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So the date is Thursday the 22nd of January 2015. My name is Clara Manassian-Cook. I'm interviewing Glenys Lee in her home in South Bromley about her activities in WILF and in activism over the years. Glenys, please could you tell me your name, your date of birth and where you were born? Okay, I was, my name is Glenys Lee and my date of birth

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is the 15th of August 1930 and I was born in a place called Coperd Heath which is near to Bristol. Glenys, please can you tell me a little bit about the place where you were born? Very little really because I only lived there until I was nine because my father died and then we moved to South Wales where I lived with my grandmother and grandparents until

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I was 16. But Coperd Heath was a country right in the middle of the country and it was, we had quite a poor background, poor upbringing because my father was out of work and when he did have work it was very low paid and that was because he had had a very bad accident in the colliery so that his health was not good. So really we lived out of our garden.

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My mother did lots of gardening and we lived out of the garden and we'd get eggs from the people who lived next door and somebody would bring rabbits and my mother would stew this up which I hated. But that was Coperd Heath and then my father died when I was nine and we moved off to live with my grandmother in South Wales where both my grandparents lived.

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But we moved in with my paternal grandparents who were Methodists but didn't go to chapel very much. They knew about the background of Methodism but they preferred to sit in the front bedroom, front room and watch the people go to chapel rather than go themselves and it was a very quiet, stayed sort of home. I was not really happy there

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but my mother was working and that just had to happen. But I was afraid, this was during the war, so I was very afraid that my mother would get killed in the war because she went to work, she was going to work in an armaments factory but I cried so much and thought that she was trying to kill herself

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because all the people who worked in the armaments factory had yellow skin because of the stuff that they put into the bombs and they had yellow hair, they'd all go yellow and then they'd be ill. So I thought that she was trying to kill herself, she was so unhappy when my father died that I thought that's what she was trying to do. So I cried and made such a fuss that she

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didn't go to work there fortunately. So went to work in a factory where they made uniforms for de-mobbed people, people who were coming out of the army or people who were, and some uniforms as well. So that was, but as far as the, I went to live in the Rhondda Valley which is a very working class area and you know, you knew all these stories about mining and how the men would

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work in 18-inch tunnels to get coal out and it was all absolutely horrendous and I think I've inherited claustrophobia because of that. I think it's just inherited, I don't think I'm really claustrophobic but I don't like small places. Although the home was not very exciting to be in, I loved being out of doors so lived

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a lot of the time on the mountainside, climbing trees, playing in the quarries, going down into cul-de-sacs, not cul-de-sacs but culverts where the streams would run from the mountain right down under the road. You'd go so far and somebody would shout rats and you'd have to run out fast. And we used to have orange ropes, these ropes were wrapped around wooden

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wooden cases of oranges. Now during the war you had, you know, there was lots of rationing, food was very short but you could queue up and get sometimes fish, sometimes oranges, they were all sort of special bananas now and again, very, very rarely. But orange ropes were quite good to have because they came in these wooden crates. We used to take the rope

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and throw it over a bar that was on the top of the lamppost which was gas lighting and you'd swing round and round and round on this rope and that was great fun. Anyway, I lived in that house until I was 16 when my mother had met a very nice man and we married when I was 16 and we went to live further down the valley in Porth. And that's the sort of confluence of the

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Rhondda Valley, Rhondda Wach and the Rhondda Waur. Wach meaning small and Waur meaning big, so there was two valleys that met at Porth and then the Rhondda River ran on down. So I went to live in this house with my mother and stepfather and life was very different there. I went to the secondary school there and loved to play games rather than study

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and so I had a very conventional sort of upbringing there. But my stepfather was a great reader and enjoyed music and the arts. So we came to London now and again, holidays and we'd go to the theatre and go to the galleries and he was just a great person to have around. Although I didn't like the idea very much

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that my mother was married to him. Oh and I forgot to tell you that when I lived in Lloynepia, which is with my grandmother, I didn't stay there ever through the school holidays. I went to stay in Swansea with my aunt, my mother's sister, which was wonderful because there was a lot of different freedoms there and we were at the beach

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and you know that was so it was like a second home that I went to and she was like a second mother to me really. And she had a daughter, my cousin, who was a bit younger. So we used to play all sorts of games in the air raid shelters and you know fancy games like where are you blue princess blue eyes and rubbish. But life was very much easier there

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and it backed onto, her house, backed onto a cemetery. So it made our day when there was a funeral because we'd go and watch the funeral and see all the people and the flowers and what not. Watch people cry, we quite liked that. Really miserable lot. Anyway, so I lived then after my mother married, lived in Porth, went to

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school there in Porth until I was 18 when I moved up to London and I went to Averyhill College here in Eltham. At college what did you study? It was a teacher training college so I trained to be a junior school teacher, supposed to be trained to be a junior school teacher. I think it was really, looking back,

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it was really quite a good training but that was not my general interest. I was more interested in playing games and played for, you know, hockey and cricket and anything. But there was, and I also loved to go into London, loved doing that of going to Sadler's Wells and queuing in the long queues from early morning and wait to get one of those little metal

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discs that they'd give you and then when the doors opened you ran all the way up these stairs to the upper gods and you got your seat to watch whatever was on at Sadler's Wells and also go to Leicester Square where you could go in the Empire there for all day. You'd just go in about 10 in the morning, 10, 10.30 in the morning and there'd be a show, somebody would play the organ,

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they'd be dancing and then a film would show and then it would start all over again. So if you wanted to you could stay there all day. But I loved being in London for those sorts of things but I don't remember going to an art gallery ever when I was up here, which is very different from now. Yes, but college was an education but not necessarily what you'd expect.

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There was an English teacher who I adored, she was really a great teacher. She treated you like an adult, she didn't treat you as a child. I think she was probably a feminist, thinking about her, not from now but I think in my past I thought that she was the beginning of my feminism. She introduced me to Virginia Woolf and to her works which I absolutely loved and

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oh it was the woman who wrote The Land, who lived in Knole, I mean they were lovers for a while. Virginia Woolf and anyway her, we can fill that one in after. She influenced me more than I thought at the time,

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introduced me really and truly to reading, you know encouraged me to read and all that so thanked her for that and then I did teach for a little while. I taught for a year in the east end of London, down at East Ham, right near to the river and the first class I had, I had 56 children of seven-year-olds and it was overwhelming. I just

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struggled with that as any young teacher would but it was interesting because some of the, I was young and enthusiastic and whatever I sort of asked the kids for, you know, bring this, that, the other, then somehow or other they bring it but there were some very poor children in my class who were dockers children and it was at the

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time when they were, 1951, 52, no earlier than that, 48, 49, 50, when the dockers went on strike because of the conditions so they were poor but if you asked for anything you'd get all sorts of things, you'd ask them to bring flowers and you had to be careful because they'd get them from the cemetery for you so you had to stress, you know, wildflowers, this is what we want for our room is wildflowers,

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they'd find something but there I got on incredibly well with their parents and sort of related to them and I think it was probably because of my background in the Ronda. That's in retrospect, I think that, but I only stayed there for 18 months and then I got married and came to live in Wales, back to Wales, to Newport Monmouthshire

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and I tried to get a teaching job there but didn't manage to get a teaching job in a classroom. I taught sick children at home so went into their homes a lot, you know, teaching for an hour, kids who couldn't go to school because they were sick. So I should say before I came, went to live in Newport, that year that I was living in,

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I lived in Ilford but taught in East Ham, that was the time of the Vietnam War and I was not active in that but I did march with people against the Vietnam War but really my emotions and my gut was more involved with getting married and having children and then that happened, we did spend a lot of time, not a lot of time, but we spent our time

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together and it was a very comfortable, happy time. I had two children one after the other and then when the children were five and three, we went to live in Portugal for a year which again was a very luxurious time because we lived on you know, company expenses and all of that. So I was living in this dream bubble really,

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came back from Portugal and had another child but also had a job, I was teaching at that time. I taught for a year and then discovered I was pregnant and that I had German measles. So I struggled through my pregnancy being very worried that my child would be all right. The doctor said, oh no, no, no, nothing to worry about. I didn't know then that he was a Catholic

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and didn't believe in abortion but it was only after that that I realised that. So Helen was born navy blue with circulation problems and deaf. We didn't know she was deaf until she got to about 18 months when she was very slow with all her development, in all sorts of ways she was slow but bright little eyes and followed everything

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went on. Adored her two sisters and they were wonderful with her and when we discovered that she was deaf we decided we should move, well my husband decided he was going to work in London and that was a really fortunate thing even though I didn't want to come because we went to the Nuffield Hearing and Speech Centre where they taught me to teach her

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to lip read and to communicate really. That was a good training for me and I taught other children. I had opened a little nursery group of deaf children in my downstairs room and they'd come and we'd do, I'd teach them the way that I'd taught Helen. So everything in my house was labelled with names of everything and we talked to her non-stop with hearing aids on but sitting

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on the draining board listening to everything and I kept her on my hip and commented on everything, I didn't stop talking. Anyway so that happened and then I had another child, a boy, a little boy and by that time I was a bit disillusioned with this 50s housework and housewife. I had realised that I was able and more capable of doing more things than

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just being a housewife. So I did a course to be a social worker with deaf people. So I had been teaching deaf children and from my home we moved, we had a little class in a school where we,

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another teacher became involved with me downstairs in my room, in my little room and we realised that we were not doing enough for the children, they needed more than we were able to give them because we were not trained teachers of the deaf. So we used to go to the educational department and nag about setting up a classroom within a school because we were

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oralists, we didn't want to do signing, we wanted to help the children to speak. They might not be able to hear but it didn't mean there was anything wrong with their vocal chords and in order to get into their brains to make them speak and all the rest. Now we underestimated some deaf people don't manage to do that because the hearing aids

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were not as good as they are now. I think it's probably easier, not easier but yes it is perhaps easier now with good aids and all the things that you can do on your telephones and you know texting and whatnot make deaf people much more integrated than they were then. So we were about integrating our deaf children because she had two deaf children

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and I had Helen and we were about integrating those children into the community because the local authorities had said the best thing we could do was to send them to boarding school. Now I was not prepared to send my two-year-old to boarding school and I was not prepared to let her to go halfway across London in a bus to a school for the deaf. So I insisted

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that she stayed at home and educated her until we found a little, oh no this is a bit later on that happened, so she came with us into teaching in this school. They'd given us a classroom where some of the children who had been at boarding school we brought them into our classes and that's when we really realised how inadequate we were and how inadequate that teaching

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of severely deaf people was. So we got, we managed to get employed a teacher of the deaf for those severely deaf people and our children went into that class and lost their language. Their language was very much lower when they were at school than when you know they improved so much more when they were at home

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and when on holidays you know with our children and playing outside with the kids and just being integrated. So the pair of Joe and I removed our children and left the other children and in that school but they'd also set up a hearing, a partially hearing unit as well which is that was the first one that had been set up

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and we feel very much that we were part of that process of pushing against the tide again of letting our kids go. So I find a little school down the road where they were willing to take her and she had a special teacher, a peripatetic teacher who would go in and help her and that happened that she stayed in that Baston school until she was 11

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and by this time I had had Robert and I was feeling the need for doing something more than I was doing. So I did a crash course in social work for the deaf, social work really not for necessarily for the deaf but I did go to work in Ladywell in a specialist deaf unit, not unit, department. It was run by an incredible woman called Ruth Cook

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who really helped me understand deafness much more than I had before. So then I worked in that service with her and with other people until 1977. And in that unit, in that what they call it, I mean it's a service, a deaf section really of the social services. In that section I met some quite wonderful women,

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American women who had very different ideas about education of deaf people and handling of deaf teenagers than I had ever dreamed of. So that was really and truly the beginning of my feminist education and she was the beginning of it and another young woman who was just 19 who I'm still in touch with.

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Ruth and Irene and Anne were like the core of this little group.