{"id":39,"date":"2011-10-17T15:37:23","date_gmt":"2011-10-17T14:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rostennyson.info\/w\/?page_id=39"},"modified":"2021-05-17T09:42:52","modified_gmt":"2021-05-17T08:42:52","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.rostennyson.info\/w\/about\/","title":{"rendered":"About"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RosI am grateful to my parents for the gift of being \u2018mixed race\u2019. My mother was a Jewish refugee from Germany who fled to the UK in 1939 at the tender age of 16 and never saw her parents (relatively wealthy business people prior to Nazi persecution) again. My father\u2019s father was a grandson of the great Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. My father\u2019s mother was a refugee Hungarian origins \u2013 a feisty woman (do these things run in families?) who, rumour has it, was much admired by both Lloyd George and Bertrand Russell and who was the first General Secretary of the Free Trade Union.<\/p>\n

It was wonderful to grow up in the atmosphere of my parent\u2019s strong sense of social concern and social justice \u2013 they had spent two years in India before I was born and continued to be inspired by Gandhi, Tagore and Indian philosophy for the rest of their lives. They always supported and encouraged my early enthusiasms (of which there were many) whether of an artistic or animal rescue or social change nature.<\/p>\n

\"TennysonAnother formative influence was the fact that our family shared a large house with another family for 5 years where the children grew up together and the parents were able to cover for each other when one or other was away or indisposed. <\/p>\n

Apart from the value of feeling part of an extended family, the experience set in motion a deep interest in communities and community living that has remained with me ever since.<\/p>\n

Building on my early passion for all things cultural \u2013 see other interests<\/a> \u2013 and a natural inclination (sometimes closer to dogged determination) to create new ways of doing things whenever the conventional approach seemed seriously inadequate \u2013 see: social innovator<\/a> \u2013 I have forged a rather zigzag path in terms of what others might consider \u2018my career\u2019.<\/p>\n

Having done poorly in my final exams at school, I went to drama school rather than university. I thrived at drama school and after my somewhat humiliating school experience, was surprised (and, of course, delighted) to find myself top of the class in a whole heap of subjects including phonetics! What I learned at drama school has undoubtedly influenced the way I do things \u2013 helping deepen my powers of observation, sense of transformational potential and capacity to \u2018get inside the skin\u2019 of different points of view \u2013 see partnership broker<\/a> and facilitator.<\/p>\n

I left drama school with no clear idea of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life which led to quite a period of \u2018dabbling\u2019 (about which my parents despaired but which I absolutely loved since it gave me so many opportunities to explore rather than getting caught into one career path). Over an extended period my activities included:<\/p>\n