Chris Rose

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:Then we were getting contacted by lots of people who had been affected by pesticides. Once we started, because we had basically picked a fight with the NFU and the chemicals industry. And which suited Des because he was very pugilistic belligerent campaigner. He was from New Zealand. Do you ever come across Des Wilson? He set up Shelter, you know. And he was a real- Being a New Zealander he had none of the sort of British reluctance and reserve to, like he was very to the point, more like Australian than New Zealand in a way, though he wouldn’t agree with that I’m sure. And he would like personalise and be very pointed about attacks. So he would do, almost Trumpian but he was a much nicer guy than Trump. But he would like, I’ve seen him sort of fight. People were terrified of him because he’d be going like, you know, ‘So-and-so, I’m going to destroy you. You’re on the wrong side. You are going to lose. You’re going to be destroyed. You’re going to be eviscerated in front of your wife. She will never forgive you.’ [laughing] He was like this sort of attack, it’s like the guy from in The Thick Of It, you know. I mean he made Alastair Campbell look relatively mild. And I knew Alastair Campbell at this point. [laughing]British Library catalogue number: C2037/24 Project clip number: 121