Melissa Hardie

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

I’ve never slowed down from earliest days and I’m now 79. People are forever remarking that they don’t know how I do everything I do. I’ve never looked upon it as being particularly social activism. In fact, I was thinking seriously about it the other day when you asked me if I would like to interview, um… about what is my work here in… in the West Cornwall… actually social activism, because I think of it almost as antisocial activism. Now… now I don’t mean I don’t want to share it – I do, but reading, which is my growth (laughs) project, literacy, writing, publishing, creating books that other people can read is really a very immersive activity. Since then, I have turned out much more – uh, turned out I mean opened up… blossomed I suppose you might say (laughs) by forming the Hypatia Trust. And the Hypatia Trust is an educational charity, and the whole ideas… the whole of the ideas behind it, umm… is… sharing literary, umm… ambition… ambitions yes, industry yes, umm… uh… the joy one gets from discovering history, um… and then also, the subject – whatever that subject would be. Now in my case this is the history of women, and I suppose that is a social activity because I’m recording, I’m documenting, I’m publishing and… and so forth. And I’m doing this… I… I think or I try to be benevolently I’m not looking for, um… what d’you call them? Malevolent information or malicious stories or anything like that. I’m not exploiting people, I’m trying to say, ‘look what this woman did- and isn’t that inspirational and isn’t that wonderful?’

And we had an art exhibition once, and Jeffrey Holland – Sir Jeffrey Holland at that time was the… um chancellor… vice chancellor of Exeter University. And he came down for an art exhibition and I said to him- ‘you don’t um, happen to need a women’s history library, do you? A collection… at Exeter?’ And he said, ‘strange you should mention that’ he said, ‘we are actually just opening our women studies centre, umm… in… in about two or three months – could I send my librarian down to look at it and see what he thinks?’ So, uh Alistair Patterson who was then the university librarian at Exeter came with his two assistant librarians – both male, and looked um, at our collection there, and just couldn’t restrain themselves they were so delighted with the whole idea of having it. So, within about two months, uh, a articulated lorry pulled up and they took away approximately 12,000 volumes on the history of women. 

Notes:

The Hyapatia Trust
Melissa Hardie founded The Hypatia Trust in 1996 to support and promote women’s achievements through research, documentation, exhibition, publication and training, in Cornwall and beyond. 

The Trust has grown from its beginnings to now have women’s literature and non-fiction archives placed in the University of Exeter libraries at Exeter and Falmouth, the University of Bonn in Germany, the Autonoma University in Barcelona and a small collection in Leeds University. Locally, her Elizabeth Treffry collection of books relating to Cornish women is housed in Morrab Library in Penzance in a room of our own, fitted out with the hardwood shelving from Melissa’s original library project; The Jamieson Library in Newmill.

 Find out more: https://hypatia-trust.org.uk