Interviews
Interviews with Women’s Pioneer Housing tenants and staff
As part of the Women’s Pioneer Housing centenary project, we carried out interviews with a number of long-term residents and WPH’s longest-serving staff member.
These recorded interviews make up a unique archive that provides us with first-hand insight into the day-to-day lives and experiences of WPH tenants and staff, from the 1950s to the present day.
Here, the voices of our tenants and staff are preserved for posterity – a lasting glimpse into a fascinating, but a previously little-known, piece of twentieth-century women’s history. As women’s stories are so often missing from records and archives, this is an invaluable resource.
Below, you can hear and read an eclectic, moving, and amusing range of stories. Although each woman’s experiences were very different, every story shares a clear sense that WPH provided a community and a secure home of one’s own amid the ups and downs of life as an independent woman.
Fiona Green
WPH resident from 1990 to present
- Fiona describes how having a stable home with WPH benefitted her young daughter, now a beautiful, confident young woman. Listen to it here Fiona Green interview first extract
- The importance of low-cost social housing to parents bringing up children Fiona Green second extract. and Fiona Green third extract
Marie Collett
WPH resident from 1969 to present
- Marie is interviewed by WPH manager Nona Grosstephan and manages to get a flat despite her worries that being an actress would count against her. Marie Collet interview first extract
- Initial impressions of her fellow tenants at her first flat at 8 Stanley Gardens. Marie Collet interview second extract
- A description of her first flat in Stanley Gardens, which lacked central heating. Marie Collet interview third extract
- The key role of the Scheme Manager where Marie lives now. Marie Collet interview forth extract
Sue Hockett
WPH staff member since 1977
WPH’s Director of Property and Estate Services, Sue Hockett started work at the organisation in 1977.
- Sue describes starting out at WPH and working with Nona Grosstephan, Manager and Secretary of WPH at that time. Sue Hockett interview first extract
- Sue describes the differences between tenants in the 1970s and those from the 1990s onwards. Sue Hockett interview second extract
- Sue explains how rents at WPH were relatively high in the 1920s but were not increased in proportion as the decades passed, in part because of the gender pay gap. Sue Hockett interview third extract
- Sue recalls how the introduction of computers to the WPH office in the late 1970s changed ways of working. Sue Hockett interview forth extract
Mary Digby
b. 1929
WPH Tenant between 1973 - 2016 and stockholder
How did you get your flat at Women’s Pioneer Housing?
Mary was living in a small London flat in Chelsea that belonged to one of the families she worked for but her tenancy was coming to an end. One day she was looking after the first of her ‘great-grandchildren’ (probably the child of one of her early charges from her time as a Norland Nanny). She took the child into the private square to play in the sandpit and she got talking to another nanny about Women’s Pioneer Housing as she was living in Ladbroke Grove. She wrote to WPH and received a telephone call from Miss Grosstephan. Following an interview at a large boardroom table at the office in Buckingham Palace Road, she was informed that she was ‘’a suitable candidate’’ but Miss Grosstephan could not tell her when a flat would be available. Luckily a flat in Brook House did become available and Mary moved there in 1973.
Who else lived there?
In the beginning, Mary described the woman as: ‘A lot [of them were] retired……all were highly respectable’
There were strict rules regarding the opposite sex –
‘When I moved in, you were not allowed to have a man live with you, and you could only have friends to stay for a weekend, no longer than that’.
Some tenants broke the rules but Mary was not one of them. Later on, the rules were relaxed and there were examples of ‘men moving in with the girls’.
When asked if she had a memorable member of staff, Mary named Sue Hockett: ‘A very nice young woman saw me get moved in. She was calm, pleasant and professional. There was very little red tape.’
Cicely Mary Falkner
b.1919 – d.2013
WPH tenant from the late 1950s – 2010
In this interview, Cicely is remembered by her niece Anne Sharpley, one of the Pioneering Courage project’s volunteer researchers. Anne describes writing to and visiting Cicely at the three WPH properties she lived at from the late 1950s up until 2010: 13 Ladbroke Gardens; Flat 17, 24-29 Stanley Gardens; and Flat 5, 24 Stanley Gardens.
Cecily Mary would have loved to have studied at art school but instead, she took private shorthand lessons and became a secretary.
In 1951 she became Secretary and PA to the Chief Accountant for the Festival of Britain and was the only woman in the office. The office was housed in a flimsy prefab on the South Bank, handling large sums of cash. At the end of each day, the heavy money bags were sent down a chute to a security van. On more than one occasion the young male accountants managed to post Cecily down the chute as well!
Later, she moved to Unilever; after working over 20 years for the company, mostly as a project controller in their market research department, she was made redundant in 1976 at the age of 57. Undeterred, her response was to knock four years off her age and rewrite her CV – so at a time when women automatically retired at 60, Cecily Mary worked on until 64 as secretary and administrator in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s architect’s department.
Living in Fashionable Notting Hill
In the 1990s, Cecily had celebrity neighbours – the Jagger family lived on the other side of the garden and Tina Turner moved next door. When the BBC made a documentary about Tina Turner which included an interview with her on her balcony, Cecily Mary chose to spend the entire time in the background watering the plants on her adjacent balcony - she was edited out of the final version!