Peggy leads the firm’s Family Footprints campaign which raises money for Chestnut Tree House
and needed those skills to get back into work. I also ran a special needs department and we had young teenagers with learning difficulties or physical disabilities coming into the college for various things and we had a very, very good lecturer who herself was deaf and we started running courses for teaching sign language and teaching people to become facilitators for deaf students, either in the workplace, at college or who were going out into the world to act as interpreters in Magistrates Courts and all sorts of things. It was an absolutely wonderful job. There was a report about funding and people with special needs moving into mainstream education and them being
integrated within ordinary classes. So that began to effect the funding that was available - having it as a separate provision. As a consequence the college could not afford to keep many of those courses running unless we could get funding and so you spent half your time writing proposals that were going to Europe to see if you could get some extra funding. Eventually, the opportunity came up for me to sort of review where I was and the further you move up in management in colleges the less you teach and the more you’re dealing with finances and things like that and I wasn’t particularly interested, that’s not me. So I decided then that there was the opportunity to think about retraining and so while I was still teaching I started a conversion course, because you didn’t have to have in those days a law degree to begin the training to become a solicitor, as long as you had a degree of some sort. You could do a conversion course which would give you all of the basics that would be done on a degree, the basics of law, probate, equities, tax, etcetera all of that.I did that over two years as distance learning with the University of Trent and College of Law, and then once that was done, I moved from London, where I’d still been teaching at Redbridge, to Norfolk. I started working as a paralegal in a firm in Norwich, which had a huge criminal practice; I was with the criminal boys, that was back in the days when you
could be sexist. I was working with them as a paralegal whilst doing the distance learning. At that time, if you were still training you could do an awful lot more in the criminal world than is possible now. So almost the first day there it was straight down to the police station, sitting with suspects or whatever and doing their interviews - going to court and sitting behind the lawyers. They didn’t always turn up, so you’d be sitting behind, having to make the applications, even though you weren’t qualified. That now can’t happen but in those days it was exciting because you could do all sorts of things. I did that for a couple of years and by then I had finished the conversion course and I then had to take what’s now called the legal skills course I think but it was the legal practice course, LPC, and I did that back down in London for a year. When you’ve got all of the academic bits behind you it’s a matter of starting with the article clerks, trainees as we now call them. I went back to the firm in Norfolk and did that for about a year with them and then there were family reasons why I needed to come back to Sussex. There was a lot of speculative letters - by then I was nearly 40, a nearly 40 year old trainee! Then I got a training contract for this at what was then Mayo & Perkins, which were one of the legacy firms for this firm and they gave me
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that wasn’t a particularly pleasant job and it was also while the Yorkshire Ripper case was going on
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