Chris Rose

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:Saskia Papadakis: So were people living on Brent Spar?Chris Rose: Yes. We were because it had been abandoned.Saskia Papadakis: You were?Chris Rose: Yes. I was for a while.Saskia Papadakis: For how long?Chris Rose: And then I was on the Moby Dick, the boat. I don’t know, I was there for a week or two I think.Saskia Papadakis: And what was it like? How did you-?Chris Rose: Cold and wet. [laughing]Saskia Papadakis: How did you plan it? Like what did you need to survive on a-Chris Rose: They had loads, you had to winch all the food up. You had to climb up a ladder up the outside of it which somebody had, I think Shell had cut the top rungs section and it was like the metal things, you know, you get out the outside of big structures. And somebody had like cut off a section of it. And they’d just attached like an ordinary wooden builder’s ladder across it, but it meant when I got to that bit you had to sort of go up and out. And I have never climbed up anything in my life like that before. And but I knew that Mary Morrison from our political unit who had also never climbed up anything like that, she had already gone up there the week before. So I thought well if Mary can do it, I ought to be able to. And yes and then we started winching people up and down which was a safer, less hair raising. But I mean it had all- The initial Greenpeace people who went up there where all mountaineers and stuff. So like you know it’s sort of like, oh this is fun. And but to normal people it wasn’t that much-Saskia Papadakis: What would you fallen onto if you had fallen?Chris Rose: If I had fallen off I would have fallen into the sea but it was a long way down so you would have been, unless there was, there was- The people with the rib, they dropped me off and backed off, these two Norwegian women and watching me, expect to see whether I’d fall off or not. And yes, so you had to take everything with you obviously. And but then that, you know, that’s the sort of fairly normal thing if you were doing something, I don’t know, up a chimney or something. You’d have to take stuff.Saskia Papadakis: Were you usually up a chimney?Chris Rose: No not usually, no. Lots of times Greenpeace were. [laughing] And there were, there were hundreds and hundreds of people involved in the campaign. It was enormous. And the result of the campaign eventually was yes it got the law changed on the loophole was closed. So the oil industry wasn’t able to dump all its stuff in the sea. But the unintended or unanticipated effect was to catalyse the rethinking of SRI, socially responsible investing and the sort of what Shell described in its sort of mea culpa it went through of its social licence. So a lot of people say in that business that the whole idea of corporate social responsibility in its modern form came from the outwash of that campaign. Which was not something that we’d expected. And the other thing happened was there was a huge debate in this country, a political debate, because the Government got very, very angry when Shell gave in because the Government hadn’t given in, the British Government, but they couldn’t do anything about it. And they blamed the media for covering, giving us lots of coverage. They said, you aided and abetted them.British Library catalogue number: C2037/24 Project clip number: 74