It was surprising that there weren’t more people queueing to see Julie Wheelwright yesterday. Perhaps Roma’s right, the cult of celebrity affects Oxford just as it affects the rest of the country.
Allow me to explain, Julie is a freelance writer, besides being the Course Director for the MA in Creative Writing, non-fiction, at City University, London. She has written two books and she’s a regular contributor to The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, Red Magazine, BBC History Magazine and many others. And yesterday, she was in Blackwell’s waiting to speak to people who might like to tap into her knowledge and experience.
In the two hours we spent together yesterday, though, only two people approached her. Knowing the huge numbers of people interested in genealogy and their own family histories, I had expected to find several hovering in Blackwell’s hoping to make use of her knowledge. Where else can you speak to someone about starting to record your own findings into your family?
So many of us have little family tales to tell that we think we ought to record for future generations, if not for the general public. My own include a great-uncle who revealed on his 50th wedding anniversary that he had been in the Secret Army when he was young. How I would have loved to talk to him. If anyone reads my own blog, they will know that my paternal grandmother, who died earlier this year, had a life that took her from Constable’s East Bergholt to the wilds of Kenya and beyond, turning her from little country girl to sophisticated well-travelled woman. If you’ve always wanted to get the story of your family down on paper (or on screen) Julie would have been the perfect person to talk to about it. Disappointed, she went back to London. I’m sure many people in Oxfordshire would have loved to meet her, but without a whiff of celebrity about her, she remains relatively unknown. there was no fanfare in the local paper, no display in the bookshop window, no trumpeting of her arrival at Oxford railway station. I wonder what would have happened if Katie Price (aka Jordan) had been in the shop telling Oxfordians how to write.
I rarely buy and read non-fiction. For me reading is an escape, so I prefer to read fiction, but I recognise the skill that a biographer or historian brings to their craft and I hope I have the chance to meet Julie again. I hope you do too. I’m sorry you missed her – perhaps you are as well.
Sandra
Tags: biography, City university London, Creative Writing MA, genealogy, history, Julie Wheelwright
