Caroline Lucas

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:Chris Church: Right. So you came in as communications officer. But I understand that you had quite an impact in terms of kind of getting people to really kind of communicate better.Caroline Lucas: Well that’s kind. I mean I hope I did. It was, at that time the Green Party three employees. Myself as the press officer, John Bishop as the office manager and Chris Rose was the elections coordinator. And the office was in, it moved from Clapham and the office was in Balham by the time I worked there full time. And it was just, just looking back at it, you know, it’s so funny to think how we worked in the sense that obviously there were no computers. So we were typing out press releases on a typewriter and then using the old Roneo machine to make multiple copies of them and trying to get them into the post before the next day so that the press release would be on the journalist’s desk in the morning. The revolutionary idea that you could actually phone up the Guardian or The Times or whatever else and ask to be put straight through to copy and then you could just read out your press release and these copytakers would just be sat there basically transcribing the press release as you read it out over the phone to them. I mean it was all so slow and cumbersome in retrospect when you think now about how quickly, via Twitter or just through, just through emails that you can get your message out so much faster. So it does feel funny looking back at just how cumbersome that whole process was.British Library catalogue number: C2037/75 Project clip number: 56