It’s said that everybody has a song track to life and for Carolyn Yates, Lee Marvin’s “I was born under a wandering star” would be as good as any.
A qualified teacher, she has taken her acclaimed programme for unlocking children’s learning all over the world – an echo of a childhood during which she was never in one place for very long.
Currently the chairperson of Castle Douglas Development Forum, Carolyn has been living locally for 30 years, most of those in her current home outside the town she shares with husband Ken Gouge.
“I had a very peripatetic childhood because I’m from an army family,” she said.
“We lived all over the place and by 15 I had moved 14 times.
“I’m the only person in my family who has had nothing to do with the army. In my student days at Manchester Uni I was a member of CND!”
Born in Preston in 1955, Carolyn informs me her mother Anne hailed from York while her father Robin was Lancashire born and bred.
“I was brought up on stories about the Wars of the Roses,” she laughs.
“My mum was a staff nurse and before she retired inspected care homes in England and Scotland.
“My dad was in the army stationed at Preston when I was born.
“He went to Sandhurst and ended up a Lieutenant Colonel.
“He was in the Royal Fusiliers, joined the pay corps and became a very accomplished accountant.
“As we moved I would leave one school then go to another and we all ended up in boarding schools.”
Carolyn recalls as a young child one of her father’s tours of duty in Cyprus was memorable for all the wrong reasons.
“I can remember Cyprus when all the trouble there started,” she says.
“It was dangerous with the fighting between the Turks and Greeks – it was such a beautiful place before partition.
“The Turkish Cypriots had the poorest land and more Turkish immigrants started arriving from the mainland.
“Violence broke out with the Greeks who were led by the very nationalist general Georgios Grivas. We always lived in British military camps and were aware of the rumblings of trouble.
“When more fighting started the UN got involved and all the British families were sent home while my dad stayed on.
“Cyprus was a very important British military base and still is.
“The northern part of the island is under Turkish control and there’s a huge Turkish army base outside Kyrenia.
“Usually my dad’s tours would be for three months and when I was 11 or 12 I was at Osnabruck in Germany for two tours.
“My father thought I should be riding a bike so that’s where I got my first bicycle. It was a German make and very good with a pannier and elastic across the wheels to stop my skirt getting caught!
“I went to school there but I did not like it. It was an army school and I found it very isolating.
“Most of my childhood was spent in army accommodation.
“As a child you just accept what there is. I saw some great places but it did leave me restless and it took me a long time to settle anywhere.”
Between spells abroad – her sister Sally was born in Mauritius, Carolyn tells me – from age eight to 13 she was educated at a Hertfordshire boarding school.
The institution, I learn not entirely to my surprise, was not conventional.
And for Carolyn, the Rudolph Steiner School at Kings Langley, with its ethos of creativity and freedom of expression, was a revelation.
The varied curriculum, even for the youngest pupils, included lessons in gardening, pottery, handicrafts and art with the more conventional subjects only introduced later.
“It was just wonderful,” smiles Carolyn.
“You would come and sit round the breakfast table in the morning and there would be all ages there, from the little ones up.
“It was a very broad curriculum and very creative – I did science learning about Leonardo da Vinci and Stonehenge.
“I can remember spending hours painting a picture of Stonehenge then learning about the mechanics of how the stones were moved into position.
“You had the whole morning doing the main subjects then in the afternoon you would do things like music and eurythmy.”
This last discipline, it transpires, was developed from an idea by Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, in which dance and movement can be used to express the tone, sounds and rhythms of speech and the soul itself.
“Steiner was a very strange philosopher who had this notion that even colours had vibrations,” Carolyn says.
“You would have a piece by Chopin and in the choreography you would all be wearing tabards and move in sympathy with the chords of music being played.
“We also did a lot of theatrical stuff, acting, poetry and creative writing.
“Freedom of the spirit, imagination and the morality of being part of humanity and a community were also very important.
“It was a very strong ethic that you worked collectively.
“There were no exams – it was all to do with spirit, body and soul working together.
“The school was very keen on child development and our opinions were listened to. It made you very solid and it was a safe place to be.
“It gave me a confidence and creativity – I have always written from an early age – as well as a huge interest in movement and the body.
“I practiced yoga for a bit and practised tai chi for many years.
“I have always felt that linking mind and body is very important.
“My parents definitely did not want me to have a conventional education,” says Carolyn as she describes her next place of learning – a Moravian church school near Derby.
“It was a bit of a shock to the system because it was a religious institution,” she smiles.
“We attended church every Sunday and the men and women were all segregated – it was more like a Scottish kirk than an English church.
“It was a more structured place but I was ready for the change and took to it like a duck to water.
“I enjoyed being in the lab and loved biology.”
A certain wonder at the joy of learning is obvious as Carolyn recalls her next milestone – studying for a botany and biology degree at Manchester University.
“The uni’s botanical grounds were at Jodrell Bank and we were gardening beneath the UK’s biggest telescope,” she laughs.
“The Lovell arboretum and its beautiful trees were there and it was quite exciting to potter around under this huge radio telescope.
“I was also one of the first undergraduates to use a computer – which in those days filled a whole floor.
“It was like an old Bond movie with all these reels of magnetic tape whirring round.
“The computer was in the maths block and you had to put a special white coat on and tuck your hair up.”
What about the social side of university, I inquire.
“I was there from 1974 to 1977 and joined the rock and roll club – I had a really good dance instructor,” Carolyn says with a hint of devilment.
“Manchester was also quite a political institution – it had a Workers’ Revolutionary Party.
“I worked for a short while in a cooperative food shop and every Saturday we would go to a protest somewhere, often to London for CND marches and anti-apartheid rallies.
“We picketed Barrow-in-Furness where the nuclear subs were being built and went to demonstrations in and around Manchester itself.”
Armed with her degree, next stop for Carolyn was secondary teacher training at Liverpool then a challenging job in often unruly classrooms.
“I taught in Rochdale and Wigan when the school leaving age had been raised,” she recalls.
“At one school these kids who did not want to be there were put in a cabin. I remember turning up to teach classes of kids who thought they were leaving school but could not.
“They were labelled ROSLA kids – Raising of School Leaving Age – and were thought of as no-hopers. Talk about being stigmatised!
“There were a lot of disgruntled kids and it was quite a troubled and hard time until that settled down.
“They were not allowed to sit exams yet everybody was expected to learn science for one reason or another.
“In Rochdale, I was able to teach a bit of science to difficult kids doing media studies – by telling them how a TV worked!”
That experience of trying to impart scientific knowledge to bored and disillusioned teenagers got Carolyn thinking about better ways to make science accessible to all children.
“I wanted to study why people learned science and why some found it so difficult,” she explains.
“So I went back to Manchester to do a Masters in Science Education because I wanted to work out why I was teaching science to kids who did not like it.
“After I left uni I trained as a teacher in Liverpool and taught in and around Manchester and Wigan then moved to London for an educational research job.
“I landed a job at Chelsea College in London – now part of King’s College – which was a very famous science education research place.”
Preparing to leave for the Big Smoke, she met her life partner Ken Gouge at a media studies course in Liverpool in 1982 – but their future together almost never happened.
“Ken said he would give me a ring but he didn’t,” Carolyn laughs.
“Just before I went to London having packed all my things I was flicking through an address book and saw his number.
“I thought I’d nothing to lose and gave him a call – he said he’d lost my number.
“We started a long distance relationship and one weekend we got married.
“I told my friend what I was doing and when I went back to work at King’s College on Monday she had left a bottle of champagne on my desk.
“I inherited two stepsons and Ken inherited a dog and a cat!”
After four years’ research work in London, Carolyn moved back north testing out a new approach to learning she had helped devise called cognitive acceleration.
Her degree also qualified her to work at primary level and she was seconded to a local school to help the teachers develop their science curriculum.
“The idea was to develop a programme for 11 and 12-year-old children of any ability to learn science, not just those with the mental aptitude for applying the logic required,” Caroline explains.
“And we discovered those children on the programme went on to outperform others not on it, even though those others had learned more science. It was quite a revolutionary development.
“That was a lot of my career until I got work in Dumfries and Galloway. From here I’ve travelled to Australia, Pakistan, Palestine and Jordan – I have always been a bit of a traveller.
“It was interesting finding a home here – I moved from Manchester and Wigan but still I had to be near an airport.
“Castle Douglas might be rural – but people forget within two and a half hours you can be at major airports like Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow or Manchester.”
Don’t miss next week’s Galloway News for part two of Carolyn’s story.
