Burns Purnell Interview

Christine Burns - 'Just Plain Sense'
20/05/13

https://soundcloud.com/justplainsense/jps90-alice

Christine Burns (CB) interviews Alice Purnell (AP)


CB: I'm Christine Burns. My guest on this show is a former geriatric nurse and a counsellor. She writes poetry and lives in Hove, where we are speaking today. Alice Purnell OBE is perhaps best known to many listeners as the founder of the Gender Trust, the support organisation for trans people. She also founded a groundbreaking series of biennial conferences bringing together international clinicians and stakeholders for the first time in the 1990's, to discuss improvements to care for such people. But Alice was around long before that, in fact, she's just celebrating her 70th birthday. Alice, welcome to Just Plain Sense, 70 years! How does it feel to be celebrating such an auspicious occasion?

AP: Your introduction, I found rather interesting, you described me as a geriatric nurse. I was a nurse geriatric specialist but now I am a geriatric myself.

[laughter]

CB: My apologies.

AP: That's quite alright. Yes, in fact I've had several careers, first was in research chemistry and then nursing, and then counselling psychology. And so I come from various types of work and experiences and it's all been frightfully interesting. The trouble is, I'm actually 15 years old in my head. Seventy is an attitude of mind. The trouble is my body doesn't know that, I'm falling to bits physically. And so yes, I have to admit I'm a geriatric who's had a triple bypass recently and I've got bladder cancer and hypertention and ... I'm a blue badge holder and I'm now getting very interested in care of people with disability, frankly. Which is very pressing for even more of us. However ...

CB: It comes to all of us.

AP: It does.

CB: Well, shall we go back to the beginning?

AP: Sure thing.

CB: You were born in 1943, paint me a picture of your childhood.

AP: I'm a war baby, and Mother and Father conceived me, apparently on a haystack, during an air raid in the Wirral. And it was a bit of an accident 'cos Dad was upper class and Mum was not. I suppose she would describe herself as upper working class. She was Catholic, he was Anglican. So from their parents' point of view there was a problem about religion. My Granny - my father's mother - was very anti-Roman. My Grandma was very Irish Catholic - Liverpool Irish, and it was a problem, but since I was already on the way, they did get married and I was born. But later on, sadly, my mother and father fell out and got divorced. And it was a messy, horrid divorce, happening exactly while I was doing my O levels. And the family was fragmented and became really ghastly and I was very unhappy indeed.

One of the attitudes that my Granny had pursued was that I should go to a public school, i.e. Wellington College, because generations of my father's family had gone to Wellington College. And I was sent to a prep school, and at the prep school, which was a boarding school, I was sexually and physically abused quite horribly. And I tried to drown myself but unfortunately the lake wasn't deep enough. And so even at - you know, before the age of eleven I felt childhood is not the happiest days of your life, by any means. However, I survived. And the reason I survived was because I found a little frozen rabbit which I warmed up with my body, while I was howling and crying and just wanting to be dead myself. It came back to life 'cos my - the warmth that I had left in me helped it, and I put it near a place where I knew there were some rabbit burrows and it hobbled off into there, and I felt I'd saved its life. So I thought, I'll leave my death for another day, and went back to the school and was promptly beaten for trying to run away. Anyway, thank god, I left that horrible school and subsequently learnt that the headmaster had been put in prison for abusing, not just me, but various other kids. And I have very strong feelings and emotions about ... about people taking advantage of children in that way, because it did harm me considerably.

But even before that, when I was a very small child indeed, I have had an overriding fantasy, something -  I think my Grandma had told me the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie escaping from the redcoats disguised as Betty Burke, and Flora MacDonald rowing him off to Skye and saving his life. And I thought I'd like to be Flora MacDonald and save a hero. And because my father and mother were doing this pseudo-upper-class twit thing, I was bought a kilt, which I wore and loved, and to me it was my skirt, because I was a girl. Everybody had made a horrible mistake. I was not a boy, I was a girl, but I couldn't tell anybody because boys are not supposed to say that sort of thing and I didn't want to upset my parents because they had their own problems.

So childhood was frightful and thank god, having left that school, went to a private school and then got a scholarship to a sixth form college where I did reasonably well. However, when I was 15 in France, I was taking a shower and hating my body. I, of course, shut the door and shut the window and I hadn't realised that, in France in 1959, they didn't have the same building regs we do, nor did they have the same gas cylinders. They were using water gas which is carbon monoxide mixed with hydrogen with no odorant, and no ventilation. And of course I was singing and showering, feeling quite secure. And my heart stopped - everything went blank. So much for my modesty and eveything, they had to break down the door. My heart had stopped for five minutes and I was resuscitated by Jean, the French kid I was staying with to learn French. And after that, my short term memory was hit quite badly and I do find it very difficult to remember numbers. I've still got a reasonably high IQ, thank god, but that near death experience was a very significant one and I've kind of felt death has been stalking me all my life, and I've always told people, oh, I'm going to die young. Anyway, the following year ...

CB: You got that wrong, didn't you?

AP: I suppose I - well, I'm only 70, you know.

[laughter]

AP: Anyway, the following year, Jean and I went swimming down the length of the river [inaudible] 19 km from their country place to the city, and we got caught in a whirlpool and I was a better swimmer and resuscitated Jean, so each has given the other a life back and that was very special and important. However, interestingly enough, by the time I was 15 I'd got two circles of friends: one circle that just knew me as Anne, which was the name I chose for myself, and another circle that knew me by my other name. And the two had to never meet because by that time I'd developed myself as an 'out' person - not 'out' in terms of telling everybody I was one of these gender freaks, but 'out' in terms of 'out in society'. And I felt far more relaxed being myself, a girl, than having to put up the front of being a boy. As a boy I didn't lack courage, I went climbing and did those sorts of things, but I felt so much more at ease in the company of other women and other girls. But it was a frightfully confusing time because I was never, ever attracted to men or boys in a sexual sense. Yes, they're great as friends but I knew I was attracted to other girls. And I thought, what the hell? You know, what sort of dirty trick has nature played on me? Because I'm a girl, in a body that's mixed up, and I fancy other girls. I'm never going to be ordinary or normal, and above all I wanted to be just ordinary. That was my goal. And so, in a sense I had to be invisible to the people who really mattered. I could never talk to anybody about what turmoil was in my mind, in my heart and spirit. And it was crushing and very, very, very depressing, and exhausting and took up so much time.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, and I won't go into it too much, I eventually met somebody who I fell in love with and she and I got five years together before we got married. And I explained everything and one day she said, well I'd like to meet your alter ego, and so she met me, as myself. And there was a confusion because my name for me had always been Anne. Her sister's name was Anne. And so my partner, wife to be, said, 'Well we can't call you Anne because we'll get confused when we're talking about you in the third person. What other name would suit you?' Well at boarding school my nickname was doormouse and I'd always enjoyed Alice in Wonderland and I liked the name Alice, so I chose that name. And so Alice was a result of the person I fell in love with. That pushed me away from the original name I'd chosen which was an old family name for the first daughter. Anyway, a year after ...

CB: So we're in the 1960's now are we?

AP: Well, yes, yes. I got married in 66. We got enga - we got together and I told my ex in 1962, so we had four, five years during which time there was plenty of time for each of us to explore the other. And I thought, you know, that love conquers all, I fondly hoped and wished that it would and that we'd be together forever. And so we had a wonderful wedding and a friend played the organ, Widor's Toccata, and it was very, very beautiful and we went on honeymoon in Paris together. The awkward thing was, somebody sabotaged my case, and in my case we'd got two identical nighties and they'd put three telephone directories in so my luggage was overweight. But I think in the secrecy nobody twigged that one nightie was slightly larger than the other. Anyway, we had a Paris honeymoon and it was gorgeous. And then a year later my first daughter was born and then the second, and then a son was born. And ...

During all this time I'd had various jobs in chemistry and this sort of thing, and other things, and I eventually had decided I had to do something to help people in the same dilemma and dichotomy as myself. And what really spurred it on was on my way back from work in ... a seaside town in Sussex, I came across a small boy aged about 11, who was dressed as a girl, hanging from a tree. He hadn't been cut down and I arrived just a few moments before a police car arrived and this man got out. This man was the child's father and he walked up to see his son, dressed as a girl, hanging dead from this tree, and a small crowd and the police were standing around. The man said out loud, 'The little bastard!' and stormed off. I could have been that child, so many other people could have been that child.

So I then got involved with Samaritans and, you know, I'd had experience of wanting to end the pain that one gets in life. I hadn't much experience but I took Sam's training and did a lot of work with Samaritans. And what I discovered, to my amazement, that a third of the calls were from people with gender difficulties, and then another large portion were with sexuality difficulties. Because back in 1966 to ... 1996 shall we say? For a long, long time, if you were an outsider, if you were gay it was awful, families disowned people. If you were trans it was even worse, everybody disowned you. And it became increasingly obvious that the last outsider, the last taboo, was the trans person.

If you looked at the medical text books that I saw and studied, because I went through the postgraduate medical library looking at every single report and study there was, everything seemed to suggest that anybody who was intersex was a loony, everybody who was trans was some sort of deviant, that homosexuality was an illness, and believe it or not, they were still carrying out lobotomies and aversion therapies, and medicine itself was geared up to curing people who were gay or trans, to making intersex people into one sex or another without their permission. The medics acted like gods in reinforcing the gender binary and the heterosexual dominance and it was frightful and it was ghastly.

Anyway, I searched and searched through bookshops, and of course I read Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud, and everybody you could think of. And always they associated anything to do with gender variance as a type of deviance, and I got more and more horrified by this and I thought, what the hell am I going to do, and I came across ... would you believe it, in a dirty book shop in Soho, a magazine called Transvestia and I thought, what? And this was a magazine produced by a Dr Virginia Prince, who was an American pharmacist, and she had organised a thing called Phi Pi Epsilon, very American, which stands for Full Personality Expression. And the essence of her thesis was that you could be a woman, though male. So the goal of her organisation was to try to maintain marriages or relationships between men and women when one or the other, usually the one that was officially male, gender migrated by cross-dressing or by being what eventually we came to know as transsexual. The whole vocabulary of gender was a dreadful, dreadful nuisance.

However, what I learnt was that in the States there were about 500 people like that. And they would seem vaguely ... you know, it rang bells. Anyway, Virginia Prince's organisation, she called Phi Pi Epsilon, standing for Full Personality Expression, she ran it like a secret society, a sort of sorority. In those initial days the majority of members were US but they had an overseas chapter, a European chapter if you like, and I discovered that there were two or three people in France, and I speak French which is helpful, and there were other people, one in Ireland and two in England. And so we wrote to each other through the contact system. And the leading light then was a person called Olga Campbell, who was from the Republic of Ireland, and there was a Belgian called Lucy and another Brit called Sylvia. And we corresponded and corresponded and there was an initial first meeting in 1966, just before I got married, where they first of all had a meeting in London and then we had our first real full meeting in a hotel in Southampton. And Olga, being Irish, came up with this brilliant idea, we'll call our organisation, which will be afilliated to Phi Pi Epsilon, The Beaumont Society after the Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, who was a French spy who had spied in Russia, in Imperial Russia, disguised as a woman. Quite possibly was intersex and there are lots of very interesting books about the Chevalier. Chevalier actually earned a living by sword fencing and the betting as to which gender the Chevalier was, was phenomenal, equivalent to millions of pounds when she died. That's another story.

Anyway, The Beaumont Society sounded like a respectable thing because Beaumont is an old French aristocratic surname. We founded this society and Olga said we'll have to give the impression there are more of us than there really are. We'll call you number 100 Alice, I'll be 99, Sylvia will be 98 and Lucy will be number 101. And we'll have a meeting, and we put an ad in Exchange and Mart [laughter] explaining rather vaguely what was happening and would people contact us throught this contact system to ... a postal forwarding company called British Monomark and the address was BM3084 London WC1V 3XX So we had an anonymous forwarding centre and people could write and maintain their security, because secrecy was important.

And eventually, some months later, we discovered there were actually 15 people in the UK who were members. And we had the very fist meeting of the Beaumont Society in this hotel. And it consisted of 11 members and four spouses and my dog, and he became an honorary member of the Society, I've always had a dog called Oliver and of course, he attended all the meetings. He had species dysphoria, he really did believe he was a human being. I think he probably was, actually.

Anyway, after that first meeting the whole thing expanded and we had more and more meetings, and we evolved a constitution. And in those days it was very, very important that people did not confuse gender migrating - modern terminology - with drag, because in the public mind, homosexuals are men who dress as women, to have sex with other men. And the assumption was, if a guy was caught in a dress, he was charged with importuning or all sorts of other offences. If he was a genuine homosexual he would probably be beaten up by the police as well, he'd certainly be ridiculed. And I've come across countless cases where police brutality against gays and against trans people has been very obvious, back in the 60s and 70s. It was apalling. And the strange thing is, policemen at policemen's balls very often cross-dress. There's a story there somewhere.

Anyway. Gradually, the society got more and more significant, and a chap called Stephen Whittle was the first female-to-male who joined the society. And the principle of the Society was, it was a society which maintained people's secrecy if they wished, where there would be meetings in people's homes, and there would also be meetings in public places which were accepting the situation, and we produced a quarterly journal. And at one stage Stephen and I edited and prepared the magazine by literally cutting and pasting. We'd type up an article and then stick it onto the paper, literally. The technology was very primitive way back then. Anyway, after about a year or so we'd got nearly 100 members and we decided to have a national dinner. And I was tasked with going to the Forum restaurant, which is in Broadcasting House to arrange, for this first national dinner. And I explained to the management, 'Look, this is going to be a really respectable evening, and at this evening there will be people dressed as women, and some of them won't be women. So please address them properly and accordingly.' Unfortunately, the manager had got the wrong end of the stick, because a lot of people took their wives and partners with them, and all the staff called everybody Sir, including all the wives. [laughter] That's so English, isn't it? And it was marvellously funny.

And, the strange thing was, there was a very high proportion of the members seemed to be engineers. That's another very strange thing because, as a matter of interest, Olga said, 'I'm an engineer, who else is an engineer?' and about 30 people put their hands up. And eventually, years later, it turned out that there was a group of about 30 people who were into steam trains, who'd dress up as ladies and play with steam trains. Now that is very English, I think, and I love it! There was a chapter of steam trannies! Anyway, the society, having founded, was proving a safe place for people to go, who either were cross-dressing - transvestites, as the terms came, or who were transgendered - transsexual, whatever terminology you want to use. The majority of the membership was in the direction male-to-female, rather than the other direction. But the society wanted to be available for anybody in that position.

Now, the interesting thing was, back in the 60s and 70s, if you were a woman who cross-dressed or was transgendered, you would, generally speaking, be absolutely acceptable dressed however you wished, wherever you went And if you went to a lesbian event there'd always be about half the dykes would be dressed in suits and ties. It was acceptable behaviour. But if a man turned up in an evening frock, or went shopping in Sainsburys in a summer dress, he'd be for the high jump. And interestingly enough, in those days, if you were gay or cross-dressed you could not get a job in any job - any employment where the Official Secrets Act was concerned. And one way the society had to make certain it differentiated between being identified as gay - it was never ever anti-gay - and being identified as something different, was it had to exclude people who admitted that they were gay. And for that purposes we had a thing called sponsorship. Well, the process of sponsorship meant that a regional organiser would meet a new member and then ask them about themselves. And it was all in complete confidence, and people needn't give their address or employment, or even their proper name. So it was a secret society. The reason for that was, for example, one of the area contacts in Hampshire had stupidly gone out to post a letter in a dress of his wife's and the police arrested, paraded him, it hit the local papers, he lost his job. The wife stood by her husband but the police, again, were causing a person frightful grief by their attitude.

Anyway, so security was important, secrecy was important. Nothing immoral or improper happened at society meetings, in fact they were rather like WI meetings. The Beaument Society gradually gained a repution for being a middle aged, middle class, twin set and pearls type of thing. Very, very tame indeed. But the point was, it gave the cross-dressers in particular a chance to relax in a frock, and that was what was important to them. And it gave the people who were moving towards gender reassignment, which began to be a possibility because there were all the stories of what was happening in Morocco with Roberta Cowell and Christine Jorgensen and all those things. And there were horror stories coming out about the surgery that was available and people were thinking, 'Well god yes, I'd love to have the surgery but it's awful.' And you know, I saw some of the early versions of surgery, they were apalling, they were disgusting. The attitudes of surgeons - maybe not the attitude, the skill of surgeons seemed to be that any hole will do, putting it very crudely. And in terms of phalloplasty, it was not possible for the chaps.

Anyway, as I was saying, about the security thing: one person I had to interview to sponsor was working in one of our colonies, because we still had colonies then. And I arranged to meet this person at a particular place and we would both be carrying a copy of 'She', I think it was. And I interviewed this person and once we'd identified ourselves, this person then told me which bank account I had, how many children I had, what I was working at ... they had done a complete and thorough investigation, which was the sort of investigation they carry out on people who are about to work in defence. I was really horrified, my privacy had been utterly invaded. But his attitude was, 'I've got as much on you as you've got on me.' And I thought this is disgusting and apalling.

Anyway, time went by, and I was president of the Beaumont Society for seven years, and it did save a number of relationships, and saved a number of people from feeling isolated and frightened and lonely because they were weird, queer or whatever word you want to use. The basic thing was, if you were all outsiders, but together, you didn't feel quite so outside, and that was really good. Anyway, time went by and I heard about somebody called Judy Cousins and she was a remarkable person, she'd been an officer in the army, married with children, and she'd manufactured her own death - pretended to have died in a climbing accident - leaving a wife and children very well provided for, and then re-emerged elsewhere with a completely new name, Judy Cousins. But Judy was a golfer, a very keen golfer, and eventually people did put two and two together and it must have been frightful for the wife to discover that her husband wasn't dead. So I disapprove of that, tremendously.

Anyway, her organisation, she called the Self Help Association For Transsexuals - S. H. A. F. T. - SHAFT! I said, 'Judy, think about the words.' She did not understand it wasn't a good title for an organisation for trans people! [laughter] Anyway, as time went by SHAFT had all sorts of problems. And one thing that seemed very, very obvious was there was dispute between transvestites and transsexuals. There was dispute between the female-to-male and the male-to-female. And all these small groups and organisations were at each others' throats instead of helping each other. And it had got more and more silly, and I thought, 'This is getting more and more ridiculous.' And obviously, divide and rule is something which has kept gender minorities on the fringe of society for ever.

Anyway, time went by and SHAFT, with all these disputes and so on, seemed to be rather introverted. And I thought the essential thing is, the client group, the trans people, the intersexes, the cross-dressers even, need to have some sort of dialogue with the professionals in the field, whereby the psychologists, psychiatrists, surgeons, endocrinologists ... actually met human beings as human beings, instead of making up a theory, and working with the theory, and trying to make people fit the theory. And all sorts of research papers have been produced with inadequate numbers of people so that they were statistically invalid. And half the research work done before 1990 was dreadful in terms of validity, peer group reviews and so on.

However, as time went by, I joined a thing called the Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association. Harry Benjamin brought out a book called 'The Transsexual Phenomenon' and it was the first book which looked frankly at transsexuality in any depth. One other person from that flock, if you like, was professor Richard Green and he'd produced a paper on sissy boys, where he'd reviewed 32 boys who were showing female gender development in childhood, in terms of their play. And his conclusion was that sissy boys turned out to be drag queens when they grew up rather than transsexual. I hate using all these shorthand terms because people are much more complex than that, and none are meant to offend anybody. Good luck to all drag queens.

Anyway, so, I thought I'll join the Harry Benjamin Association because I have, you know, a reasonable degree of knowledge and so on, and at the Harry Benjamin Association meeting that I went to first, which was in Bordeaux, half the proceedings were in French and half in English, so I wasn't at a disadvantage, and I made various contacts. And so I decided to go to each Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association meeting that happened in Europe, I couldn't afford to go to the ones in the States. But what became very clear was that the Americans were running the show. They were running the show in Europe as well as in America. Any standards of care were developed to protect the surgeon against any litigation - the surgeon and the psychiatrist. What they wanted, above all, was to create standards of care which protected the practitioners, rather than produced the best service possible for their client group. And the whole thing seemed to be revolving around psychiatry rather than psychology or counselling, which seemed rather strange. The whole thing was super-medicalised. Anyway, time went by and I made lots and lots of contacts. I got to know Professor Louis Gooren, who is a great hero of mine.

CB: And we're in the late 1980s now?

AP: Yes. We've got a - I'm trying to shorten - I don't want to go on too long. Effectively, what happened was I now had contacts with all the leading Europeans and Americans who were involved, and of course, with Charing Cross Hospital as well. And there again, this is another story, each hospital unit that had a so-called gender clinic had its own standards of care, depending on who was in charge. I got to know Russell Reid when he worked at Charing Cross, and Don Montgomery and Richard Green and all these splendid chaps. And I thought, it's time we had a British conference which was all inclusive - client group and the professionals in the field. And some of the people in the field were actually professionals in the field anyway. By that time I was a qualified nurse and so had a sort of medical credential.

And so we - I - well no, I'll say 'I', because I did most of the work, I organised the very first gender dysphoria conference at Manchester University, at Hulme Hall, and we had about 200 delegates and 30-odd speakers. It was very, very hard work to organise a conference, to write your own piece of work and present it, to make sure everybody's needs were met. But it was really wonderful because at the very first conference we had every type of trans and intersex, every type of cross-dressing or cross-gender behaviours. We had psychiatrists, surgeons, counselors, social workers, electrologists, speech therapists ... every type of person you can imagine who was interested. And people were talking to each other and listening to each other, communicating, and that was really, really important.

As time went by I organised seven of these conferences, and my greatest help with all these conferences was a wonderful person, Jed Bland, and I'll never stop thanking him for all his hard work. We produced conference reports which you can see on the internet, and I've still got these publications for sale, if anybody wants them. We also produced various books. I produced a booklet which was how to deal with the whole business of changing your documentation, and what is required in terms of surgery and so on, and things to help you get by. Basically, a do-it-yourself book, as how to not make too many mistakes.

And then eventually, I thought it would be a good idea if we formed an organisation in the UK which was specifically for transgendered people, which we called the Gender Trust, which became the second registered charity dealing with gender problems. I haven't already said this but, in the Beaumont Society years back, we'd found that we got calls from people who had problems much greater than, 'I need somewhere to dress'. We needed to get the professionals among us together, who'd got experience of Samaritan work, nursing, medicine - there were three doctors, myself and others. And so we produced a new registered charity, the first - the Beaumont Trust - which is still running, which had professionals in the field giving their time, running a help line and so on. But of course, the majority of calls were from people with cross-dressing issues rather than with the full transgendered issues, but there were also partners and parents and children. And the range of people who had these - the difficulties thrown up by gender dysphoria, as it became known, was immense.

So we founded the Gender Trust, which became the second registered charity, and that got off the ground with its own helpline. There was a problem I had with the Gender Trust because, having founded it and in fact subsidised it for the first year, I'd written a book on - a guide to transsexuality. And that book was my copyright, and I'd allowed the Gender Trust to use it as a means of making a little bit of funds towards doing the job it was doing. At the same time, I was providing counselling, because by that time I'd done a postgraduate degree in counselling psychology, and I was providing counselling, and as you know, counselling is a contract between a person in complete confidentiality with a client. The legal expert in the Gender Trust said the trustees, because of fiduciary duty, had a right to have access to all my notes. The standards of care under the British Association of Counsellors would go bananas, and I would go bananas, if anybody who was not the client or the counsellor had access to other people's notes. So I resigned from the Gender Trust, and I had to take them to court to make sure that my copyright was maintained. I didn't want any money from them. And fortunately the court upheld that. It is a shame because we were doing very good work together.

Anyway, in some respects it was a good thing because it freed me up a little bit from the duties that were involved with being involved in running two registered charities and being still an active participant in the Beaumont Society. I'd enough on my plate. So I then founded Gendys which was an organisation that was including trans people and practitioners in their care, and I was very lucky in that so many of my contacts, through running the conferences, became patrons. And that maintained this ongoing dialogue between professionals in the field and the trans people, and that was very good. What is interesting is now, we've made so many strides, we've all worked so very, very hard and the law is now less of an ass than it was. It still is an ass in some respects.

Anyway the situation is very different for a young person who is trans or intersex but there is still an awful long way to go. I'm quite involved with the General Nursing Council and standards of care in nursing. And as a nurse - I was a nurse from 1980 - no, 1977 until I retired in 2003. So that's a long time, in fact I was a matron at one stage and oh, quite a long time. And increasingly, my interests have been in care of the elderly, of course. But I've kept up an interest in helping, hopefully, as many trans people as I could, and intersex people. I haven't got the energy or the time to organise the conferences any longer, Barbara Ross took up that banner, another good friend. But there's been a tremendous amount of work done by a very few volunteers. And as usual, when you need a job doing you ask a busy person.

One of the problems one has now, for example with the Beaumont Trust, which is still going strong, is it's very, very hard to get young people, new people involved who are prepared to help. Everybody says, 'I want your help.' Well, they don't even say please. I get letters from people saying, 'Can you send me some money and some clothes, and can you get me a job and accommodation?' People ...

CB: No, that's too much.

AP: Indeed. I mean, I'd love to be able to wave a magic wand but I'm not capable of - I don't have one [laughter] If I had, I'd use it.

CB: So, you've just celebrated your 70th birthday, you are still busy, you're writing your own biography, you're doing palaeontology as well ...

AP: Ah yes, you have got to have a passion in life. And I suppose I've got two passions in life, one is dogs, and my darling dog Ollie died aged 21 last year, and that broke my heart. The other passion I have, I developed during the sixth form, because the experience of finding something that is 100 million years old, that hasn't seen the light of day for 100 million years, makes you feel very young. And each time you find a fossil it is something from a different world, almost. The imagination works riot. It gets me out into the countryside and I adore the British countryside. And well, I collect fossils, and people who know me think I'm a bit eccentric because my house is full of fossils, to the extent that there's hardly anywhere to sit. But the good thing is they all make me feel remarkably young.

[laughter]

CB: As indeed you are, Alice.

AP: Thank you.