Many of us had the privelege of hearing Ellen MacArthur speak on Monday and Tuesday after the Bank Holiday. Despite her public personna of a rather shy, quiet, almost monsyllabic interviewee, Ellen turned out to be incredibly fluent, speaking without notes and to a wrapt and silent audience. Her talk avoided the inevitably chronology of 'We started on the race; then we came to this storm, then that iceberg' and was an essay on the delights, fears and feelings of sailing alone for long distances under a weight of expectation. Her love of animals shone through and her acting of the two swallows that spent the night huddled up on her chart table was charmingly infectious and it is not surprising that a baby albatross fell for her.Her charity, the Ellen MacArthur Trust, gives young people recovering from cancer the chance to regain their confidence by tackling sailing and she told the touching story of Flora who had suffered from an aggressive form of the disease. Seeing her two years later, Flora was looking stressed. When Ellen asked why she was told 'I have my GCSEs' and Ellen was delighted to hear that Flora's problems were so 'normal'.
In a third part which she admitted privately she found incredibly difficult, she explained her current passion for sustainability, emphasising that we are likely to run out of oil in her lifetime and appear to be fiddling while Rome decays around us. This was not the rant of a green, flat-earth activist but a heartfelt desire to get us to address the problem for real. She wants to do for oil what Al Gore has done for the climate: make us face up to the inconvenient truth.
As she said 'The politicians know there is a problem but unless the people know it, they will be able to do nothing about it. No one will vote for a party which tells us to change our lifestyles so radically.' At a time when the leaders of the two main political parties were bickering about whether we should or should not have released a dying man from prison on compassionate grounds, it was not hard to believe that Ellen had a point when she said that politicians were not leading opinion. Jo Lumley for Foreign Affairs, Esther Rantzen for Children's Minister and Ellen as Energy Minister in a new form of Parliament, say I (who needs men?).
And there was praise for the Museum too. She adored seeing Wanderer as Margaret Dye had inspired a recent trip along the canals of Britain and she admired Ben Ainslie's Finn. She even recalled playing on the Waterfront pool just before she left on her voyage and thanked everyone for their help and support. But the biggest surprise for her was to discover the Library. Her school library in Derbyshire had only had four books on sailing and here was a whole library full of them. Moreover, there was one book which told her all about the building in which she is currently living in Cowes. If for no other reason, she said, I am coming back for the library.
Her quietly husky voice gives you the impression that she is about to burst into tears at any time, as indeed she was when speaking of her courageous and spirited grandmother, and this just helped to highten the tension and brought the audience to its feet at the end.
Between them, Pete Goss and Ellen MacArthur have been stand-out speakers this year. Both had captivated their audiences by their openness, frankness and courage. Let's have more of them.
