This is Disruption
This is Disruption podcast explores the pursuit of creativity and shares the stories of the fearless creators in street art, graffiti, music, photography and beyond, who boldly challenge the status quo, break barriers for others and share their work unapologetically. Each episode is a deep dive interview exploring the lives of artistic risk takers, exploring their motivations, their inspirations, and their take on the power of art, in whatever form they make it in.
The podcast is hosted by Irish street artist and DJ, Did by Rua, based in London.
This is Disruption
Jenny Draper: A Storytelling Maverick
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Meet Jenny Draper, the brilliant mind behind "Mavericks: Life Stories and Lessons of History's Most Extraordinary Misfits."
In this episode, Jenny shares her unique journey from her days as a Viking reenactor in the North of England to the bustling streets of London, trading theatre costume dressing for a vibrant career in history tour guiding and earning a prestigious Blue Badge. Jenny has a knack for making the past feel like juicy gossip with your pals down the pub, and introduces us to historical mavericks from the past.
Engaging us with tales of majestic swans (very much not extinct btw) and eccentric paleontologists, Jenny explores the delicate balance and the art of separating myth from fact in historical narratives. Jenny's passion for history is infectious, as she highlights the challenges of presenting figures like Paul Robeson, whose legacies are as complex as they are impactful.
Jenny shares her innovative use of YouTube and using TikTok during the pandemic, where she captivated audiences with lesser-known historical tidbits. As we explore stories of disruptors like Radcliffe Hall, Jenny offers a fresh perspective on how censorship can unintentionally amplify a narrative. With humour and insight, she encourages us to challenge norms and embrace our creative passions. This episode will leave you feeling excited to explore the mavericks of history with a renewed sense of curiosity.
Mavericks by Jenny Draper will be released on 11th February 2025 but is available to pre-order right now from your preferred bookseller. You can order at the link here.
Find Jenny on TikTok and on Instagram, and on Youtube, or book your own London History tour.
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Hello there. You are very welcome to. This is Disruption podcast, with me, your host Rua. This podcast brings you in-depth interviews with the fearless creatives in street art, graffiti, music, photography and beyond, who boldly challenge the status quo, break barriers for others and share their work unapologetically. Each episode is a deep dive into the lives of artistic risk takers, exploring their motivations, their inspirations and their reasons for their willingness to disrupt societal norms. Some of these stories involve revolutionising their industries, while others are pushing the boundaries of legality with their art. Coming up on today's episode.
Speaker 2:I always like to tell stories as if it's gossip. I'm telling at the pub what I try and keep in mind. That's the image I'm keeping in mind. Yeah, I think you really do a disservice to some of these stories if you don't acknowledge how wild they are. Sometimes I need to tell somebody. So I just started opening up my phone and telling my phone in video form and then just posting it. I know I can do videos. Let's do something else. Let's do a book. Yeah, let's do something else. Let's give it a go. If you want to be a writer, you write. That's the only thing that there is to it.
Speaker 1:For this episode. I had the pleasure of speaking with Jenny Draper. Jenny is a tour guide, a historian and, recently, an author. She has written a book called Mavericks, which we will be discussing today. This is a great episode and Jenny is very funny. I cannot wait to share it with you. As always, these episodes are best enjoyed. If you listen while you create something, go get making. This is Disruption. You listen while you create something, go get making. This is Disruption. I am over the moon to be here today with Jenny Draper. Jenny is a historian, a tour guide and an author as of recent. I'm so excited to talk to her. She has just written a book called Mavericks Life Stories and Lessons of History's Most Extraordinary, extraordinary misfits. In this book, she is telling the stories of people whose lives have taken an unusual turn and who ended up doing something very interesting in history. I can't wait to talk to her and ask her lots of questions. First of all, jenny, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm not bad. Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I have so many questions. I've been holding back asking them because I want to know everything but before we get into it. Was my summary correct and is there anything that I should add?
Speaker 2:No, that's all good. Yeah, I'm a tour guide in London. I do social media, I do videos on London history for YouTube and TikTok and, yeah, as of February, I'm going to be a published author, which is very exciting.
Speaker 1:Congratulations, thank you so much. That's so exciting. So going to be a published author, which is very exciting Congratulations, thank you so much. That's so exciting. So tell us a little bit about you.
Speaker 2:Where are you from? Where did you grow up? So I'm from the North, as you'll be able to tell by my accent. So I'm not a Londoner by birth, I'm a Londoner by choice. I've been a tour guide basically my whole adult life. So I went to uni in York. I knew I needed a student job, and in York there's only two kinds of student jobs that you can have. You can either A work in a pub Supposedly there are more pubs within the city walls of York than there are days of the year but I knew I wouldn't be very good at that because I don't hear very well. So you can have option B, which is you can be a Viking.
Speaker 1:I know which sounds more fun to me.
Speaker 2:That's what I did. I was a Viking. For four years I worked at the Viking Centre in York. They have a lot of Viking history there and the staff are all dressed as Vikings. So I was Lathgirta shield maiden waving an axe about at the tourists, and that's how I got into heritage. So I've been working as a tour guide ever since, In 2013, I moved to London.
Speaker 2:I have worked at the Museum of London, I've done tours for the London Charter House and then, in 2021, I got my what's called the blue badge, which is the highest qualification for tour guiding in the country. Mine's for London. I had to study for two years for it. There's, I think, 10 exams. It's hardcore. They sort of haze you a little bit. Yeah, I mean, they don't make you do push-ups in the mud, but it's hard. There's a lot of exams sort of too many, I think and yeah, that means now I'm a freelancer and I can go wherever I like in London. I take people around the Tower, Westminster Abbey, change into the Guard and I get to show them all the best stuff from our city every single day. It's brilliant. I'm very, very lucky.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when you decided to move to London from York, what was it that brought you down here?
Speaker 2:Oh, originally I wanted to work in theatre and, yeah, I was going to be in costume. If you want to work in theatre and yeah, I was going to be in costume If you want to work in theatre, you sort of have to live in London, in this country, and then it turned out that I hated working in theatre costume Really. Yeah, it turned out. I didn't like it at all. If you're in costume, you start off at the bottom rung.
Speaker 2:In theatre costume is what's called a dresser and you are the first person there and the last person to leave. You have to do a load of laundry every night. I didn't think about this, but every West End show, someone has to stay until the washing machine is finished every night after every show and then hang it out to dry before they go home. Wow, and I just I kept missing my last train. It I wasn't, yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't a good time. So it turned out I was much better at the side gig I was doing, which was working at the museum, and that was much more fun for me and much happier doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I never considered that before. Everything's like highly sequined and stuff to catch the stage lights, I guess I mean it depends on what show you're on.
Speaker 2:I've worked in a couple of. I didn't work on anything with sequins. The one where I realized this wasn't for me was an opera Holland Park production of the Barber of Seville. So it was all 19th century, all Victorian costumes and really lovely costumes. Everybody was extremely nice. Like no disrespect to opera Holland Park, it was a really nice place to be. Everyone was lovely, but it personally was not for me at all.
Speaker 1:But at least you realise that and you find, at least you realise, oh, but this is something else that I really love.
Speaker 2:Leave the theatre jobs as scarce enough as it is. Leave them for someone who wants one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hopefully someone else is doing that. Extremely happy and they love laundry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Hopefully. Yeah. If you love laundry, get into costumes. They need you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's a great point and actually something I wanted to talk about. Tour guiding is a fascinating thing to do because you need to have a lot of knowledge, a great memory, you need to be good with people and controlling crowds, watching out for a large group of people that you've never met, handing a lot of personalities and one aspect that people don't really talk about but is definitely the best tours I've ever been on the guide has been quite theatrical and a great storyteller there's a lot of jobbing actors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, the jobs work quite well together, right? So if you do get cast in something, it's very easy to just drop your work for that for that month and go back to it later. So there are a lot of actors who do it. I'm personally not an actor, but there are a lot of transferable skills. I think, um, it's a lot of projecting your voice and making your voice do interesting things, going up and down, and the cadences to make it sound interesting, so that you're not speaking in a monotone the whole time. But you're totally right, I mean, there's a lot of performance to it, but there's also a lot of like really boring, practical stuff. In the in the exams, only about a third of the marks were for like knowing historical facts. The vast majority of it was can everybody hear you? Are you making them stand in a place where they can see it? You know when you're making sure they can all see everything. Have you successfully got around the crowd? Did you get lost? Did you walk out in front of a taxi? It's like all this practical stuff.
Speaker 2:And with London, you have to be ready for absolutely anything. Be ready for absolutely anything. I've done tours during pride where you have to keep a crowd of 20 people together marching against traffic. I've done it during the lord mayor show. I've done tours where the king's car has come past and you can't carry on talking because nobody's going to be paying attention. You've got to turn them around to see in case it is the king. I've been on tours where the king's horse guards have come past and, yeah, you just gotta stop and let them watch it. I've been on tours that have been disrupted by protests. I've had people like londoners come up and start heckling me. In tours you've got to be ready for anything, and that's that's actually harder than learning the dates. Like you only need to learn the dates once, whereas that sort of stuff you have to be on top of every single day yeah, it's very unpredictable.
Speaker 2:You don't know how people are going to be interacting with you in the street yeah, yeah, you could turn up and something will be covered in scaffolding that you were going to show them. That's tough. You just got to find something else to do, and so you've got to know enough to be able to change it on the fly, to be able to take them a different way. Uh, I've had. A couple of weeks ago, I had a tour with a lady who was using a wheelchair and I'd gone around and figured out where all the dropped curbs were, and then on the day, there was a car parked on top of one of them. So you've got to, you've got to be able to, you've got to be able to improvise, and you've got to know enough to be able to improvise you obviously must have so many stories.
Speaker 1:Is there any in particular? Is there a story that stands out to you, a good tour guide story?
Speaker 2:oh, oh, hang on. Do you mean about like history or about the client?
Speaker 2:the clients yeah, so I these days I do mostly private tours, which means that everybody wants to be there, everybody's extremely polite, they're all having a good time, they've, you know, they've paid for my time, um, so I don't tend to get any very strange people these days, but when I used to work especially at the Museum of london, because it was free, like anyone can just walk in and uh, so you do get some slightly odder people the museum of london used to have the lord mayor's coach on display, which is this uh, if you imagine, like cinderella's carriage, it's this over the top, rococo confection, it gold, it's covered in sculptures and paintings and it's a really, really big, eye-catching object. Everybody loves it and so I used to hang out around it quite a lot. And if I ever got a kid, I would play like a game with them where I would get them to find different animals on the coach. Oh, can you find the lion? Can you find the lion? Can you find the dragons? Um, and I had this little kid once who was maybe sort of four inch and her dad, and so she was running around looking for the animals and her dad was sort of uh, you know, following her about and clearly sort of playing along himself as well, like trying to spot them.
Speaker 2:And he comes up to me and he goes I didn't realise there were extinct animals on this coach. Now, it's quite an old coach, so I do have a think about it, but I can't think of any extinct animals on the coach. So I think, okay, maybe there's some sort of language barrier. And I say, sir, do you mean the dragons? Maybe he means mythical animals? And he goes no, no, no, no, no. And he takes me around the side of the couch and he points at one and he goes that one. And I said, sir, that's a swan. And he goes yeah, and I'm like swans still exist. And he says, really, where can I see one? He'd had a whole child before realising that swans aren't extinct. He was old enough to have a kid and he had not realised swans still exist.
Speaker 1:What does he think was in the park, these amazing white birds? I?
Speaker 2:don't know. I mean imagine getting, I mean the joy, the wonder of seeing a swan for the first time in your 30s. That sounds amazing. I would love to be able to see a swan for the first time, but I still kind of gobsmacked to this day.
Speaker 1:But that's wild. So you must get people who are thinking that you're telling them like mythological stories as well. Do people take they're like, yes, this is definitely true and I believe everything. Or do people challenge, like this man thinking a swan is extinct um people.
Speaker 2:People are generally pretty polite about not going nah, didn't happen, did it come on. And I'm pretty careful about about how I word things to make sure that they are correct. Even when you know, when I say, when I tell a story that we don't necessarily know for certain is true, I'm always quite careful about saying that. So, for example, I do a tour called Votes for Women where we talk about the suffrage movement, and there's this excellent story about Millicent Garrett Fawcett that is almost certainly not true but is a good story, and so you have to preface it at the beginning. Okay, this bit probably not real, probably Lytton Strakey made this up, but it is really funny. So here we go. And yeah, so I do always try and be really clear about the bits that we're not sure about. And, for example, in the book in Mavericks there's a chapter on William Buckland, who was a very early paleontologist but also ate his way through the animal kingdom. He seemed to just want to try lots of different meat flavours. So we know that, for example, he ate hedgehogs and puppies and once a fly, which he said was the worst thing he'd ever eaten. And there's this story about him that was told by a writer called Augustus Hare that once he was at a dinner party and the host was passing around a mummified French king's heart and William Buckland just snatched it off him and ate it like straight, gobbled it down.
Speaker 2:And this story gets told about William Buckland all the time. If you read about him because it's such a fascinating story like what a weird thing to do. And Augustus Hare wasn't there. He didn't know William Buckland. This is at least secondhand. A lot of the stuff in his book is just made up. I can't find which French king this could possibly be. He just made it up and yet it's a really famous story about him. So yeah, in the book. I have to say this probably isn't real, but you're going to hear about it If you want to go and look up William Buckland anywhere else, you're going to hear this story and you're going to wonder why I didn't tell you it.
Speaker 1:So here it is, with the proviso, but it's probably made up I liked that you called that out, actually where you said I personally don't believe this is real and I've researched a lot and I cannot find any sources.
Speaker 2:I'd love it to be real how funny, what a good story for the book that would be. But I just can't find anything except this one book that's full of tall tales that Augustus Hare wrote in 18-whatever. And even in that book he says he wasn't there. He just heard it from somebody who was. And you're like did anyone else write it down then? Why did no one else say anything at the time? Why are you the person to break this story a generation later? Yeah, it's a shame, because as a writer, you want to put in stuff that's interesting and funny, but you've got to be honest at the same time how did you discover your love for history?
Speaker 2:I was in this job, working as a viking. I didn't do history at university. I didn't do it for a level even. But if you get to wave a sword at enough tourists, you, uh, you develop a love for history. So that was, that was how I originally got into it. And the viking center is I guess I'll just plug it it's really good. If you're in the north you should go. It's absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2:Basically, the the museum is based on a single archaeological dig that happened in god. It's been a while since I've worked there, in the 80s I think and they dug up a whole street in York, the whole thing all at once, and they found the Viking street underneath it. And what the museum is is it's on the level that the Viking street was, so it's underground and they just rebuilt everything where it was. So where the blacksmith's house was, you can tell because there's a load of like iron slag and like spare bits of metal in there. They've just rebuilt it. And where the woodturner's house was, you can tell because it's got a load of wood shavings they just rebuilt it. The shoemaker you can tell because it's got loads of like badly made shoes and leather off cuts in the bin. They just rebuilt it and you go round on a little cart. There's a voiceover that tells you what you're looking at, and then there's a museum where they show you all the actual finds and in the museum they're all dressed as Vikings and you got to make your own character and your own personality.
Speaker 2:I went through a couple of different characters while I was there. Like I I said, I had this shield maiden character for a while. I had a lady who played the liar, which is like a very early kind of guitar, and my dad made me a very rudimentary liar. That's amazing, really cool. I mean, best Christmas present I've ever had. It was, it was really good. Shout out to my dad's carpentry skills. He's great. Yeah, that was great, uh. So I got into it there and that meant that I had the experience to work at something like the Museum of London and London Charterhouse. There's kind of a thrill of performing which you don't tend to get unless you're an actor, which I'm not. But I love the reactions that these stories get and I didn't even have to do anything for the stories, like they've already all happened. I feel very almost like I'm cheating, telling people this stuff like I didn't do anything to make William Buckland eat a mole and and yet I get to, I get to benefit off it by telling you guys that it happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm very lucky it's fascinating and it takes so much investigating different sources and everything, which is something I would really like to learn more about about your book. You need to tell stories that may or may not have happened and that is going to require a lot of research. And, as we've just spoken about, you have recently written a book called Mavericks, which I was very lucky to get a preview copy of Without gassing you up. It is fantastic.
Speaker 1:You're very kind it's so good, it's so so good. It's storytelling in such a fantastic way because it's hilarious. There's a lot of nods to like the way that we speak in modern times while telling very old stories.
Speaker 2:What's so important is you can't tell the story as if you're writing a 1950s Lady Bird book anymore. You've got to talk to people in their own language. I always like to tell stories as if it's gossip I'm telling at the pub. That's what I try and keep in mind. That's the image I'm keeping in mind. So even when I'm doing very trad history, very traditional history like, say, henry VIII, I'll do. Can you believe what Henry VIII did? Can you believe a guy did this to his own wife? Yeah, I'll tell it as if it's my mate Henner's, and I'm telling you his weird relationship drama down the spoons. Relationship drama down down the spoons, because if you say it as if you're, you know, a 1970s historian, that works all right for them.
Speaker 1:That's not how people talk anymore. Yeah, I loved it. There was a lot of references in one of the stories you acknowledge. Now these days we would call that hashtag problematic, oh yeah, I loved that.
Speaker 2:Everybody in the book is hashtag problematic. I did when I was choosing the subjects. Every now and again I would sort of run out. I don't know if I really want to talk about this person because, yes, the story is very interesting but they seem like a nasty piece of work really. But if I did that I wouldn't be talking about anybody. I mean, the worst one was.
Speaker 2:The worst person I had with this was Paul Robeson, who's the very last chapter in the book. So Paul Robeson was a singer in the first half of the 20th century who had to overcome a lot of barriers to become an incredibly popular actor and singer. So he was African-American during the height of segregation in the US, during the height of lynching even, and you know, worked really hard to become an incredibly famous, incredibly popular singer and actor all over the world. Out of everybody in the book, he's probably the most famous. So there's a lot that's been written about him. He's got many, many massive, thick biographies and so I'm working my way through one of these 900 page tombs and halfway through there's a bit that's like oh yeah, and he hit the woman he was having an affair with while she was pregnant Paul, paul, no, do I, do I?
Speaker 2:Do I scrap that chapter? Now I've written half of it, do I? You can't, you can't, you can't scrap it, because I'd love to scrap every single one of them. So all you can do is just try and make it clear. I don't know. On one hand you come across something like that and you go well, obviously nobody's going to think that's all right, but on the other hand, you do worry that people will think that I'm saying we should look up to him in some way. So, yeah, you just got to be upfront about it. Yeah, not just him. A lot of this stuff, because a lot of this stuff isn't a big part of their own personal story, right? So each chapter is told kind of from their point of view. And from Paul Robeson's point of view, this wasn't a big episode in his life.
Speaker 2:Like hitting Uta Hargan one time isn't a massive part of his story, and so do you do you say it because that seems like a big thing to have done. Uh, and that happens quite with quite a few of them. Marjorie kemp is another one. So she was a medieval mystic. She had, uh, visions. She was an ordinary lady for almost all her life and then, after the birth of one of her kids, she starts getting visions from god. By the time she's had all of her children she had 14 pregnancies by the time she's had all of her kids she's having visions about getting married to god and she travels all over the world in pursuit of of holiness. And this incredible story for a medieval lady from norfolk. And then, like, buried halfway through her book is uh, oh, yes, of course, of course the jews are all christ killers, like marjorie no, marjorie, but in the story of her life it's not like she ever did anything about that. I don't think. I mean, she did go to jerusalem, but apart from that, I'm not sure she ever met a Jewish person. So how much emphasis should you put on that in terms of telling her story from her own point of view? And it's difficult, but I tried my best to be honest about that stuff when it happened. Very occasionally there would be something that happened in the other direction, where you would find out something nice about someone that isn't very well known, and I had the pleasure of that with Ira Aldridge.
Speaker 2:Ira Aldridge was an African American actor in the 19th century. He was the first black person to play Othello, and most biographies about him focus on his acting career, which is very illustrious. He toured all over the world. He got loads of of fans. He also sent money to buy the freedom of a whole family of people who were in slavery. He bought the freedom of five people, which is like, no matter how good an actor you are, there's nothing that's going to top that. That's uh, you can't. You can't ever do any performance of othello. That's going to be better than freeing five people from slavery, and I I found that in one biography written in the 50s, buried halfway through. So that's lovely when it happens that way around. Unfortunately, I tended to find it more often happened the other way, where you'd find something buried that was nasty about them. But it works both ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the process of writing a book. You obviously had all these stories that you somehow felt you were going to bring together. How did all of this come about?
Speaker 2:um, I was approached by the publisher in this case. So this is uh watkins, who are my publisher, and they are an indie publisher in london yeah, one of the few left that are independent and not part of the big four. So it's nice to work with an actual, like a real London institution. They've been going since the 19th century and, yeah, they approached me about it.
Speaker 2:I think the reason that I was quite a good fit for it is because of the sort of episodic way it's told. Each chapter is about a different person and that fits quite nicely with doing TikTok shorts, right, short videos, each one about a different person. So it suits my style quite well. And I guess that also works with in tours to a certain extent. Sometimes in tours you do a grand overarching narrative but sometimes you stop them in one place and you tell them one story and you stop them in another place and you tell them a separate story because it's just based on which things are near each other, right, which things are physically near each other. So, yeah, it suits the way I'm used to doing about history very well.
Speaker 1:What about the process of writing, though Were you a writer before?
Speaker 2:No more than like video scripts. I've never written anything this big before. I've never written anything this long form, but it really is just like opening that word document and typing something, anything so that it's not blank, and then going back and fixing it later if you need to. I guess for me what really helped was planning it and then like sketching it and then going back and adding in detail. So you know, first off you have your very overarching sketch, the very barest sketch, which is this is going to be about people who had weird lives. We've got a title mavericks and that's it. That's all we've got. And then you go in and you sketch it out a little bit more. So you go, okay, which people? And you figure out your 24 characters.
Speaker 2:I wanted to make sure there that we got quite a good range of people. I wanted to make sure we had people from different periods in history. I wanted to have people from Scotland and Wales and Ireland, so it wasn't just people from London which is obviously what I'm used to as a London tour guide that did different things with their lives. So we we have, you know, we have a Scottish lady warrior and we have American actors and we have paleontologists, lots of different kinds of people.
Speaker 2:So you get that layer roughed out and then you go in. You put down even more detail, right, you get further down. So you go, okay, right Within this chapter. What do we want to talk about? Where do we want the story to start and where do we want to finish? Do we want to start every single person with? I was born the David Copperfield beginning. I didn't want to finish with every single one of them dying. It gets really depressing writing that 24 times. So where are we going to finish? And then you go in and you put more detail in. For me, I found that much more manageable than staring at a blank page and trying to brute force it from the beginning to the end.
Speaker 1:How did you choose the 24-so? I imagine there were so many to choose from.
Speaker 2:I keep extremely thorough notes on everything I read about history. I have hundreds of pages worth of Word document notes. Basically, whenever I read a history book, I make bullet point notes for myself and it's all sorted into time periods and then further into subjects. So, for example, I have a whole Word document on the Georgian period and then within that it'll be like agriculture, entertainment, literature, politics, war, and every time I find an interesting fact it goes in the Word document. Or a quote or a story, it all goes in there, which means that I don't have to rack my memory.
Speaker 2:If someone says, can you name 24 interesting people? I don't have to go. Oh God, yeah, let me try and think I can just scroll through these Word documents and go, oh, I've got a load of notes about that story, that's a good story. Oh, yeah, and that one, oh, and that one. I've been keeping these notes for maybe 10 years now and I'm really proud of them. But obviously they're not useful to anyone except me. But they are very useful to me, yes, so much better than trying to remember everything. You've got to keep it outside your memory so that you've got it for yourself.
Speaker 1:That's so incredibly organised.
Speaker 2:I love it, though I love it. I mean, if organisation is a chore for you, then obviously it won't work. But for me, organising notes I love it won't work, but for me, organizing notes love it. Maybe I'm just a weird nerd that way I love. I love doing the subheadings, I love the wallet points, indenting, making different, you know, making that bold, making that, sorting out all the formatting uh yeah, I think it's fun. That that's the. That's the worst nerdiest thing I've ever said. Jesus. Formatting, formatting in microsoft word is fun. You heard it here first.
Speaker 1:It's so lovely to see how passionate you are. It really is and I am really shocked to find out that you weren't an author or a writer beforehand. I really am super surprised. What did you study?
Speaker 2:French and linguistics at uni, which I don't get much use out of at all anymore. Yeah, I mean, for me, the important part of going to uni, it turns out, has been, a the friends I've made there and, b the student job I had while I was there, which, you know, I needed to get some kind of degree to get either of those things, but it has turned out that the actual subject I picked didn't matter very much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a corporate job and one of the things I do is I do work experience days for, like friends and family. Just it's not my job, it's just a nice thing to do. So I get to bring in somebody who asks for this. I'll arrange a day where, for example, if you're really interested in organisation, I'll let you speak to people from different departments in the business about what their day to day looks like. I go into the meetings with the students to make them feel comfortable and not scared, and in almost every single one to one I've ever had what the person studied is now not what they do.
Speaker 1:I hope nobody is listening to this thinking oh well, shit, because I'm studying something that I'm really interested in, I'm not going to use it. You probably will if you love that thing. The point is that you can study something, but the experiences you gain in uni might not be where you want to go. It might be something totally different. Like you, probably, when you were studying French and linguistics, you probably never thought I'm going to live in London and I'm going to be a tour guide. I'm going to write a book about interesting people in history.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it wouldn't have crossed my mind back then. I mean, obviously that doesn't mean you should just pick whatever at random, like pick something that you will be interested in for three years, pick something that won't stress you out if you're not good at it. But yeah, I mean you're totally right, for a lot of people it doesn't end up mattering. My, uh, my favorite anecdote in this vein is that Hugh Laurie studied anthropology and he got a third.
Speaker 1:Wow, but there you go. I totally agree. By the way, three years will be miserable if you're not doing something you're at least interested in. So if you're listening to this, choose wisely, but be open minded, because you can do anything. You never know where it'll take you. You're not going to be stuck. There's so much pressure on students to pick something, and this is the rest of your life now. So make a good decision, make sure it's something interesting and then just see where the world takes you.
Speaker 2:It's the message there.
Speaker 1:So, like I said, I'm very surprised to hear that you weren't. You know somebody who was like my dream is to write a book.
Speaker 2:Was your dream ever would write a book one day, and I was always quite good at English at school, but I really didn't think that that was something I was going to do, like once the tour guiding and social media took off. It wasn't really something I thought about. My most popular stuff on social media is all very short form. I haven't written long form since I was doing essays at uni, which is 11 years ago now. So, yeah, it wasn't something I had a lot of practice at, but at the same time, very exciting. If someone comes to you and says, would you, we would love you to write a book, you jump at that chance. You absolutely take that. Um, yeah, it's very flattering to be asked and very exciting to do, and just like a new, a new medium for me. Right? So you know, I know I can do videos. Let's do something else. Let's do a book. I know I can do, can do tour guiding and I can do on the bus and I can do walking tours. Yeah, let's, let's do something else.
Speaker 1:Let's give it a go and how does one go about being a writer?
Speaker 2:being a writer. Oh, it feels very existential. One writes if one wants to be a writer, one writes. I don't know, I don't think of myself as a writer yet because it's not published. So if I ever met an actual writer I'd be like, well, of course I'm not a real writer like you are yet. But yeah I, if you want to be a writer, you write. That's the only thing that there is to it. But I'm afraid I can't give any advice about how to get published because I have no idea.
Speaker 1:I have no idea how one gets published brought you to their attention as somebody who was an amazing storyteller, as somebody who had so much knowledge and tell stories in such an engaging way, was that you have a really fantastic TikTok and Instagram and you put out content where you tell these amazing stories, but again, like I mentioned, very relatable terms and they're funny and really educational at the same time. They're funny and really educational at the same time. How did you get started?
Speaker 2:doing that. I originally started on YouTube in 2017. So it's been seven years now since I started my YouTube. It did not take off at all until 2021. So keep plugging at it. You might get somewhere.
Speaker 2:But originally I was inspired by the channel Crash Course. One of their first series they did was world history, and in it they cover a very broad sweep of history, because they're trying to do the entire history of the world, but there is there was always some question at the end making it that maybe needed you to think about some more, or a question that made it relevant in some way, and the one that really sticks in my mind for me was they had this episode about trade in Renaissance Italy, and they were specifically talking about Venetian glass how Venice imported all these dyes from places like Afghanistan, from the Middle East, through the Silk Road, and they used it to make this incredible glass that made Venice extremely wealthy. And that sounds like a really boring story, right 16th century glass trade. It's extremely dull, but at the end he goes yes, so the Venetians, you know, they took these dyes and they transformed those into something greater, and this is why my college girlfriend left me. You have to colour their glass. You have to offer them something. You can't just take the stuff. You have to turn it into something else. You can't just sit in a relationship with your trade partner. You have to offer them something in return. You have to give them the glass. And I was like you do. You do have to give them the glass. That is history. That is why it's interesting Suddenly I'm interested in 16th century Venetian glass. Yes, so that's what I wanted to do.
Speaker 2:And then my very first YouTube video ever was about Thomas Beckett, where I tried to do something similar. You do the story of Thomas Beckett, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the 12th century and ended up being murdered, sort of well, because he crossed the king at the time, henry II, and they were mates. He was mates with Henry, they were really close, and yet he ended up being murdered by him. And so I do the story in a very traditional way. And then I asked so who was right? Because the reason they fell out is because Henry wanted to reform the church and the church should have been reformed.
Speaker 2:But yeah, and trying to give people something to bite into, I started TikTok in 2020, and that was when the pandemic hit. I was furloughed from the museum job, and this was while I was studying for the Blue Badge, and so all the lectures and exams just went on hold because, of course, everywhere that we were being examined on just shut down. You couldn't get into the Abbey, you couldn't get into the National Gallery, you couldn't get into Tower of London. It was all shut indefinitely. We didn't know when it was going to start up again and I thought, oh my God, I'm going to forget everything for my exams. I'm not going to get any practice in. I need to tell somebody. So I just started opening up my phone and telling my phone in video form and then just posting it.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I think there was a bit of a niche for it back then. I did have a look on TikTok in 2020 and I couldn't find any other London tour guides who were really on there on TikTok in 2020, and I couldn't find any other London tour guides who were really on there or at least not posting very much. So I think I was sort of the first, and now there's quite a few of us. Um, jack Cheshire is on there and Katie Wignall, and there's a couple more popping up now that are relatively new. But yeah, originally it was just me trying desperately not to forget things that I needed to remember for my exam, so which meant it was a lot of fairly dry facts, really Like I needed to remember a lot of dates.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I guess just the panic in my eyes made them made it relatable?
Speaker 2:I suppose Do you get people contacting you with stories of you've taught me something and now I'm interested in pursuing this. Gosh, I mean not in so many words, but I do often get comments saying, oh, I never knew that, that was something I've never heard of. And sometimes you can tell when a subject really really catches the eye of a certain community and get this a lot with lgbt history. Actually, people, especially, I think, young queer people, are like desperate to see themselves reflected in history and so, yeah, if you tell them that, they're absolutely fascinated.
Speaker 2:I had a video once about asexuality in london history, which is something I had to kind of dig up by myself because nobody's really talked about it before. It's really it's hard to talk about asexuality in history, because how do you tell the difference between someone who was just celibate and someone who would today identify as asexual? You can't. But I said, okay, here are five people in London history who didn't seem to have, you know, seemed who you know if you're, if you're asexual, you can see yourself in these people. I don't know what they would have called themselves if they were around today, but you can see yourself in it and that's something that a lot of ace kids have never heard before and I got a really good reaction from it, a lot of people really connecting with it. So you do get that. I've never I mean that's just in comments, though. I've never had someone write me a letter or anything like that going oh you've, you've changed my life. I don't think we write letters anymore we write comments.
Speaker 1:Now we write comments. The thing that people don't do so much is they don't reach out and tell people that's also true, yeah you've actually really changed my life. It's quite rare, but I bet somebody listening to this is thinking, well, she really helped me somehow. So I encourage those people to go and tell you write her a letter yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's uh, social media, especially especially the really new ones like TikTok, are set up to to allow you to consume, right? So you, you can just keep scrolling and you can very much enjoy something without ever really saying so. You're quite right. I I noticed once I started, uh, getting recognized in the street. I noticed very clearly that if people recognized me off TikTok, they were not likely to know my name. They were not likely, like they knew my face, but they'd never seen my name, or at least they'd never noticed it, because it's just down there at the bottom of the screen.
Speaker 2:You don't need to type it in to get to my page on TikTok. Tiktok just gives it to you. And I noticed that about people in my own TikTok feed, my own For you page, is that there'll be faces I recognise, but I will never have clocked the names because TikTok just feeds them to you. So it is a very strange way of consuming. It's quite new way of of consuming. It's quite new, um, and, yeah, it does, necessarily, it does sometimes mean that people out there that yeah who don't leave comments, that's.
Speaker 2:That's totally fine. I tend I tends to be about 10, I think, people who leave comments. If you look at the views to comments ratio tends to be about normal, for me, that's totally fine.
Speaker 1:I heard recently that that's ideal. Supposedly that's ideal if you've got too many comments, that's that.
Speaker 2:That's ideal, supposedly that's ideal If you've got too many comments, that's indicative of some sort of war going on in the comments and that we should probably shut that down. If it's no comments, then that means it's not interesting. But if you've got about 10%, then that's about right. Gosh, I'd never really thought about that before. I mean, there's nothing you can do about trying to bump that up or bump that down. People comment or they don't, and I tend to find I can't ask. I can't ask for comments. I see other people do it and that's fine, but I can't. I can't do it. It makes me cringe. I can't ask. I'll give this video a thumbs up. I can't do it.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, whatever amount of comments comes in is the amount I get, and that's fine. I would love for people to be able to go and see where to see your videos. Leave lovely comments, supportive comments. That's all we're interested in over here, and to hear all about where to find the book, because they can pre-order right now. It's coming out on the 11th of February 2025, but they're going to be able to pre-order right now, so can you please tell everybody where they can find you on socials?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I'm on YouTube and TikTok at jdraperlondon J-D-R-A-P-E-R, and you can pre-order Maverick's Life Stories and Lessons of History's Most Extraordinary Misfits for the 11th of February at all good retailers, wherever you are. So I know it's on Amazon, but it's also on bookshoporg and many other sites around the world. I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 1:Well, I have. Like I said, I was very lucky to get a preview copy. I'm a really big reader. I love reading, I love stories, storytelling hence why we are doing this right now. Storytelling I find history so interesting when you get a bit of personality behind the person you have to yeah it's fascinating and what you do is really bringing characters to life. Thank you very much. So genuinely fantastic and, honestly, really funny.
Speaker 2:You're very kind. When you're actually writing it, when you're sort of screwing it out of your guts, you don't necessarily realise if it's funny or not. You can't tell, and it's not until you go back and have a look at it clean. You know a month or so later that you go oh, oh, that one's quite good, wasn't it? I think I cooked there a little bit. I recorded the audio book for it last week and so it was like going back. I mean, I finished the draft months ago and, yes, I'm revisiting it for the audio book. It, yeah, I think. I think I think there's some jokes in it. I flatter myself that I was funny once or twice and again. That's not something I've really tried for. I don't consider myself a comedian, but uh, I think you have to. I, this stuff is funny. It just is funny. Some of the stuff these people got up to is if you don't, if you don't tell it as funny, you're losing out because it is.
Speaker 1:And um, yeah, I think you really do a disservice to some of these stories if you don't acknowledge how wild they are sometimes it's so fascinating you get to hear about such a range of people, like you said earlier, on all sides of history, like whether they were the goodies or the baddies, whether they were up to mischief.
Speaker 1:I like to talk to people who are doing something really different, which you yourself are. You're putting yourself out there telling stories, educating people, but now you're also telling the stories of 24 mavericks, or what I would call disruptors.
Speaker 2:Ah, yes, I've heard that term.
Speaker 1:People who are disrupting the norms of the day and who were told what they could and couldn't do and they decided no, well, I know what I want and I'm going to do that thing. So it's such a fantastic read. So, just before I let you go, do you have any advice for anybody who would like to change into something different? So for you, for example, you studied one thing, you decided to do costume, then you moved into tour guiding and now you're a writer, and I will call you a writer because you've written a book.
Speaker 2:You are a writer.
Speaker 1:Do you have any advice for people who may be stuck in one thing and feel they need to stay there?
Speaker 2:gosh, uh, I, oh, I don't know if I've ever really struggled with that. I, I if I've, if I wanted to do something, just I've always just done it. I guess, um, I guess it depends on how much you think you're leaving behind, right? So, like, for me, leaving costume was not a big deal because I'd not built up a career in costume, like I've done a couple of small-time jobs as a dresser, whereas I guess if you are worried about giving something up, then that's going to be harder for you to move on. But if you look at your situation honestly and realize that there's there's nothing to give up, then then go, go, go, go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess that's what I would say is have a look at what you might be leaving behind and ask yourself honestly if it's worth keeping it, how long if you weren't going to move? If you're not sure about moving, how long are you going to stay where you are for? Are you going to stay for a month if nothing changes? Are you going to stay for a year if you know nothing's going to change? Are you going to stay for five years if you know nothing's going to change? And I don't ask that facetiously, genuinely, how long do you think you would stay for and give yourself a time limit and say, ok, if nothing's different, I'm out by?
Speaker 1:the end of the year.
Speaker 2:I guess would be my best advice. I hope that's good, that's great.
Speaker 1:It's very practical Really look at things and weigh them up and decide what is my limit here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that goes for jobs and it goes for relationships. And, yeah, have a look at honestly what you'd lose if you left and if nothing changed, how long you would stay. Yeah, I hope that's good advice. I don't know if I'm good at giving advice. I don't know if that's my style. Originally, the publishers wanted each character in the book to have like a lesson a life lesson to learn, and I quickly turned almost all the lessons into jokes. I don't know. I don't feel qualified to tell other people how they're going to do best in their lives. So, yeah, I ended up writing a lot of them as jokes.
Speaker 1:Was there any maverick that did teach you something? That's the last question.
Speaker 2:So I would definitely pick out Radcliffe Hall for a maverick who taught me something, or at least cemented a lesson that I should have already learned. Radcliffe Hall was a queer writer in the 1920s and she wrote a book about a lesbian relationship. It's called the Well of Loneliness. The book itself is quite dry. It's a very staid. If it was about a bloke and a woman, no one would remember this book. It's a pretty staid romance. If it was about a bloke and a woman, no one would remember this book. So it's a pretty staid romance, but it's about two women and nothing particularly sexy happens in it. And in fact Radcliffe Hall presents lesbianism as actually pretty depressing. That's what the well of loneliness is. The well of loneliness is lesbianism. It cuts you off from all your friends and your family, and so the characters in her book end up pretty miserable. But it also presents lesbianism as natural, as something that the characters can't change. And they're still a good person. They're still good people, and that was abhorrent to many people in authority at the time. And the government tried to have her book banned and they prosecuted her publisher for importing salacious material and the Daily Express ran a campaign against it. And if they hadn't done that, no one will remember the Well of Loneliness today. So the lesson from her story is if you try and ban something, if you try and cover something up, you could end up making it way more famous.
Speaker 2:Years later there's another lesbian book that comes out in the 1930s and Parliament is debating again like should we prosecute the publisher? And they have to say like no, because look at what happened to the well of loneliness. They ended. It ended up becoming much more famous.
Speaker 2:There was a debate in parliament at the time about whether to criminalize lesbianism, like male homosexuality had been criminalized for a long time, but there's never been anything on the books in this country about sex between women. And a peer of the realm had to get up in front of the house of lords and say to them. He said I don't think we should ban lesbianism, not because I'm pro-gay, but because there are lots of women who've never heard of it. You ban it, they're. They're all gonna be curious. I think it's lord birkenhead.
Speaker 2:He said um, there are a great many women in this country who have never, never, dreamed of such a thing. I think it is a very great mischief, a great mischief, a great mischief. That was his quote and so like, yeah, we can't. We can't tell them about lesbianism, or they'll all want some. And that's a lesson that that crops up over and over again during Redcliffe Hall's life is that trying to kill information, kill a story will often make it more famous. So that's something I've really tried to take on board with her. So what we're?
Speaker 1:saying is do not buy Mavericks, it is filthy.
Speaker 2:The World of Loneliness is an extremely tame book. The sexiest it gets is that night they were not divided. That's all the sex scenes you get. There is a sexy chapter about a lady called Eleanor Reichner who was a sex worker in the 14th century. That gets a little bit spicy. But no, don't read the Well of Loneliness if you're looking for hot, spicy times. It's a slog.
Speaker 1:But thank you so much for that and I'm really glad that it's been a good experience for you as well and that you've enjoyed it. I have no doubt that you have many more books than you, because I did not know that you weren't a writer. Honestly, it's so well written. I'm not just saying that. I really, really enjoyed it. I loved reading it and, like I said, I'm all about the Mavericks, so this was a fantastic book for me to read and I really recommend everyone goes and pre-orders it. And that's all we have time for today. Jenny, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for coming down.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming down. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:That's it. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of this Is Disruption. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to follow the podcast and never miss an episode. You can find us on all major podcast platforms Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Also on YouTube. Stay connected with us on social media. You can find the podcast at this Is Disruption pod on Instagram and TikTok, and you will find updates and snippets of upcoming shows. Until next time, keep challenging the status quo, embracing your creative spirit and be brave. Go and create. Thank you, and see you in the next episode.