Protests

PROTESTS

PHILIPPE SOUPAULT SAID OF RENÉ CREVEL THAT ‘HE WAS BORN REBELLIOUS THE WAY OTHERS ARE BORN WITH BLUE EYES.’ THE SAME COULD CERTAINLY BE SAID OF BRENDA WILLIAMS.

WELL VERSED PROTESTER PATIENTS LONE HOSPITAL PROTEST POET MAKES A ROOFTOP PROTEST

THE TIMES HIGHER MAY 6 1994

WELL-VERSED PROTESTER

Next week Oxford dons will be voting in the election for the controversial chair in poetry, but one voice will not be heard. Alison Utley reports

Between the tombstones of St Cuthbert

And St Bede between destiny and England

The stone sheared for nothing and Cranmer burned

And from your closed city a poet turned

(Extract from Brenda Williams’ poem Oxford)

There is nothing apparently unusual about Brenda Williams. Perched amid a handful of students revising in the shady quiet of Oxford's Wellington Square one warm spring day, she seems quite unremarkable. A well-thumbed Milton lies on her knees. A mature English student perhaps. Or a tutor? Wrong. So very wrong, in fact. For Wellington Square may be as close to Oxford University as Ms Williams is ever going to get. She is, she says, destined to remain forever on the outside.

Yet so great is her longing for membership of that coveted institution that Ms Williams has begun a silent protest. She has pledged to sit out there under a tree in Wellington Square until someone does something.

She offers me her seat, a folding fisherman's stool, and a poem. It is the first time anyone has written a poem for me. Reading it I am uncertain how to respond. This must be a driven woman, a woman spurned, an angry woman refusing to accept rejection, demanding, struggling. Wrong again. “No I am not angry, not bitter. This is a good place for me to write.”

For the past 12 years Ms Williams has been writing from the garden of her home in London's St John's Wood. She began to write suddenly at the age of 33. She says she didn't know she was a writer. Traumatised by her father's mental breakdown, she began a letter that simply came out as a poem. She has not stopped writing since, and five years ago she made her first bid to be nominated for Oxford University's chair of poetry.

Even as an unpublished author, Ms Williams was eligible, although she acknowledges that her chances of success were virtually non-existent. Predictably, her application got nowhere, but undeterred she set about improving her body of work. Last week her application for the quinquennial contest was again turned down, this time without any nominations. (All Oxford MAs are eligible to nominate a poet for the chair, currently held by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and to vote).

The highly regarded chair is an important influence on poetry in Britain. It has often been the subject of controversy, sometimes perceived as a prize in the struggle between the Oxbridge literati and contenders with a more populist following. Yet perhaps 315 years without a woman professor of poetry in Oxford is long enough. Voting will begin next Thursday when Professor Heaney relinquishes the role. His would-be successors are a daunting collection. Led, arguably, by James Fenton (a war correspondent and Independent columnist) who lost to Peter Levi in 1984, the group does include a feminist hopeful, Ursula Fanthorpe, a former head of English at Cheltenham Ladies College. Two latecomers have also thrown their hats into the ring, respected Australian poet Les Murray and Alan Brownjohn, a former chairman of the

Poetry Society.

The electorate is relatively small and unpredictable, the candidature distinguished. Yet Ms Williams insists her protest is less about the fact that she has failed to gain nominations to the chair and more a reflection of her feelings about her treatment by the Oxford establishment.

In a desperate bid to gain sufficient nominations to be eligible for election to the post, Ms Williams sent 1,200 copies of her epic work The Pain Clinic to Oxford academics. She describes the work as passionate, uncomplicated, lyrical, straight from the heart. What really hurt was that not one offered any response to the formidable 1,064-line poem. "To do nothing about such a considerable poem speaks volumes," she says. "To ignore a poem from an unpublished author breaking new ground, working alone, is completely irresponsible. What are they there for? To encourage writers? They can't be bothered with me because they have James Fenton."

Ms Williams is a gentle, quietly spoken middle-aged mother of two boys. She says she has been very happy as a mother. In fact, she describes her life as wonderful. One son is an undergraduate at Magdalen College, following a scholarship to Eton. The other is a gifted musician at the Purcell School. She has applied, unsuccessfully, to every Oxford college to read English. She believes she has a right to be recognised, to be accepted. She is prepared to suffer intensely in return for that recognition.

Instead she is thwarted, it seems, time and again. Passive protest has become almost a way of life. Some years ago Ms Williams staged another sit-in at Oxford, which ended badly. Following her son Isaiah's failure to gain a place at the prestigious Magdalen college school, Ms Williams sat outside during a bitterly cold winter for five months until she was violently ejected by a group of young men.

Recently her treasured London roof garden was destroyed despite a concerted campaign that ended in the High Court. She has also staged a sit-in at Leeds University after failing an entrance exam to read theology. The appeals procedure got her nowhere. Another began, lasting several weeks. "I never got any response, no feedback whatsoever. I just wanted to be heard. All I ever got from Oxford and from Leeds was derision and contempt. The best I got was indifference." She learned Hebrew during that sit-in. "They thought I was a laughing stock, a joke."

The high point was a Christmas card from the classics department. "You won't believe how important that was to me. It was an acknowledgement. Somehow I had got something across to somebody." The English department told her to go away and write poetry at home. “I had done that,” she says. "Done that successfully. To go away, be out of sight, out of mind, means I don't exist. The universities must take some responsibility for me, give me some chance."

The Oxford poetry chair is an obsession, sparked by the death of her father, Cyril, in a car crash. "The day before he died, father said to me do it, get nominated, do it for me." It was a promise she now feels committed to fulfill. But equally important, she says, is her determination to show the university system she pared to suffer for the right to study, and to be heard. It is unlikely any of the Oxford dons voting next week will hear her voice.

HAM & HIGH NOVEMBER 7 2003

PATIENT’S LONE HOSPITAL PROTEST

WOMAN WHO IS REFUSED TREATMENT WILL NOT BUDGE FROM BENCH

Andrew Brightwell

A PATIENT is staging a solitary protest outside the Royal Free Hospital claiming she has been refused care by Camden's mental health services. Brenda Williams suffers from depression and has been treated in the borough for the past 19 years because she is registered with a Camden GP. But the St John's Wood resident says Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust told her in September to seek help in Westminster.

The 54-ycur old poet receives just one hour of care a week, from a Camden Council funded team, and, claims the move is the result of her persistent complaints about the standard and provision of mental health services in the borough. Ms Williams has lodged an official complaint and for the past eight weeks has stationed herself on a bench outside the hospital in Pond Street. Hampstead, where she has previously received care in the mental health wards. She told the Ham&High she would remain there for eight hours a day, every day, until care is reinstated.

"I am protesting at the standard of care. But most of all I want to get back the care I entitled to and 1 will stay here until 1 achieve that." she said. Ms Williams said her problems began three years ago when she was receiving treatment under the Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust at the Royal Free and came to the assistance of another patient. She later made complaints about the West Hampstead Day Hospital in Fordwych Road.

"I have always been interested in fighting for other patients but I have always gone through the proper channels," she said. "I have never been a problem patient but my care was slowly dismantled. I just thought it was me because at the time I was so depressed. It was just a nightmare from then on," she said. But she said: "I don't have any confidence in Westminster and I have always been treated here and 1 have a right under the rules of the NHS to continuity of care from Camden."

In a letter passed to the Ham&High, addressed to Barry Tebb, Ms Williams' ex-husband, who has lodged complaints on her behalf. Erville Miller, chief executive of the mental health trust, said that doctors felt it was no longer appropriate for her to receive help at the Royal Free. He said that Ms. Williams had refused care from the West Hampstead Day Hospital and her mental health problems were not currently acute or severe. Her quiet protest outside the Royal Free Hospital is not her first. She went on hunger strike for two weeks in September when she was told to seek help in Westminster and in 1994 she protested outside Oxford University for nine months over the failure of the university to appoint a female chair of poetry.

A Camden and Islington Mental Health Care Trust spokeswoman said it could not comment on individual cases that were the subject of official complaints.

Ham & High 10 December 1993

Poet makes a rooftop

Protest over garden

A POET'S rooftop protest on Wednesday temporarily thwarted the efforts of the landlord of a St John's Wood mansion block to remove a valued garden.Workmen arrived with a mechanical digger at Old Manor Court in Abbey Road to dismantle the roof garden but were ward ed off by Brenda Tebb, who has been leading a tenants' protest against the plan.

Now Ms Tebb; her ex-husband, Barry, and her son, Ezra, have all been named in a 14-day injunction order forbidding any "agents, friends and supporters" from going on to the roof garden. The Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society, which owns Old Manor Court, says it has to remove the garden above the mansion block's garage in order to repair the roof, which is leaking. It has told tenants that if they want the garden replaced they will have to pay for it themselves. After starting to remove soil and cut down trees, workmen left when they were berated by Ms Tebb and 15-year-old Ezra, who went up on the roof garden to stop them.

"I had decided to sit right with Gandhi-like passivity, but when I saw their van said 'muck and rubbish removal' something just snapped,'' said Ms Tebb. "I told the man I was going to stay on the roof and protect the trees as much as possible. He said he had a job to do, but I told him I was a poet and it was my duty to protect nature."

Earlier this year, two-thirds of tenants in the 24-flat block signed a petition opposing the removal of the roof garden, arguing that the structural work did not require it. Ms Tebb was especially annoyed, because she was 70 sonnets into a 120-sonnet poem inspired by the garden. "I have 50 more sonnets to do and if the garden goes it will destroy the poem," she said. Since then Ms Tebb has completed a 71st sonnet, about the dismantling itself. A Liverpool Victoria spokesman said this week: “While we have no proposals to replace the roof garden, we would be prepared to consider any reasonable alternative propositions that tenants come forward with to improve the amenity, but any such work would be at the lessees cost.”

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