INTERVIEW
By the Dart INTERVIEW
TONY FYSON
By Phil Scoble
Society and Town Councillor, is sitting in a holiday letting house next to the Community Bookshop in Higher Street. “My wife and I acquired this house because it enjoyed a covenant giving rights to use the yard behind the shop. By chance the house came on the market, so we bought it and extinguished those rights. We now have planning permission to extend the shop into the yard, and next we hope to use the ground floor of the house itself.” “I’m committed to the community bookshop because as soon as we moved to Dartmouth the Harbour Bookshop closed and it was one of the things we loved about the place! We were having a pint one day with friends, grumbling that “someone ought to do something” about it, when I realised that the ‘someone’ ought to be us!” Things moved on quickly for the resulting bookshop project. “We formed a not-for-profit co-operative and received the generous offer of a free six-month tenancy for the shop at 12 Higher Street from the Dartmouth trust. We bought fixtures, fittings and computers from the old shop and engaged Andrea Saunders as manager. Without her the whole thing wouldn’t work, as the rest of us are just occasional volunteers led by a small, hard-working, committee”. “Crucially, people from far and wide
T
bought ‘shares’ in the shop knowing that they would never earn anything from the investment: they, like us, simply wanted
ony Fyson MBE, Chairman of the Community Bookshop, Chairman of the Dartmouth and Kingswear
to see a bookshop in the town for the good of the whole community. This gave us the capital to stock the enterprise and a sum to spend on the expansion plans. We have just successfully completed two years trading in difficult conditions” Tony was born in March,
Cambridgeshire in 1943. When he was 11 he won a scholarship to the boarding school Christ’s Hospital in Sussex. The school, which took only less well-off children, is famous for its ‘Bluecoat’ uniform dating from Tudor times. He was a sporty child so survived well in the public school environment. His claim to fame was catching a batsman in the slips off future England bad boy fast bowler John Snow.
Not all modern development is
unacceptable, even in a wonderfully historic place like this.
After school Tony joined Voluntary
Service Overseas aged 19, and was posted to the Fiji Islands to become an English teacher for a year. “I was lucky to be sent to Fiji – it was quite an experience and I’m sure I learnt more than i taught,” he said. “i also got to spend five weeks working as a midshipman for the Royal Navy after the Commander of a survey frigate offered me the chance over the Christmas holidays.”
Returning in 1963 Tony studied
Geography at Oxford University. It was the Swinging Sixties and he even got to see the Beatles once, though not in conventional circumstances. “I saw them out of my college window overlooking radcliffe square,” he said. “i was alerted by the screams of fans as the Fab Four left after an incongruous dinner on a college high table.” His studies led to an interest in
how towns work, in terms of design, conservation, social and economic functions. He hopes to apply his knowledge and experience for the benefit of dartmouth. “i’m interested in how we can make towns prosperous and house people better. I’m a bit of an idealist, and i don’t apologise for that.” After university, Tony worked in town planning for Westminster City Council before “brushing the dust of town planning” from his feet and training to teach. But he then found himself running an environmental education unit for the Town and Country Planning Association. After a brief spell in academia, he
returned to planning as a journalist, becoming Editor of The Planner, the journal of the Royal Town Planning Institute. “I worked there for ten years before the then Secretary of State for the Environment’s private publishing firm bought the magazine, but perhaps understandably didn’t buy me with it! So i freelanced before retiring.” His contribution was recognised in 2004 when he was made MBE for services to town planning and urban environmental education. He remains a trustee of two environmental planning
43
CHAIRMAN OF COMMUNITY BOOKSHOP
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132