Gibbon, Maureen
2013 "Gibbon, Maureen", 2013, HistoryTalk Maureen was born in Ilford, the eldest of three children, after her parents had moved back to London after the war. She worked in various part time jobs in Ilford and Rainham as a teenager, including in a library, at Jeyes Fluids and as a waitress....
| Institution: | TUC - Trade Union Congress Library |
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| Language: | English |
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London
2013
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/F275737C-2F39-45B9-9352-98E23BFFCB7C http://hdl.handle.net/10796/D97423F6-A318-4D98-BEBB-7C879DFD57C7 |
| Summary: | 2013
"Gibbon, Maureen", 2013, HistoryTalk
Maureen was born in Ilford, the eldest of three children, after her parents had moved back to London after the war. She worked in various part time jobs in Ilford and Rainham as a teenager, including in a library, at Jeyes Fluids and as a waitress. Although she did A levels at school, she did not go to university but did a secretarial course. Her first job was working for a research company in Soho in the early days of market research around 1962 and was earning about £6 per week. In 1963, she moved to work as a supply teacher at the Rosetta Infants and Primary School in Canning Town. She describes in detail some of the children at the school and her enjoyment of teaching there. She then went into factory work in 1964 until her daughter Jo was born. She then did cleaning jobs in Notting Hill and recalls playgroups in north Kensington around St Marks Road and the Spanish and Portuguese communities in that area.
Maureen later worked for SHAC, the housing part of Shelter in the statistics department. She describes in detail the reports on housing. This was based in the Old Brompton Road and partly funded by the Greater London Council until its abolition in 1986. She worked there for 13 years. She took redundancy in 1993/ 4 and did classes at the City Literary Institute and Morley College and then did a degree at Queen Marys and later an MA in Creative Writing . After her first degree, which was enjoyed, she got a job at Breakthrough Breast Cancer and moved to Kensal Rise. She describes accomodation in north Kensington and other aspects of the social environment in the 1980s. She published a novel called Her Fault and is writing a second novel.
In her clip she describes working for SHAC/Shelter and how training refugees about their rights regarding housing had a huge impact.
Click on the pdf icon to read the entire transcript or click on the mp3 icon to hear a clip of the interview. |
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| Physical Description: | Photograph TEXT |