A feminist in dangerous waters.
The Human Story: Claire Bryson
I met Claire over a decade ago, at school in Torquay, where her intelligence, punchy good humour and strong-willed nature marked her out as someone to watch. Sure enough, she has leapt and bounded through her career, smashing through ceilings and defining an accessible, pragmatic feminism through her writing which appeals to thousands of followers on Twitter and readers of her blog, ‘Everywhere You Look’. Her dramatic sailing adventures have also given rise to a popular Instagram account.
Claire’s socially-progressive outlook made waves through her marriage to Ollie. The couple have both led unconventional lives; a marketing expert specialising in art curation and a musician with one leg in the Labour Party, they fall firmly into the ‘quirky’ category, with plenty of unusual stories to tell. But the thing they are renowned for is not some astonishing aspect of their many adventures; rather, it’s a very straightforward decision they made in preparation for their wedding. Something which, by 2016, should have been regarded as mundane if not completely uninteresting. When I spoke to Claire recently, I naïvely asked her if anyone had ever questioned their choice of surname; she laughed:
“Like almost everybody! Anytime I tell someone my name, they’re like ‘oh, that’s weird’ and I’m like ‘yeah it’s not that weird’. I mean, our families thought it was pretty strange; but I didn’t think it was *that* odd.”
The couple struggled for a long time with the challenge of choosing a suitable moniker, toying with the idea of taking on a completely new surname, ‘West’, before coming to their ‘surprising’ solution.
“We thought about amalgamation, but then didn’t mention it again for ages. I was talking to an old friend and and she said ‘you’re one of the few people who can legitimately combine your names and come out with something that’s a real surname — why aren’t you going to do that?’. So then, when I talked to Ollie about it, we just decided that it felt like the right thing to do.”
And so the decision was made; Claire Bryden married Ollie Pearson, and they became Claire and Ollie ‘Bryson’.
‘So my dad grew up in South Africa; he was South African, and he left in the seventies because of apartheid.’
It’s a simple solution to a common problem, so why don’t we hear this happening more often? Perhaps it is the stigma associated with this ’feminist’ solution; it is certainly an egalitarian decision. Claire has a strong belief in equality, frequently writing about feminist issues on her blog. I ask her why there is such a negative perception of feminism, shared by both men and women. Claire’s insightful response demonstrates not only her feminist credentials, but also a profound understanding of this nuanced issue.
“A person’s world is such a delicate ecosystem of relationships, work and personal feelings. I think that some women are possibly worried that it would damage things in their life if they said that they were feminist, because then they’re inherently suggesting that they can see inequality in their lives. Maybe your life is propped up by a system in which there is inequality. So that’s not a boat you want to rock. I don’t think it’s that people *don’t* see that there’s inequality towards women, it’s just that the implications of acknowledging that would be too damaging.”
Despite her insight into our unequal society, Claire was still unaware of the controversy that her surname would bring:
“It really surprises me how interested people are, because to me, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. I’m like ‘all we did is, you know, Bryden, Pearson, stick them together…’ and people are like ‘[gasps] wow!’”
I ask Claire where her passion for egalitarianism comes from and she talks about her father’s strong influence on her thinking:
“So my dad grew up in South Africa; he was South African, and he left in the seventies because of apartheid. He thought it was wholly, totally, completely wrong that black and white people were treated differently and that those horrible things went on… maybe still go on. He just couldn’t live with it. He decided, I suppose as a way of protest, but also in order to have a life where he wasn’t surrounded by that, that he would move to England. He taught me to really think about what my point of view is, how to talk about it; to question things. It’s just natural for me to do that, and I’m surprised to be described as a ‘passionate’ person, because in a way, to me, it just seems crazy. If you know something’s wrong, why would you *not* talk about it?”
Claire’s memory of her childhood is complicated by the effects of dyslexia; her condition means that most long term memories are hazy, or completely lost. She relies on a collection of journals to remind her of the good times she shared with her family.
“I’m a pretty positive person, and so I tend to write down the good things which have happened. Actually it’s kind of a blessing to have this forgetful thing, because you don’t remember the bad stuff.”
I first met Claire at the age of fifteen. She was, and still is, fiercely independent but even in late adolescence, family played an important role in her life. Claire’s home was the hub of our friendship group and her mum and sister were regular fixtures in my life, too. It took me a long time to realise what had happened to her father. It is a credit to her family that Claire, aged fifteen, was so positive and driven, despite having dealt with so much already.
“Some of the biggest things that make you are the things that happen in your childhood. I think my dad dying… I think for a while I was quite angry about that, and quite sad. But you can kind of take some of the spirit that someone leaves you, some of the spirit that they had, and then put it in your own life.”
‘It was awful, but in a strange sense, it’s freeing, because you’ve gone through something that’s terrible, just… just unbearable.’
I tell Claire about a recent interview I had heard with the technology journalist and co-founder of Recode, Kara Swisher. Kara lost her father as a child and she believed that this experience took away one of her greatest fears, giving her the confidence and clarity to succeed in a cutthroat culture. It’s a view of childhood bereavement which I had never heard before, and I asked Claire how she felt about it:
“That really rings true, because actually, I could almost hear myself in that. I consider my Dad dying to be the worst event of my entire life. It was awful, but in a strange sense, it’s freeing, because you’ve gone through something that’s terrible, just… just unbearable. But you know that you’ve actually come through it and from there, you don’t have to be afraid of anything, because you know that you can deal with it.”
My conversation with Claire skits across many aspects of her story; for nearly two hours, we jump from mortgages to factory farming, from house-hunting to school systems. But the conversation keeps drifting back to happy memories in her childhood and teenage years. She tells me about a family trip to the Gower peninsula in Wales, when her dad took just £50 in cash and a few cheques for a week-long trip. It was an experiment in subsistence travel and by the fourth night, holes had started to appear in his plan:
“We had begun to run out of money and we had to eat Cuppa Soup, as that was something we brought with us for a backup food. It’s not a backup food at all really, because it’s basically just powder and water, and we’d walked for like ten hours that day. We were absolutely exhausted, and worried that my diabetic father was going to have a hypo in the tent. I was like ‘oh my God, what is this?’, but yeah, I kept that adventuring spirit and also that knowledge that you can go out and it will probably be alright and you *should* just go and have fun.”
After her father passed, Claire kept in touch with his family, and her growing sense of adventure was fostered by an experience with relatives in South Africa.
“We were staying in this amazing house, ten or twelve of us. It was really remote — it had taken us a few hours to drive there along dusty tracks and slowly all signs of civilisation dropped away and there were just trees and dirt and animals. We got to this house — I don’t even know how my uncle found it — and I was like wow, this is amazing! That night, we all walked outside, and there were the brightest stars I’ve ever seen; far brighter than you could ever imagine in England. We were south of the equator, so it looked very different to what I was used to and I saw loads of shooting stars, which I’d never seen before. I loved that.”
‘Oh my God, we’re sinking! What are we going to do?’
In 2015, Claire and Ollie bought their first home, and shortly afterwards an opportunity arose for them to cash in some equity and buy a boat. This happy moment was the culmination of a long-held dream for Ollie, and Claire wholeheartedly embraced this natural extension of her lifelong adventures. Indeed, I vividly remember the celebrant at their wedding reading her vow:
“Claire, will you live on a boat and travel from place to place?”
Thus, the windfall from their new home kickstarted a life on the open waves:
“The best thing about being on the boat is that feeling of being completely dependent on the elements. Weather is everything, especially wind. It’s sort of slightly magical, because it’s just so simple. I don’t think I’ve ever felt scared out there; I’ve felt focused, but the boat is just such a great feat of engineering. You couldn’t flip a craft like ours; the keel is more than a third of the entire weight. It’s only if you got a hole in your boat, and then you might sink, I suppose…”
Claire pauses, and then tells me about a recent incident when she opened up a hatch to investigate a ‘sloshing sound’ and found that the prow was full of water. She was off the coast of Devon with Ollie, and their boat was not yet equipped with a liferaft.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re sinking! What are we going to do?’. Ollie came down and just said ‘let’s taste it; if it’s salty then we’re sinking, if it’s not, then something’s gone wrong.’ So we literally tasted the water; there was foam in it and I thought ‘this is disgusting’. It was fresh, so we bailed a bit, to see if it would fill up again.”
After a panicked few hours, Claire discovered that the boat’s water tank had started leaking into the hull. It was an easy fix, but nonetheless a terrifying experience to go through so far from dry land.
Claire’s life is one escapade after another, from her weekends sailing in crashing seas to trekking through the highlands in snow and ice and writing a novel. She even has time for a rip-roaring career in which she leaps between the worlds of historic tapestry restoration, ancient woodland management, nurturing local artistic talent and orchestration of the digital marketing strategy for the National Trust across the entire south west region. One thing’s for sure; whatever it is she does next, it will certainly be an adventure worth following.
Chris D’Agorne also writes for How to Rewild.
