Daniel Hooper

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:Toby Butler: So how would you learn that? I mean obviously kids climb trees right, I suppose it’s quite a natural thing. But clearly there’s a lot of technique particularly in some pretty dangerous situations. So did someone teach you and then-?Daniel Hooper: Yes.Toby Butler: Right. Yes. I see.Daniel Hooper: Yes. So, yes, just you know, the person, this woman called Kayleigh taught me to climb. And she was at Fairmile, she was a force of nature, still is from what I hear. And you know [laughing] she’s psyching- I see footage of her in Glastonbury and she’s on stilts with this sort of horns on and all that sort of thing. [laughing] You know she’s one of that. But she taught us to climb and she basically took us up this rope ladder which was really hard to climb up this rope ladder. And I was absolutely cacking it. And then said, ‘Right, you can either climb back down there or you can do these two walkways and abseil down.’ So I was like, ‘Oooh’ you know and got on these walkways. Like, you know, wobbling about on these walkways and then, yes, and then ‘Right, now you have to abseil.’ And that was it. You know once I’d done that it was like, okay, that wasn’t actually that bad. You know I was safe.Toby Butler: Yes.Daniel Hooper: We probably were less safe than I would be now but we were safe enough. [laughing]Toby Butler: So you got over your fear of heights then.Daniel Hooper: Yes totally. That’s what got me over the fear of heights.British Library catalogue number: C2037/34 Project clip number: 84