yes. That would be fitting end, I think to my absolutely non-career in broadcasting.
- [Nick] Val Dawson. And we thought we'd put Val to work straight away by asking her to spend a day at a farm. A popular destination for u3a groups in Cheshire is Tatton park in Knutsford, an award-winning visitor attraction owned by the National Trust, and managed and maintained by Cheshire East council. It has 2000 acres of parkland, beautiful formal gardens, and a grand mansion to explore. Val was a volunteer there some years ago when she showed schoolchildren how to bake scones, a taste of life downstairs. Val made a return visit recently, but this time wanted to know more about the working farm, which is at the heart of the estate. She spoke to farm manager, Jayne Chapman, who told her more about the field to fork story.
- [Jayne] About four years ago now we had some funding off the heritage lottery, and we were able to restore our three-storey mill here. So we were able to tell the whole food story, from milling crops to growing them, and then feeding the animals, and feeding ourselves as well really, so that whole process. So we were able to restore all these machines that we've got in the mill really. So bring back all the sounds and the smells of, you know, the miller in there and he used to spend the whole day in that mill, you know, the dust and the hard work and the narrow stairs. And it's making people understand how huge the edge to an estate used to be. You know, they used to extend right to the center of Manchester. And this farm here was a massive hub. You know, we've got the weighbridge outside because all the tenant farms used to bring their corn to have it milled here as well, as well as all the corn that we milled here for the farm animals and we produced food for the whole of the estate. And obviously the very wealthy Egerton family as well.
- [Val] And the other events that took place, take place, in the mansion too, don't they? The other parts of the actual estate, apart from the farm?
- [Jayne] They do, there's the upstairs and downstairs tour in the mansion that tells about, you know, when there were servants up there, the old hall does fabulous medieval days as well, and loads in the garden as well. So loads for the school kids to do really, but we wanted really to, the farm in particular, to reach the older audience, you know, i.e., some of the u3a groups, the WIs, so we started our Farming Folk of the Forties tour, which has been, before COVID, this was hugely successful. So they're able to come, and they're able to meet some of these characters that lived and worked on the farm. They can meet Mr. Wigglesworth, who was the land agent here, and they can meet Nancy Pringle, who was actually, she was a land army girl here. And we met Nancy Pringle's daughter and grandson really, and it was amazing to see their photographs of there now, you know, she's here on the farm or in a land army girl -
- [Val] Oh yes!
- [Jayne] And to hear all their tales really. And the same with Mr. Wigglesworth, we met his grandson. And obviously as well, Auntie Mary who, Paula, our lovely volunteer, plays the character.
- [Val] We may well be meeting Auntie Mary shortly, as well.
- [Jayne] And she has got a huge knowledge of, you know, the whole estate as well. So it's great for these groups. You know, they come around, they spend 10 minutes with these characters because there's lots of characters, each character, and then they go in mill and then they meet all these animals really and they've been hugely successful, and it's great to have this different audience.
- [Paula] Hello I'm Auntie Mary, nice to meet you.
- [Val] You too. You're Paula, in fact, in real life.
- [Paula] I am. But you've been Auntie Mary for quite some time?
- [Paula] Six years. So I'm sort of part-time Mary and part Paula.
- [Val] How often do you do it? Does it vary?
- [Paula] It varies, but I'm Mary, before COVID twice a week on a Tuesday and a Friday, I came and was Aunt Mary. And not only Aunt Mary, I play the wicked witch, or the nice witch really,
- [Val] Of course.
- [Paula] At Halloween, Tatiana, the Tatton witch, and various other characters. Scarecrow for our country fair, and so I play a scarecrow, very diverse, but Aunt Mary is my main character and the character really I love.
- [Val] How did you fall into this, then, had you retired?
- [Paula] I'd retired. And unfortunately I'd lost my husband, so I was on my own. And it was a friend who told me that they wanted volunteers here at the farm. So they had an open day. I came along and the rest is history.
- [Val] And Aunt Mary you love the animals too?
- [Paula] I absolutely adore animals. I was brought up on a farm. So was brought up with animals. So really it's second nature to me. I really, really enjoy them. It's lovely. Although Aunt Mary doesn't have an awful lot to do with animals, I'm always there, if I'm not Aunt Mary, to do whatever is needed, as far as the animals are concerned,
- [Val] When you're performing your role as Aunt Mary, you're in the little cottage here.
- [Paula] I'm in the little cottage because that's where Mary lived. Her name was Mary Sant. And she was born in 1879 in Rochdale, which isn't very far from here. One of six children, and her mother and father both worked for Tatton Estate. And of course, as Jane said, Tatton in those days, Mary came here in 1909, and in those days, Tatton was a huge estate, really huge, spreading as far as Manchester and right over to Buxton. That's why there were so many roads called Egerton Road and all the likes. So yes, Aunt Mary, as I say, is a real character. She got the name of Aunt Mary, I think because she was a loved character. A well-loved character, probably the only lady that, apart from the land girls, that worked on the farm. And although she didn't do farm work as such, she was an integral part of the farm because of course she, she lived on the farm.
- [Val] What the future though? Is it just more exciting things planned for the next year or two, now that we're all so-called back to normal?
- [Jayne] Yes. There's always something on the agenda here. We obviously want to do more food demos really. We want to be able to sell all our own produce down here, you know, and have a cafe with our own produce, really, as I said, we really want to promote locally sourced produce, really. And what better way, you know, we're talking field to fork, well let's actually do that. You know, we've got all the field, let's put it on the fork and give it to the public, really.
- [Nick] Jayne Chapman. And before that, Auntie Mary, AKA, Paula Martin, both stalwarts of the Tatton Park estate ending this month's episode. Remember we're always on the lookout for stories, whether it's something you've done, or you know someone within your u3a with a tale to tell, we'd love to hear from you. To get in touch, just email communications@u3a.org.uk. Next month, we hope to be speaking to the winners of the u3a creative writing competition. And we talked to the composer of After the Storm, the latest song by the u3a choir. My thanks to Peter Clift, Joanne Watson, Val Dawson, and Ela Watts for the interviews and to Ela for producing the podcast. Until next time, this is Nick Bailey saying goodbye.