Carl Chinn is joined by author, community builder and his former student Christina Longden, who grew up in the mill town of Dukinfield, near Stalybridge, and was among the first in her family to go to university. Since then, she has spent her life uncovering the stories that others left behind.
They talk about her growing up working class in the north of England; the class and accent prejudice she encountered at university; and the astonishing family discovery that her great-great-great-grandfather Robert Stanley, a Victorian grocer, magistrate and mayor of Stalybridge, converted to Islam at the age of 69 and was then quietly erased from the family memory for a hundred years.
This is a conversation about identity, belonging, and what happens when ordinary people dare to think for themselves. Christina's books, her work through the Lorna Young Foundation and her community interest company Pastruisms all carry the same belief: that every life has a story worth telling, and that those stories can bring people together across every kind of difference.
Links:
\"His Own Man\" by Christina Longden — https://www.amazon.co.uk/His-Own-Man-Victorian-Reschid/dp/0992879248
\"Imagining Robert\" by Christina Longden — https://www.amazon.co.uk/Imagining-Robert-Reschid-Stanley-1828-1911/dp/0992879256
Past Truisms CIC — https://www.facebook.com/pasttruisms
Lorna Young Foundation — https://www.lyf.org.uk/
Dark Woods Coffee - https://darkwoodscoffee.co.uk/
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