I’d been working in a theatre for about 12 years, doing publicity. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the theatre, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to make a difference in some way, to do something meaningful. Somebody must have heard I was thinking of leaving and almost immediately I got a call from the mayor’s office to ask if I’d do a fundraising job for the Mayor of Cambridge. The job was taking 1200 elderly people away for the day to Great Yarmouth. I was involved in raising funds for the trip. I did a 6-week fundraising job, raising the money, and raising awareness in Cambridge.
At that time, in 1989 and 1990, homeless people were starting to appear on the streets of Cambridge and obviously, the mayor had got involved – he’d done a sleepout and various things like that and wanted to find an answer to it, find what he could do. He mentioned Emmaus and asked if I knew anything about it. I didn’t but I found out there were Emmaus communities all over France that offered homeless people a home and work, so I took myself over to France and went to see the Emmaus community outside Boulogne. It was a community of about 30 companions, they were all men in those days, but I remember thinking that this could work. Something captured me. I could see the benefits that it had.
Joining Emmaus UK
Once I’d seen the French community, I knew that I could make a difference. I’ve always thought if you’re meant to do something it’ll come back and bite you later on. It was in the spring of 1991 that I had a telephone call asking if I would like to be the first employee of Emmaus and start the first community in Cambridge.
When I joined in March 1991, they’d found a site for the community and then it was a matter of raising around £400,000, which was an awful lot of money. We formed a friends group and I think we had about six months to raise the funds.
To start with local people were horrified that there was to be homeless people living on the site and a lot of people wrote to the local paper and said they weren’t happy about it but I think once we started explaining what it was all about, they began to see it could actually solve a problem. People would have somewhere to live and somewhere to work, to get them back into working. Recovering self-respect through meaningful work in a supportive environment is what makes Emmaus unique and successful.
When we were raising the money, we had massive events and incredible coverage on tv and radio. The local paper said 
they would do a story every day. Emmaus’s founder, Abbe Pierre, came over in June 1991 and saw the site and offered his support. He was extraordinary because he’d been on hunger strike and we didn’t know he was going to come over, then at the very last minute we heard that he was on the plane, and he was going to be arriving that day. It gave us a real boost to have his support.
We started the building work in November 1991 once we’d raised quite a significant amount of the money, but we still encountered lots of problems. At one point vandals broke a lot of the windows and doors, then we found we had to build an access road to the site and we also realised the shop in the community was too small so had to close in order to make a larger shop.
Despite the issues I always thought ‘this will happen, it will happen!’. It was difficult but it was merely a blip really because there were many supporters. It just seemed the right thing to do because of what it could offer homeless people.
Opening the community
Terry Waite opened the community in July 1992, he’d not long been back from Lebanon. I remember the French communities were very helpful, they sent over van loads of things for the shop when it opened. Three busloads of companions, and friends of Emmaus from communities in northern France, bought goods over which was very inspiring.
Just as we were getting Cambridge open, Tim Brooke, a friend of Selwyn’s in Coventry got in touch to ask for help setting up a community there. He had a building and needed the money to convert it. I went to see it and an appeal was launched in the autumn of 1992.
Our main focus was to try and get more communities set up. The drive from the start was to try and get several communities set up quite quickly so we had to raise awareness. One of the stories we did was when the Queen came to Cambridge and Emmaus companions presented her with a bike for one of her grandchildren. We very nearly didn’t get the photograph of the moment because the queen had her back to the cameras. I was near the Queen and I touched her arm, which you’re not exactly allowed to do, but I remember her looking around and I smiled at her and said ‘Ma’am, do you think you could just turn slightly, we only have one opportunity to take this photograph’ and she smiled and turned and then we got this brilliant photograph – bonkers really. It got a massive amount of press. The best thing was the photo on the front page of Hello Magazine.
In February 1993 we had a briefing in the House of Commons to try to raise awareness and from that Emmaus Greenwich started. A vicar in Plumstead, a chap called Benny Hazlehurst, had read about Emmaus from a report of the House of Commons briefing in one of the religious newspapers. He’d seen that the former children’s home opposite his vicarage in Plumstead had been derelict for about two years and after reading this article he thought the site would make an ideal community. He contacted Selwyn, and then in April 1993 we launched an appeal to buy the former children’s home.
30 years of Emmaus in the UK
I was the only employee of Emmaus UK for a few years, then Iain Mackechnie-Jarvis became the first director and a few others joined later. It was a huge amount of work, I found it very exciting. Every day was very different, and I was always having to think about the money; how were we going to get the money, how was it going, think about publicity and keep the drive going.
After the first few communities were established and more were opening, my role was a mixture of fundraising, coordination, campaigning and appeals. Nothing compares with those first few years because it was just so exciting.
Having reached the 30th anniversary I feel very proud having been involved with it. I’ve utterly loved it. In many ways I can’t believe 30 years has gone by, it’s astonishing. Looking back on those early days I didn’t think much about what it would become because your mind was taken up all the time. We did very quickly think of there being a second and a third and fourth and a fifth, but at the time, certainly in the early days, you’re just thinking of the next one or two, not the 29th and 30th. I think if anybody had mentioned that I would have just said ‘how extraordinary, I can’t imagine that happening’.