Fiona Reynolds

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Toby Butler: And also it strikes me that you were given an awful lot of responsibility by the sounds of it pretty quickly if that legislation was coming in so fast. But what was your as a secretary, what was your official job as it were? [laughing]Fiona Reynolds: Well secretary is the old-fashioned sort of governance role, you know, that you are the person who is accountable for the good running of the organisation, for the financial health of the organisation and for what the organisation does. But because there was only me and one other part time person who became my best friend very quickly, in fact we’re still best friends, we basically just did everything together. So I had to learn double entry bookkeeping. I had to learn how to write minutes. I had to learn how to call meetings and make sure the system functioned. But equally I had to dream up amendments to the Wildlife and Countryside Bill and write papers on things that I had never been involved with before. But I had a very good Chair, so John Hunt was the President, my Chair was Alan Mattingly of the Ramblers’ Association. And he basically said, you know, ‘I’ll help you as much as you like but your job is to do it, get on with it. And there are loads of people you can ask but, you know, I’m not going to ever tell you what to do. You just have to find ways of being the advocate for national parks that national parks need.’ And that was a brilliant management approach because I did. I was a very quick learner but I was also a good listener and a good learner in terms of understanding where everyone was coming from and what the dynamics of all the different organisations were. But it was a wonderful way to become immersed in what was then clearly part of the environmental sector. So I had gone from loving the countryside to realising that I was absolutely in the environmental movement, the early environmental movement.British Library catalogue number: C2037/17 Project clip number: 112