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: Just tell me how you actually picked up those skills because you know we’re looking here at drafting legislation essentially and proper campaigning, lobbying, none of which you would have experienced in your education.Fiona Reynolds: Not at all but there were people around me who did. So two things, one was we were sharing an office with CPRE. And the CPRE staff just sort of adopted me and said, they were all lobbying on the Bill, they were lobbying on different aspects of the Bill, I was focusing on national parks. And so they were writing amendments. So we used to sit in the office and draft amendments together. And then I would say, ‘Well how do you get, what do you do, have to get it right?’ ‘Well actually you don’t have to get it right, you just have to make a persuasive case. Then the Parliamentary draftsmen will get it right if Government accepts it.’ And writing speeches for Parliamentarians was a bit similar. You quite quickly realised that they didn’t want a great screed of stuff, they wanted a handful of really pithy points. And you learned how to do that. Actually the technology is the thing that makes me amused when I look back. Because we had to type speeches and amendments and briefing notes onto these, are they called stenographs or something, these big sheets with a waxy cover where the typewriter pierced the wax and then you put it on a roll of ink and rolled it round like this, and pages and pages came out. And then you stuck them all together with a, you know, with a staple and then you put in an envelope and then you wrote the envelope and then you cycled down to the House of Commons to drop them off. I mean, because there wasn’t time to put them in the post, it was a very fast turnover. But they wanted something written. Nowadays you just type an email and send it off. You know it’s all completely different. But we were very creative and I really learned a lot from CPRE and the staff there. But also there were loads of organisations lobbying on the Bill. And all of them had a Parliamentary officer, except CNP who just had one person. So RSPB, the Wildlife Trust as it was, Royal Society for Nature Conservation it was then called, the Ramblers, the YHA, the National Farmers Union, you know, because we were dealing with issues that affected farmers and landowners. So we all were a little team really bouncing ideas off each other. So I did learn very fast but with a lot of help.British Library catalogue number: C2037/17 Project clip number: 113