Lisa Fagan

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Lisa Fagan: very, very quickly I think I got roped in to be the treasurer, you know how it is, nobody ever wants to take on any of these roles. So I took on the role of treasurer at first. And then very quickly I was the very grand sounding title, President of the Conservation- Now, that just meant you were the person in charge. But I became President of the Queen’s Conservation Volunteers. And I just found that I had a real aptitude. I mean yes I liked nature and everything but I was a good organiser. I discovered I was a good organiser. So I could liaise with BTCV, the actual charity. BTCV so they owned the minibuses, the trailers, the tools. They managed the sites. And we provided some assistance on a Wednesday afternoon. In those days and maybe still there were no lectures on a Wednesday from lunchtime onwards and that was the afternoon for clubs and societies. The university had maybe 200 clubs and societies, everything from you know Dungeons and Dragons to political groups and GAA and rugby and soccer and you know all the sports and everything. So on a Wednesday afternoon we would all wait at one o’clock outside the students union building and Conservation Volunteers would pick us up in a minibus and there’d be a trailer on the back and it would be full of like spades and shovels and trees and you know all kinds of tools. And we’d plant trees, or we’d clear out a pond, or we’d do hedge laying. And it was just something to get into. And you kind of, I mean it’s not, it’s not really, I don’t actually think it’s all about the work, it’s just about finding a tribe. And I think that’s as much to do with it as anything. Just finding a tribe.Toby Butler: Yes. So can you just give me, yes do you remember any particular or examples that you particularly enjoyed doing with them? Any highlights?Lisa Fagan: Well they’d bring you, I mean Conservation Volunteers, I call them Conservation Volunteers, strictly speaking British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, so they have an office here. I mean I could walk to it in ten minutes from here. So they would negotiate with landowners to manage a particular piece of woodland. It might be, you know, the local hospital has a woodland that’s all overgrown and they want to improve access to the woodland for the patients and the staff, you know, that sort of thing. So yes they’d have brought us to the site which might have been let’s say Belvoir Park Hospital. And the woodland all around the hospital would have been overgrown with rhododendron and laurel planted way back more than 100 years ago as cover for pheasant. And we’re going to cut it all down and plant native trees that will support insects and birds and create a habitat for wildlife, because the rhododendron and the laurel supported nothing. It was that sort of waxy leaf that wasn’t edible by insects and you know it was just as I say planted for pheasant, you know, by the big landed gentry sort of estates they planted it. So we’d have been busy cutting down laurel. And it was something I could do and I formed friendships and it was great craic. And I loved the organising side. So even though I was organising these Wednesdays, so one of my jobs was I wanted a good turnout, I wanted the minibus to be full. You know I wanted there to be fifteen volunteers in that minibus every Wednesday at one o’clock. So I’d ring round a few people and I’d put up posters. And then I thought, do you know what, we’d have more time if we went away for a whole weekend. So we started then going away for the weekend. And we’d go to, I remember Blessingbourne Estate which is Fivemiletown, County Tyrone, a privately owned estate. And we would have gone there and got in, you know, maybe with these big chest Wellingtons up to here. And you’d have been pulling all sorts of shopping trolleys and dead sheep and everything out of the lake, you know. And just really cleaning out the lake with big grappling hooks and all sorts and filling up, it was just something you got a sense of achievement, you know. You formed friendships and you’d a sense of achievement that you were doing something good. It maybe didn’t go much deeper than that. And so I was, yes, I think, I think I started, I think I enjoyed these weekend breaks a lot because we’d go away, you know, there’d be fifteen of us in a bungalow or a, yes there were various sort of residential places, Clandeboye Estate, there were bedrooms there and kitchen facilities. We could have stayed on Clandeboye Estate near Bangor or Castle Archdale Estate which is near Irvinestown, County Fermanagh, or the Blessingbourne Estate in Fivemiletown. There were various places you could stay and do a whole weekend of work. So you’d work all day Saturday, all day Sunday. And then but I enjoyed the craic, you know, just finding your, as I say, finding your tribe. So in the evening by then I’d become vegetarian you see, I became vegetarian on New Year’s Day 1987. And that’s really when it all started. After that first term of finding my feet at uni, I went to uni in October and I would have had October, November, December to sort of find my feet and figure out. But by the beginning of 1987 I’d become vegetarian. And I was running, very quickly after that, I’m not sure how soon but quite quickly, I joined the Conservation Volunteers January ’87, became vegetarian January ’87. And quite quickly I was then running the Conservation Volunteers and running these weekend breaks, which meant liaising with the charity and finding the volunteers and talking to the landowner and getting the tools and the trees and then making sure we had enough food and we’d have to bring all the food with us for the weekend. And just the organising. I liked being an organiser. I just enjoyed being an organiser. I’m maybe a bit bossy.Toby Butler: [laughing] Right.Lisa Fagan: So I enjoyed organising it. And the food and the tools and the trees and talking to the landowner and the charity and yes.[…]Toby Butler: Yes. Yes. Yes. And you mentioned that, you know, you kind of found your tribe really. Can you just sort of tell me, describe that tribe, describe kind of what were the people and what was it like? What was the community like that you joined there? Could you, is it possible to paint me a kind of word picture of the kinds of people you encountered?Lisa Fagan: Do you know I did make some friends there but I really found my tribe later at Friends of the Earth. I think I really found my tribe at the Friends of the Earth because they were a fairly eclectic group of people at Conservation Volunteers. They were students, so they were a mixed bunch of people and they weren’t necessarily my people. They weren’t necessarily all my people. So maybe what I found there was my purpose not my tribe. My purpose was I was a good organiser, I discovered I was a good organiser.British Library catalogue number: C2037/81 Project clip number: 22