Jeremy Iles

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: Well let’s just talk about the stress of it. Obviously you’ve had to come up with your own ways of coping with it and it sounds like you’ve been through some pretty stressful times and also in leadership roles, I think there can be an issue there where it sounds to me like you have your triumvirate of support but often it can be quite a lonely place directing or leading an organisation. So could you talk to me a little bit about your journey in that respect, how you’ve managed to get through okay.Jeremy Iles: I suppose going right back, when I started in the ‘80s there was no training, there was no support, there was very little structure really. People just used to do stuff and it was like wing-and-a-prayer really or bull-in-a-china-shop as I would describe it. You made mistakes and things got broken and then you’d have to try and patch it up. Then there was this dawning of the era of NGO training. I mentioned some of that yesterday. I mentioned time management. There wasn’t something called work-life balance back in those days but effectively, you had to develop your own way of having a work-life balance. So you would work, as I say, maybe work really hard during the week but at weekends you’d go away and you’d be with Clare or whatever. Later on, when it became a lot more structured and I was a lot more experienced, even so, things happened that caused me a lot of stress.British Library catalogue number: C2037/04 Project clip number: 213