To Read & So...

To Read & So...

Alumnae and Friends Summer 2017

Katie Prescott year of 2001

Radio 4 Business Presenter and Producer

02 To Read & So...

Editor I’m retiring this summer! What better way for me to close this chapter as Director of Communications (and before that as Director of Drama) with this issue devoted to words - on the page, presented on radio, recited and sung. I hope you enjoy it and take inspiration as I have done over 25 years at JAGS from remarkable girls who go on to be remarkable women.

It’s been a privilege.

To Read & So... 03

Contents

The JAGS ”orchestra” relied heavily on staff – Miss Wren (History) played the viola, Miss Brown (Maths) and I were the cellists and Miss Peebles (Junior School) played the double bass ( A large lady, it was generally understood that she had been dragooned into playing the bass by none other than Gustav Holst himself !). A couple of girls played wind instruments and there were the inevitable recorders, plus four or five unreliable violinists. We had great fun and in the autumn and spring terms we played hymns etc on Wednesday mornings for Assembly – which in those two terms was held in the socalled New Hall (the covered-over pool).

Jo Denham, Marketing Manager: jo.denham@jags.org.uk (020 8613 6369) Joe Ridge, Marketing & Communications Co-ordinator (maternity cover) joe.ridge@jags.org.uk (020 8613 6495) Yang Ming Ooi, Database/ Rese arch Manager: yangming.ooi@jags.org.uk (020 8613 6497) Alison Venn, Head of Communications: alison.venn@jags.org.uk (020 8693 1181 ext 6440)

First, however, as the CMC building makes its presence felt on the JAGS skyline, I leave you with an affectionate nod to music at JAGS in the past. In an email sent by from alumna Margaret Post, year of 1951, she shared these thoughts from her table of friends at our wonderful Alumnae Reunion lunch this May. Table 4 are steaming towards their 85th birthdays next year.

We agreed that the developments in Music are nothing short of awesome (as the young ones say) compared with what was on offer in our day. In the 1940s there was one Music Room and one teacher (theoretically parttime) who did wonders teaching class music throughout the school, training choirs, conducting the “orchestra”, giving private piano lessons in the lunch hour and Wednesday afternoons, and producing Gilbert & Sullivan operas on the tiny stage in the Holst Hall. This miracle woman was Miss E.M Deveson. She re-invigorated music in the dreary days at the end of the war (1944-47); there were no instrumental lessons available at JAGS so she arranged for me to go to Mary Datchelor school in Camberwell for cello lessons.

Contacts

06 Denise Saul year of 1987 Poet, fiction writer and visual artist

Have you signed up to the alumnae website yet? alumnae.jags.org.uk 08 Mancie Baker Y13 Singer /songwriter 11 Fabienne Hanton year of 1982

10 Mariam Mighidiseli Y10

Marketing & Communications, James Allen’s Girls’ School, 144 East Dulwich Grove, London SE22 8TE www.jags.org.uk Lawton Print Design Ltd • T: 07932 624 218 www.lawton-pd.co.uk

Bell House, a place for wider learning

Poetry by Heart Singer /songwriter

14 Katie Prescott year of 2001 BBC Radio 4 Today Business presenter and producer

Margaret (née Post 1945-51) Alison Venn Communications, alumnae, legator & donor relations

18 Chloe Gounder Forbes year of 2001 Platform 1 Restaurant owner and foodie

Back cover: 22

Alumnae Reunion Lunch

Alumnae Medical Society

04 To Read & So...

To Read & So... 05

Denise Saul

Sally-Anne Huang

year of 1987

Headmistress of JAGS It gives me enormous pleasure to welcome you to this latest edition of ‘To Read & So…’ It has been a wonderful twelve months at JAGS, not least in that our CMC is rising from the ground with great speed and we are looking forward to a new era with that building at the heart of our community, both literally and metaphorically.

However, this is also a very special edition of this magazine in that it marks the last one with Alison Venn as editor. As you will know, Alison has given enormous service to the JAGS community for 25 years, initially in the Drama department and, in recent years, as Director of Communications.

As well as our love of JAGS, Alison and I share careers rooted in words and it is so fitting that this edition should be based around that theme.

However, as an English teacher, I thought I would try to come up with a few of my own to summarise JAGS girls, both past and present.

Glancing through these pages, ‘creative’ would certainly be one of the first to come to mind.

But how about ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘innovative’, ‘influential’? It is not just a celebration of words

Poet, fiction writer and visual artist

that these articles have in common, but also a shared sense of ambition, social responsibility and lives that make a difference, whatever the chosen field of each alumna.

And, if I have to end with some carefully chosen words, I would have one for everyone reading this edition; ‘welcome.’ It is the word I choose to say, stay in touch, come and see us, remain in the family. And to Alison in particular: ‘thank you.’

In conversation with Alison Venn Meeting poet Denise Saul and discovering a little of the journey she’s taken since JAGS and the awards garnered on the way, was a delight.

In 2008 Denise was selected for The Complete Works, a two-year mentoring and development programme for ten advanced black and Asian poets in the UK, organised by Spread the Word. Denise won the 2011 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for her poem ‘Leaving Abyssinia’. Her pamphlets, White Narcissi (Flipped Eye) and House of Blue (Rack Press) were both Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Recommendations.

Denise is a George Viner Scholar.

Denise has taken a fascinating new path more recently. She is founder of a video poem project, Silent Room: A Journey of Language.

Silent Room is a collaboration between poet, Denise Saul and film-maker, Helmie Stil, working with people with aphasia, referred by the charity Connect, a speech disability support organisation. Aphasia is a communication disability which occurs when the language centres of the brain are damaged. Denise and Helmie together helped them to unlock their voices. It’s a personal breakthrough in finding such voices and making them heard.

Denise is a currently a PhD researcher at University of Roehampton, researching the representation of speech disability in contemporary poetry. She is a member of the Stroke Forum at St. George’s Hospital, London and Wandsworth Council’s Carers Forum.

Other Flowers “If we wait in silence for a while, we should see the apples that you talked about,” I say to Eris. She nods. The afternoon does not arrive in the way that I hoped. She points at the tree. Yesterday, and this morning, she kept on repeating the same word but I did not understand why she would mention fruit when the tree was bare. I met Eris at a conversation group last week where she talked about apples. I sit with her on the lawn and watch wood pigeons. “I still can’t see them,” I tell her. I sip a cup of green tea.

She talks about persistence, daisies and other flowers. Denise Saul

06 To Read & So...

Silent Room. The name reflects the whole attitude and the experience of the speech disability, aphasia, which at times, doesn’t allow the individual to communicate verbally.

Even though ‘Silent’ is present in the title and there are moments of silence, underneath the periods of silence that people have, they are talking with their eyes, with their body, their gesticulation. It’s a fascinating insight into all speech disorders and neurological conditions.

There’s so much about neurological disorders we don’t know. What I wanted to do with this project was to widen arts participation for individuals who have speech disability, to give an insight into the regeneration of identity post onset of aphasia and language breakdown.

It was challenging. If someone can’t write because they have aphasia, or had a stroke, how can they create a poem? When I was a carer for my mother who had aphasia, I felt there was so much more I could do for her and for others using film as a medium. The seeds of the project were planted in 2011. I thought, rather than making my own video poems, wouldn’t it be interesting to get people with aphasia to make their own videos about their lives, their language breakdown. That’s how it all started. The journey of language never stops. We all have moments when we struggle to find the right words. I find those slippages quite interesting.

The project was supported by the Arts Council and I’m still promoting the screening of the videos I did with the group at venues. I collaborated with Connect, a speech disability support organisation. I knew about them because my mother was a service user. Some of the people who went there were interested in creating art and film. I was a bridge.

I wanted them to feel that their voices mattered, that it was possible for them to engage with art.

The best moment for me was when we had the installation at the South Bank Centre and the poets saw their work for the first time. Seeing yourself or hearing your voice on screen is amazing. The feedback on how they felt seeing and hearing was memorable.

To Read & So... 07 Aphasia affects all ages, types and backgrounds.

Some of the participants are from Spain and the Philippines. There’s no restriction except that they were referred by Connect from the partnership groups and music groups that they run. I had a space at Connect’s premises; we had about 7 core members. They came and went over the months but the project had several core members. It gave us time. The theme was silence, different interpretations of silence: for example, silent places, silent laughter…Then they would create poems, but not necessarily verbally. I brought different prompts to the sessions, for example, crystals - I would get them to choose which kind of crystal reflected how their voices were. I used colour cards and they would pick a colour according to how they were feeling. It was very organic because with aphasia the impact it makes is so individual: some can write, others can’t, some can draw, some can’t. So it was about tailor-making those sessions. I had one participant who kept saying, ‘I can’t speak. I can’t speak,’ but in fact she created a poem and it was from the colour yellow. It was interesting how she connected with colour. The film-maker Helmie Stil filmed different grades of yellow to reflect the silence and just one or two words in that poem, so that reflected the whole breakdown of language for her. It was about finding from each member of the group what worked for them, to allow their ‘voices’ to come out.

I think some of them had pre-conceived ideas about poetry as difficult, with trick questions which you have to answer to explain what the poem’s about. I wanted to bring across to them that poetry is enjoyable. The whole journey wasn’t what they – or I - anticipated.

It was moving. There were different emotions that came out, first frustration of not being heard and then freedom in the language. The most humbling part was seeing how everyone in that group supported each other and when one person couldn’t find a word another person would jump in. There was no pressure if that word could never be found. So what?

Our society focuses so much on words and not really on the performance of language or how language resides in the whole body.

JAGS Genes I remember Debating and importantly Public Speaking, standing on the stage in the Prissian Theatre; that was really helpful years later with my poetry readings.

My English A level tutor was Mary Macrae. I met her again when I’d just finished putting together White Narcissi, my first poetry pamphlet. I saw her at an event and it was so nice to meet her. At that point she told me she was a poet and I never knew that side of her. When she passed I so regretted not having kept in touch. When I saw a copy of her poems I realised how much she’d influenced me. When I was at JAGS I was always in the Library reading books and it was thanks to her opening doors, metaphorically, reading books with me: Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Hamlet, Emma, Middlemarch. It was Mrs Macrae who had planted the seeds in my head.

I studied French and Italian for a while but I switched and studied instead NCTJ Journalism and that was my true calling. I won a scholarship from The George Viner Memorial Fund, set up by the National Union of Journalists to broaden the diversity of journalists working in the British and Irish media. My tutor was Lionel Morrison from South Africa, another strong influence on my work. During that period I was editing, writing articles as a business journalist, a foreign exchange journalist. I didn’t want to write about lipstick or makeup; that didn’t appeal to me. I worked on Lloyd’s Shipping Economist, FX Week, newswires and so on. All these deadlines which were very useful to me later on.

I wanted to write my own book. So I took the plunge and decided to focus on that. I started writing poetry from a very young age; my dad was a teacher from Guyana, my mother was really into poetry too and she often recited her first poem written when she was a child, something on the lines of ‘I wish I were a penny…passing from hand to hand. She used to recite to me so I was really used to being creative from a young age. I fell into writing poetry by chance.

You have to be disciplined to get work out there.

I tend to write late in the evening, in my room, in libraries... I vary it so the creative process

Once you step into the world of poetry you cannot leave it.

comes about. I’m in the last year of my PhD at Roehampton University focusing on aphasia and the carer’s narrative. It’s a completely different perspective. Meeting so many carers has shaped my collection.

Poems are meant to be read aloud, not just read only on the page. You have to breathe life into them. We have a strong oral tradition. Writing a poem, it’s only when you hear it you can see the parts where it doesn’t work. If something doesn’t work on the page and you read it aloud you can see why – for example, too many vowels or too many consonants, or it needs a linebreak here.

With creating there are times when you are not actually writing, but digesting an idea. Once you enter into that particular world, your brain is turning over different variations of that idea, and then when you write, something gels.

JAGS Gems The theatre was my special place at JAGS; that theatre was amazing. For a school to have theatre of its own to rehearse plays was exceptional. I wasn’t in plays, I’m more an orator. And also the Picture Gallery. The architecture of both the school and the Gallery appealed to my senses.

To my 18 year old self I would say: Go out and create, don’t be afraid to create. To leavers I would say: Whatever fears you have, challenge them. I’ve followed my advice! It’s really important to follow your convictions because at the end of the day, that’s why we’re here. As human beings, we’re here to create. https://www.silent-room.net/

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Mancie Baker

Y13 singer/songwriter In conversation with Alison Venn

Mancie has been writing and performing her own material and the odd smart cover for over four years to audiences ranging from thirty local pub patrons to over thirty thousand at Car Fest 2016.

Her music has been prominently featured on Dermot O’Leary and Chris Evans radio 2 shows.

She recorded her song 6am with The Strypes Josh McClorey and has supported UK rock legends Squeeze in concert.

She can be found on soundcloud, twitter and facebook, http://manciebaker.com I’ve always written my own stuff. I can’t play the guitar very well but I saw how One Direction did it when I was 13 and I thought, I really need to be able to do that too. I’ve never known another world. I’ve just always thought singing, acting, musical theatre would be for me. I didn’t start writing for quite some time. I was learning how to play guitar while I was learning how to write songs. I haven’t had any lessons; I can play 4 chords but that’s fine for most songs.

Apparently you can start a band if you can play four chords!

I remember I was listening to One Direction and then I went to write a song. It was called His Best Friend. My dad was kind about it and said, “That’s quite good” and I told him I wrote that, so he said “Go! Write more!” I’ve got more critical of myself. Now I don’t play much to my mum or dad. To be fair they wouldn’t tell me something was good when it wasn’t. My mum wants me to play to her all the time.

I just like writing stories. I like it when I find a song that has a story, and one that I recognise.

The songs I write are literally all true. There’s something autobiographical in all my songs. I just like that more, when I can know what a lyric means. I’m going to make myself sound like I think I’m really cool here. Sometimes I write things that are so obvious, so black and white. I used to play in a pub in Greenwich and literally I was saying ‘This is what happened this week, guys’. But in Guidelines, there’s a bit that says, Broken fairgrounds, sculpted dreams Islands of the lost Awkward comfort I bet that you thought I had forgot I thought it was quite cryptic, that no one was going to get that. Then I got a bit obsessed about the idea that I know what it’s about and no one else can understand it!

I’m quite good at writing break-up songs.

But then I was happy for a while so there was nothing to write about. I had to live it through other people’s sadness.

The last big gig I had was Car Fest and then we came straight back to school and into rehearsals for Grease. That was full on until December.

I’m taking a gap year. I’m applying to help teach music and drama at the school where I work on Saturdays, helping to teach LAMDA classes.

Then I’m applying to Drama schools the year afterwards.

Every girl should say Taylor Swift is a role model because her music and her lyrics are so clever, if you go into her albums to find something brilliant. I love Kacey Musgraves too, she’s a country singer. Lyrically she is the best, so strong. I really like country music. We go to Florida every year and country is so big there. It reminds me of holidays. My dad and I keep up with the country charts. I met her last year and I didn’t know what to say. If I like an artist’s lyrics, I’ll listen to everything.

I am training my voice classically. It’s weird how differently you have to sing. My teacher helped me prepare for playing the big festivals.

I really had to work at opening my throat more and all these things that you don’t appreciate will make a difference, but they do. She helped me rehearse You’re the one that I want. I’m rubbish technically, but I can get by. I’d like to be able to belt notes better in music festivals.

So, once I’ve finished my classical training, I’d like a musical theatre coach.

My parents love that I’m doing something that makes me happy. I have four guitars and my mum keeps one in the kitchen; when she’s there making dinner she nods towards it and encourages me to play. She’s at every performance. She doesn’t miss a show.

Yes, I have my feet on the ground. My dad (Danny Baker) wouldn’t let it be any other way.

He always knows the direction of where to push me but he lets me take the journey for myself.

Twitter is pretty huge and he posts where I’m playing and we each retweet so that probably helps. People get in touch with me. He says ‘She’s her own person.’ As a family we just believe, whatever happens, it’ll be fine. ‘What we’ll do next is this.’ We never have any idea what we’re doing but we know it’ll be fine.

10 To Read & So...

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616 Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck, And yet methinks I have astronomy;

To Read & So... 11

Mariam Mighidiseli

Fabienne Hanton year of 1982

Y10

But not to tell of good or evil luck, Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality; Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell, Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind, Or say with princes if it shall go well By oft predict that I in heaven find.

But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, And, constant stars, in them I read such art As truth and beauty shall together thrive If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert: Or else of thee this I prognosticate, Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.

The English department entered the Poetry by Heart Competition for the first time this year and was delighted that Y10 Mariam Mighidiseli was one of ten National winners and Y10 Emily Gray was the London finalist for the recitation of two poems: one pre and one post 1914.

Poetry By Heart is an inspiring competition entered by hundreds of students in Years 10 - 13 in schools and colleges in England to learn and to recite poems by heart. Not in an arm-waving, props-supported, thespian display, but as the outward and audible manifestation of an inwardly-understood and enjoyed poem.

From all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Mariam chose Sonnet no. 14. “I learnt it, performed it once to the teachers and once again, once more for the video recording and submitted it. I chose the sonnet that made the most sense to me, the one I could interpret, the one in which I thought I could express the most passion.”

This sonnet suited the timbre of her voice. “I took Speech and Drama lessons in Y7 and LAMDA in Years 8, 9 and 10. I think that learning something by heart means that I have this poem with me for always now. I can remember how it works; I understand the structure of it as a sonnet: 4 lines three times and a rhyming couplet. I want to do English A level so the rhythm and rhyme appeals to me and reciting it makes it come alive. I’ve enjoyed studying the 1st World War poems because they are real accounts of men’s experience. To me, Sonnet 14 is about how the narrator believes that once his lover dies truth and beauty will die with her, so she must produce a child, otherwise all that will end. I think that’s a nice message in life, knowing that you want to have a baby so that you give them your characteristics and traits which they will carry on.”

Bell House - a place for wider learning It’s a positive reconnection with the past. The 250 year old Georgian house in the heart of Dulwich Village is going through a loving restoration steered by new(ish) owners, Fabienne Hanton and her husband, Angus. With the initial concept of a retirement project, Fabienne explained to Alison Venn what is driving their mission to focus their educational charity on dyslexia.

I’ve always loved the house since I first visited it when I was doing an evening class there back in the 1980s and felt that it should be used for learning and community events. We wanted to make Bell House more widely available and we were able to buy it in the name of an educational charity which will trade under the name Bell House.

Two of our four sons are dyslexic and we would like the house to offer support to those with “the gift of dyslexia” though training and information. That might include typing courses, talks, help with organisational skills and courses that play to teenagers’ natural creativity and put less emphasis on the written word.

Children with dyslexia can find organisational skills very hard. They might have to learn to touch type; They have very intensive days – While those who aren’t dyslexic might take half an hour to do homework, it might take three hours for the others. If you’re having to go to touch typing classes on top of that, it takes it out of them.

The other area we thought would be interesting was informing newly qualified teachers about

12 To Read & So... how best to incorporate dyslexics into their classes. Very little of the PGCE training is spent on this aspect. It would be interesting if that happened here.

We also want Bell House to host courses in practical subjects such as film-making, cooking, sewing, photography and maybe even computer coding. We feel the curriculum has become very narrow so we very keen to offer courses that are educational, not just for children. We are running two courses this summer making films on your smart phones.

The idea is that once people have used editing apps and had direction they can go away and do it for themselves. Everyone’s making films but it’s how to make them well. It’s a natural way of communicating now, sending films of where you’ve been. We want what we offer to be complimentary to the local schools but also to go beyond school age and host courses that also appeal to older people.

We are looking for sponsorship for specific projects. The model we’re working on for the courses is that each class has 16 children but they are given two or three free places that they are going to offer keen that it shouldn’t be exclusive of any deserving children. We’re working with the Virtual school who are the most vulnerable children in Southwark. We are keen to identify children who should take these places; that’s a challenge in itself.

We are very interested in the idea of enrichment lectures, perhaps piggy-backing on school visiting speakers and maybe inviting them to stay on to talk at Bell House open to a public audience. Perhaps there would be a series of lectures - like the Picture Gallery, though not on Art, but other subjects. At the moment we haven’t narrowed down our ideas.

We are furthest with our film project and we have a lot of volunteers to work in the garden.

To Read & So... 13 We realise Bell House works really well as a gallery space. That doesn’t really fit into the education remit but it could be an interesting way of raising funds to run courses or to support free places. We are a charity – we don’t want to be making a profit but the house has got costs and we need to cover them.

We’re very keen that people should feel part of the project because it’s in their neighbourhood.

Bell House bears some of the hallmarks of a former educational establishment. It’s been the home of the Master of Dulwich College.

Between 1947 and 1992 it was used as a junior boarding school for Dulwich College with about 35 pupils living there. The drawing room was used as a dormitory for 12 of them and the boys had almost unsupervised control of the basement with table tennis, snooker and a den.

There is much more to the history, though.

It was built in 1767 by a successful stationer and publisher, Thomas Wright, who made his money by printing bibles, prayer books and almanacs. It was also, at one point, home to a Mr Harding who set up the world’s first ever department store in Pall Mall. One of our local historians, Sharon O’Connor, has written a 50-page history of the house which is on our website, bellhouse.co.uk.

We found old newspapers from 100 years ago when Edwin Lutyens was doing major restoration of the house and in digging an exploration hole in the cellar we think we may have found a second well.

The house is large with about 10,000 square feet and about 2 acres of gardens, but we think our project can make use of all the space.

Within the house we hope we will get planning permission to create a small lecture theatre and some larger workrooms and in the back garden

there can be outdoor learning, which is all too rare!

We wanted people passing the house to be able to see the house from the road - many people locally didn’t even know Bell House existed. Hopefully everyone will now be able to appreciate the beauty of this Georgian house, the unusual octagonal windows and the bell tower. We’ve also uncovered the retaining front wall which was orginally a “ha-ha” - a sunken wall that in the 18th century would have kept out sheep but been invisible from the house.

The bell in the bell tower still works! It’s surprisingly loud. The neighbours have said they like hearing it being rung - but we don’t ring it late at night! Historically it was put in to summon local firefighters to put out fires in the Village. We did some research and it turns out that the bell was made in the early 1770s and restored fairly recently by the Whitechapel Foundry.

The authorities have been very supportive.

John Major and Madeleine Adams from the Dulwich Estate have given us advice and moral support, but Southwark have been good too their tree expert, Oliver Stutter, has come up with lots of good tree-planting suggestions. It seems that people can see what we are trying to do and they particularly like the social mission: to offer free or subsidised places on all our courses, to make sure that the house is available as much to the state schools as the private ones and to make our courses widely available through short online films.”

We’ve found a fantastic willingness by people in Dulwich and Herne Hill to join in with everything from garden maintenance to offering their specialist skills and enthusiasm. But we do need more help - please email us at info@ bellhouse.co.uk if you’d like to join in.

We’ve got a strong management group with film-makers, a garden designer, a lawyer, graphic designers, artists and people who just have a can-do attitude, but we could do with even more help!

Bell House is not Fabienne’s only initiative.

I am a scientist and do medical research, focused on how bacteria affect premature births. You have good and bad bacteria; there’s evidence that that balance changes and it changes throughout pregnancy and sometimes the product that these bacteria could be producing can actually set off labour and then your baby’s born too early. So I look at what these bacteria are producing and my aim is to find something that can test women quite early on in their pregnancies to see if they have a predisposition to pre-term birth. If you get a positive result, then intervene to slow it down. At the moment I’m looking at one chemical which comes in two different types and we know that one is associated with a good pregnancy outcome and one with a poorer outcome and it could be that this chemical would act as a pro-biotic.

I work for Imperial College so I travel to Hammersmith Hospital. My experiments are on cells in the labs.

When you wake up in the night are you more excited about the Bell House project or the medical research?

Depends on the day! Science days are Tuesdays to Fridays, Bell House is Saturday to Mondays.

How do you switch off?

I read loads. I go to Book Club. We read a fantastic book called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a reflection on Donald Trump and how history repeats itself. It was the one book that everyone in the group enjoyed and had things to say about it.

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To Read & So... 15

Katie Prescott year of 2001

BBC Radio 4 Today programme Business Presenter and Producer

News, Fake News & the BBC When the unthinkable happens and the City’s rock-solid foundations become shaky, wouldn’t that make you want to find out why? It was after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 that Katie Prescott decided to get into financial journalism.

Here’s part of her talk to the sixth form History and Politics Society in March.

I wanted to understand how this could have happened. What the terminology meant credit derivatives and swaps and so on, how it would affect people to queue up outside Northern Rock trying to get their savings, why the government had to prop up the RBS, why the tax payer still owns over 70% of RBS. So, after Oxford University, I went to Cardiff Journalism School when I was 25. That was quite late. If you are interested in a career in journalism I can’t recommend it too highly.

It was such a great year - the first time I’d done something really practical after a very academic degree. Learning how to edit video and radio tape, the law of journalism, how to write for radio and television was very inspiring because it was gearing you up for a job at the end of it. I think one of the best things I learned was how to talk in plain English. And journalism is all about explaining things to people in as simple terms as possible, particularly business journalism.

I got my first real job in journalism as a researcher in the business economics unit at the BBC. From there I moved to the Today

programme, business section and I worked my up to be one of the editors. After my first maternity leave I came back as business producer and I’m now a stand in presenter for Dominic O’Connell.

Many older journalists would laugh at the idea of Journalism School and think the idea is ridiculous, because when they were learning their trade they came up through local papers and regional radio. Unfortunately it’s now quite hard to find jobs. So I found what Journalism School did for me was to give me the basic skills I needed to be able to go into a newsroom immediately; I knew the law, I knew the technology, so that was the route I found.

The other way I’ve seen people do it is to take a specialist degree, say in law or medicine and to move across the BBC as a correspondent in that field.

The pay is terrible as you probably know! But it’s real privilege of a job and it’s lots of fun. I’ve got to travel a lot which is exactly what I wanted to do. And to meet some fantastic people.

News is a bit of a funny thing. We have days when nothing happens and we sit in editorial meetings grasping around for a lead story and we don’t know what we’re going to cover. And then you get momentous happenings and you don’t know where to start. Part of our job on Today is making sense of what is going on in

the news agenda and then explaining it. And bringing it to life. The BBC’s motto is to inform and entertain. So we tell our stories from the perspective of real people because story telling is what we do to engage listeners.

For example here are several long running stories that I’ve worked on since I starting working at the BBC. Syria has a strong place in my heart because I was there in 2004.

It used to be the place where Oxford sent their Arabic students. I went to stay in Damascus. It’s unthinkable now, but I travelled round with my two girlfriends. It’s tragic to look at what’s happened and part of the challenge we face on the Today programme on a daily basis is how to keep that story alive and interesting for people like you. We try to do it in a variety of ways. It’s very hard to get close to it at the moment because it’s often too dangerous to send journalists there. So we use technology to interview people through smart phones. Very brave people send us videos of what’s going on which we verify and that we can broadcast. It’s a really tough story to keep alive and so important.

One of the things I love about journalism is you learn to question everything and take nothing for granted. This was really brought home to me when I came back from maternity leave to cover the General Election last year everyone said it’s going to be a hung parliament; we had our guests lined up to represent just that.

And I vividly remember that moment when the exit polls came out and it was going to be a Conservative majority. Paddy Ashdown said, “If that’s the case, I’ll eat my hat.” Of course he had to. None of us saw it coming because we all listened to what the pollsters and media commentators were saying. The second thing was the EU referendum. I think we all knew that people wanted to leave the EU or at least to give the establishment a bloody nose – they weren’t happy with the status quo. But again, a gasp went round the news room when it happened.

And then the election of Donald Trump, of course. I was at a Sky News party when it was announced, with other women and were talking about how great it was going to be with Hilary at the White House and Theresa at no.10….

And then of course he won.! What’s interesting about all of these events is that it shows a real blind spot in the media and the establishment and perhaps all of us; sometimes we don’t see what’s in front of us and we need to listen to people more and look beyond the liberal urban scene if you want to really understand the world around you.

I know if you look through my Facebook feed, for example, it’s inconceivable that Brexit or Donald could have happened, but that’s an example of how I – and many others – live in an echo chamber and I surround myself with people who think like me. I was sent to Sunderland straight after Brexit. Sunderland voted to leave the EU; which was seen as rather ironic, because many of the jobs in the area stem from Nissan, a Japanese car plant. Nissan is based in Sunderland because it sells most of its cars to Europe, at no added cost. When Brexit happens we don’t know if this will still be the case. But many of the people I met there were angry, at the administration in London, at high unemployment, lack of opportunity and high levels of deprivation. I think the danger for all of us is that we don’t explore what other groups of people around the country are thinking.

Perhaps that’s why so many in the media got the outcome of Brexit so wrong.

It must feel, that leaving the sixth form, you’re entering a really confused world. No one knows what the UK is going to look like post-Brexit; no one really knows what an America under Donald Trump is going to look like. But what I would say to you as you come out of school and go through university is to use that time to explore the world around you and question and try to understand how these things could have happened. That’s the only way you might start to change things and really get under the skin of why there is such huge dissatisfaction and disaffection rumbling in our society today.

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Questions from the audience

Who is in the room making decisions to cut?

What difference do you think the changes at the BBC will make and do you have any sympathy for them?

You have a day editor who sets up the programme and an overnight editor who comes in at eight pm and goes on till 9.30am.

They have a team of two and they have made those calls. There’s the best job title in the BBC which is the ‘early morning interferer’, a senior editor who turns up at 6.30am who says ‘That’s not right’ and meddles in the programme to make sure it’s absolutely up to the minute.

That’s difficult to answer. The cuts have been so broad. You won’t be surprised to hear I’m an advocate for a strong BBC. Particularly in an era of fake news, having a trusted news organisation with rigorous editorial standards around impartiality is absolutely vital. Cuts to regional radio are detrimental to coverage and cuts to the World Service have been a travesty, particularly in parts of the world where people don’t have access to trusted broadcasting so I wouldn’t advocate that.

How much can you be yourself when you’re presenting?

My editor said, ‘Hey, why don’t you present this piece?’ so I did. The first few months were awful. I’ve just got to the stage now where I don’t write everything down. It’s better when you’re yourself. I always think of presenting to my mum. It’s explaining things to people in plain English they can understand. Broadcasting is supposed to be a conversation, so the more you can establish a rapport the better.

How do you find these ’normal’ people to talk to on the Today programme?

Half the time there isn’t a process, so we do something called a vox pop – what I did in Sunderland was to walk down a street and find people to engage in conversation about the European Union. You might ring a local community centre and ask to come along.

Something we try to do is to work closely with our regional reporters and make sure our coverage isn’t just politicians grandstanding and you’re hearing what real people have to say. What I said about journalism being the first draft of history is a bit naff, but in a way that’s what history does: you want to go to primary sources and hear what people think.

Do you think that journalists should be allowed to voice their opinion?

If it’s critical opinion, it’s ok and you’ll hear a lot of our editors doing that. Think of our editor in America, John Sopel. He will listen to people in the America and then interpret for the listeners.

It’s not his own opinion, it’s informed. It is a tricky one, but we try to balance everything we do and question the facts. So we don’t just put out what Trump says and put it out as a given.

There’ll be some interpretation of that….

The worst example was around climate change.

It’s only quite recently that we’ve allowed to put out a piece on climate change without having to put on a ‘denier’, because we now

feel it’s been scientifically proven that it exists; but for a long time we were so obsessed with balance that we put on a scientist saying the hole in the ozone layer is getting bigger, then we had to put on someone denying that it exists. Just to give you an idea of how rigorous we are on balance in the run up to Brexit each morning, we had to put up a pie chart to show whom we’d had on and who was for leave or remain to make sure there was an even split which we had to balance out the next day. One of the things I think we did do quite well was that we had a fact check page so people could check, Is this right? It’s a really delicate balance to strike and there isn’t an easy answer.

How tight is the scheduling for your programme?

Is there any flexibility for overrunning?

One particular Tory minister always wanted to get the 7.50am slot, because we have the pips at 8am. He knew if he went on and on and on we’d have to go the weather! It’s really tough.

So much of what we do is defined by the Radio 4 infrastructure, so you have to have the news at 7.30 and the weather at 7.58.

If you were from Liverpool and had a broad Scouse accent, would you have got the job?

Yes, I think so. My friend Steph McGovern has a broad Middlesborough accent and she’s one of our top business presenters.

How would you cope with the news of the Queen’s death?

It depends on how it’s given. If it’s done under embargo they might tell us that at 11 o’clock we can make the announcement so we have a bit of time to prepare. Otherwise there’ll be a flash from the Press Association. On our desks we all have news wires coming up all the time and the important ones have a little jagged edge. So I imagine it will have one of those.

The newsreader goes into the news room and, whichever the sequence programme is (The Today programme, then World at One, PM and The World Tonight), that team takes responsibility for broadcasting the obituary, Radio 5 joins Radio 4 and we start our special programme. We’ve got lists of people to ring to give interviews - former Prime Ministers, Archbishops of Canterbury…

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Chloe Gounder Forbes year of 2000

What’s sauce for the goose…

Local East Dulwich resident and owner of Platform 1, Chloe Gounder Forbes, is a discerning 'foodie' with real passion for, as she puts it, 'fine dining in trainers'. Eating at the restaurant is a pop-up experience with a difference – the kitchen is permanent but guest chefs pop-up in a rotation of several months. Chloe provides a platform for talented young chefs to showcase their considerable skills. They offer a fixed price tasting menu which also changes during the rotation. So you can keep going back!

It’s a brilliant idea. When I booked I had the pleasure of dining on a feast created by Oxalis, a new modern British concept, led by chefs Nick Ross & Max de Nahlik. The perfect marriage of seasonal British ingredients and classic French technique.

I left JAGS 17 years ago to study Politics and Philosophy at Sussex. Sussex is a really cool place to study it because they still have the old ‘School’ system: you have a crossover …. so for example you can study Philosophy in the School of Social Sciences or you can study it in the School of African and Asian Studies; you study it individually within your School.

Then once a week we’d meet up in a seminar where you cross paths with others studying Philosophy. So that was really fun and that’s why I chose Sussex. I had a great time at uni.

At JAGS I used to fence trained by Mr Wilson on Tuesdays in the Holst Hall. He was one of the last remaining people to be taught by Leon P himself. When he started teaching me he was 82. I think he went on until he was 90. Classical style, which I picked up on straight away.

He wouldn’t actually let me pick up a foil for

3 months so I did footwork for about two hours a week, every week. I was 11 years old and really wanted to get that sword and do something with it! As a result, I probably had the best footwork in the world! In my GCSE year I might have qualified for the Commonwealth Games but I turned it down. I had already experienced national competitions and spent lots of time training. So having been in every sports team and creative club at JAGS, I opted for a different life when I went to uni.

Food is a labour of love. It doesn’t pay very well, but it is very emotional. Because we all care. When you work at the higher end of the industry it’s a real problem. Food is something that we fall in love with. How did it start? Maybe I can find some roots when I was at university; you always have a job on the side and I started working at a coffee shop in Brighton called the Red Roaster; they used to roast their beans on site. Making coffee is an art as much as it is a science. I found that really interesting. The different elements, how it all blends together.

I saw all parts of the process – the smelling and the tasting and thought, What’s going on with this? Can I get involved? That experience got me thinking about my palate which is the crux of this job. I’m blessed with a really good palate and a great memory. They are my only two skills!

That got me thinking about flavour profiles and about how one product can have a spectrum of flavours.

I tried a couple of graduate schemes but nothing grabbed me. I came second in a competition run by Channel 4 for black producers; they gave me a job anyway but it was for Attic Productions and I really wasn’t into making things like Big Brother. If I was going to get into tv it would have been more serious things, like research for a documentary.

Eventually I ran out of money. I was in the area, got a job with Blue Mountain Café. I swore blind I was never going to work in hospitality again. I thought, I’ve got my degree, that’s it, I’m out of here. But after a year, Mel, the owner, had taken on another site on Fulham Palace Road. I said, Mel, working here is great, living ten minutes away is great, but I’m a little bit bored. So she said Ok Chloe, I’ll give you a go.

I was 22 and I arrived on Fulham Palace Road and it was literally a building site and they were carrying rubble out. The next stage was ordering equipment and thinking about lay-out and then together we came up with the ethos.

This happened at the time which I like to call the Great British Food Boom. People began to be interested in where their food came from and far was it travelling. Maybe the rise of the celebrity chef accounted for that. Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, around the same time… So this raised the status of the chef to its rock’n’roll status now. The shop was going to be a deli,

so I decide to try to source as many things as possible within the M25, to keep that carbon footprint down and to support local business.

I’d never done anything like this before, never managed a project that size.

I decided I wanted to do cheese. Mel said she was good friends with the Fromagerie – ‘I’m sure they’ll take you in for three days and you can learn on the job there’. From literally not knowing anything beyond brie and cheddar, I left thinking that was awesome. Cheese is

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quite a cool thing because you have one recipe that if you just tweak it here and there you get completely different end results. That’s crazy!

So I started looking into this. I’m the kind of person that needs to know everything about a subject. I really loved learning about these different things and hearing these stories. I really took to it.

working for someone else. I earned a bit as a waitress and I was looking in Peckham and Nunhead and Catford. Also experimenting myself with cooking. I was looking for somewhere to pop-up. By chance I heard about this empty premises pop-up. I turned up here and found the person before had made a swift exit – there were still Christmas decorations and dirty plates in the sink. It was a real mess and the garden was a jungle. But it was a brilliant location and the kitchen is huge.

I thought, this is insane. Why is no one in here doing something? So we spoke and I explained my situation that I couldn’t afford the £200, 000 asking price. We came to an agreement and I’ve been here two years in July!

Then my next job was to learn about wine.

When I was 23 I said, right, I’m going to pay attention to any wine training we have. Again, a tweak here, a tweak there and you get really different results. We got our alcohol licence.

We used Alison and Annette, two ladies who run Wine Net Ltd, a small, independent wine merchant in Dulwich. They started supplying us.

Bless them, they’ve seen me through the whole journey. They’ve heard me go from ‘Malbec?

What’s Malbec?’ through to ‘I’m not having that, it’s not weird enough for me!’ I wanted to know about soil content, have tastings, trying different blends.

I worked with Mel for four years, Sydenham and Gypsy Hill. By the time I left I was in charge of three shops, had fifty staff and I wanted to do something completely different. So I got a job in town at a member’s club where they had a wine list in excess of 400 bottles. I went in thinking, I’m going to conquer this list, I’m going to know everything about all of the wines on this list. The general manager took a shine to me and any time he had the opportunity he gave me training and shared information. The key is listening. Suddenly we were dealing with wines at £400 per bottle!

Wherever I have been I’ve tried always to stick to the finer side. I went back to Brighton for a time to support my mother through treatment.

I developed my knowledge of cheese. They had appenage on site, where you finish off the cheese, change it, or let it mature. It was a crazy experience and off the back of that I got to be a judge at the World Cheese Awards in 2011. One of the best experiences I’ve had was running The Shed in Notting Hill. It was fun working with the boys; they had their own vineyard.

Having access to produce like that was really exciting.

Platform 1 has been a thousand different restaurants. Originally it was Chinese. I spent five years prior to this opening places for other people and thought it’s probably about time I did this for myself. I think women are a bit different from men; whereas they just say, Let’s do it, it took me five years to gain confidence that I could create something that could be not only good, but that I could maintain. I thought I needed at least ten years to create my own brand. I set myself targets to meet and finally thought I was ready.

My mum knew I always wanted to work for myself. Being a fireman wasn’t for me; I wanted my own business. This industry is so far removed for my mum. She spent the first eight years asking about where this career was going.

‘Why don’t you just get yourself a job in social work? Why don’t you use your degree?’ I said, Mum, if I were going to do that, I’d have done it by now.

I have opened this on my own. I don’t have any business partners, which has its pros and its cons. I’d quit my jobs because you can’t be looking to open your own place when you’re

It’s a nightmare concept to manage with chefs constantly changing, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love Lordship Lane.

There’s so much going on and still a number of independents and loads of choice. But it does get a bit samey – if I want a Japanese cocktail, I go to Yama Momo, if I want a steak & kidney pie I go to the Palmerston. I get bored. In coming up with this concept I felt it was in line with the behaviour of Londoners at the moment, getting into this pop-up scene in food and changing and supporting the underdog. So I thought, how could I provide something that’s good for the area and also going to benefit me and benefit others. The one big to note here is that I actually cover all of the financials myself. So the idea in setting up Platform is that we are a platform – someone like me with no money, not much support, but I’ll give you the opportunity to start building that support and I’ll take the risk on you. That’s why we’re very selective about who we work with. A lot of the guys I’ve already accepted are doing very well, winning awards and have got their own restaurants now.

Some people have raw natural talent. Their plating is beautiful and intricate. It tastes as good as it looks. We got a mention in thenudge. com - best restaurant within a neighbourhood.

We’re getting recognition up there with Le Gavroche, so that’s nice. We’re on our fifteenth rotation now, with lots of young men and women in through the door. This year has an

exciting finish. Our customers are really loyal and supportive. Our regulars are just that regular - and come back for every rotation.

I’ve made a playground for myself. We’ve got in-house infusions which we play around with and we’ve got the garden.

JAGS gems The year of 2000 were quite a feisty year - there were a lot of big personalities there. There was a theory that Mrs Davies let in all the noisy ones in her final year as Headmistress.

What advice would you give to your 18 year old self? Keep going, try everything. Believe in yourself, do what you’re doing well and things will come back to you. I was raised to work hard, go above and beyond.

I’ve got so many memories. I really had a great time. When I was at JAGS my mum was really poorly and people were really supportive. I think about the people I grew up with and about the teachers, particularly Mr James and Mrs Barton and Mrs Hawting – they were always really good to me and gave me a lot of joy.

(My starter! Editor's notes)

Platform 1 | 71 Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, SE22 8EP http://platform1.london

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Alumnae Reunion Lunch Alumnae of JAGS, we salute you! You are officially amazing. 170 former staff and pupils made it to the Reunion, Patricia Clarke even flew from Canada, and the Holst Hall was buzzing.

Congratulations to those who were celebrating anniversaries and significant birthdays, but whatever the reason they chose to return, we were thrilled to welcome them home.

JAGS is still the school you know, despite cosmetic changes. The Library offered the best views of the breath-taking rise of the new Community Music Centre, which currently has floors and ceilings, even staircases, if not walls! The archive displays absorbed several alumnae of all generations. Quite challenging to persuade people to leave the Dining Hall after a gorgeous lunch, content to catch up with each other. Happy days.

Headmistress Sally-Anne Huang painted a picture of JAGS in the future, with places awarded needs-blind. There will be a campaign in the next academic year to fund more bursaries.

Shaping the Future

The JAGS Alumnae Medical Society

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