I have at last started to methodically go through the archive in relation to East Shallowford Farm, because 2026 will signify the 50th anniversary since Elizabeth Braund, with her two colleagues Rosemary Bird, and Hywel Jones purchased the farm, and the first groups of young people began to arrive. I have promised the Shallowford Trust that I will have a book ready about story of the farm. In fact, the book that Elizabeth never wrote.
In my initial researches I have actually come across a notebook, where in her handwriting, it looks like she began to write the story. Unfortunately, she didn’t get far. However, with a combination of her writings, other writings and photos we will get there.
Among the material, I opened a small wooden box, that I knew had been there for a while and contained some letters to Elizabeth. It was about A5 size and only an inch thick.
Inside were letters from her mother, Lady Isabel Braund, her father, Right Honourable Sir Henry Braund, from her godfather William Holdsworth, the famous law writer, from a soldier, and from some family friends. There is even a collection of prescriptions from a Calcutta chemist, while she was there during the War, and also a dinner menu from 1944 with some handwritten sketches on it.
Quite why she kept them, I have no idea. Were they particularly personal, or did she just forget them?
In amongst them is a different sort of handwritten letter from someone called Barry. It is undated, but I am guessing it is from one of the lads from Providence House in Battersea in the sixties. Or maybe not. I am not quite sure how I could find out. I am not sure why she kept it either.
It says: ‘The most heartening thing that you have said to me, even if I had felt dispirited as you were saying it, is Get a job, even if you hold it for two days.’ There is another sentence that I can’t quite work out.
In some ways it is not inspiring at all, but what it does is open a window on what Elizabeth Braund was all about. Indeed, what East Shallowford came to be about: having an influence on the lives of individuals, and making a difference, a personal difference.
Doubtless we will be able to trot out, for the benefit of funders, all sorts of statistics about numbers, or attendance, about inputs and outputs. What is most important is to be able to say for that girl, or for that boy a difference made. For this man, for this woman, their being here mattered, and counted, and changed even something.
In the plan of God, it is always about people, about individuals, about being personal. Or rather it always should be.
Elizabeth by the way had a phrase that we should look at people as people, not things or numbers.
I think that still stands us in good stead – seeing people as people.