Born and educated in Scotland (I’m a farmer’s daughter), I worked for two Edinburgh publishers after university before heading off to South Africa in the wake of a doomed love affair. I came back with Richard, my husband. In Johannesburg I found myself launching the Wombles and at the sharp end of the first South African Celebrity Tennis Tournament, which concluded with Burton/Taylor wedding no 2.
After a spell as deputy editor of a new business magazine and a year in Amsterdam, I popped in for lunch with Sylvia Holder, my Johannesburg friend, to find she’d set up a PR consultancy in up-and-coming Camden Town and ‘needed a hand for a couple of days’. Twenty one years later I was still there. Thanks to various cunning strategies and a lot of good fortune, Holder Swan Public Relations managed to steer clear of the less interesting parts of PR and into some of the world’s most exciting and occasionally dangerous places. We did travel, theatre and horticultural PR and ran How to do your own PR courses. Yawning financial gaps during various recessions were plugged by a succession of parallel and usually unrelated businesses.
We called it a day after our eighth Hampton Court Palace Flower Show and while my children Ben and Georgina were growing up, I co-founded Working Options, an agency that placed professionals in part-time work. This was before work-life balance became de rigueur and businesses and Government switched onto flexible working. In 2002 I became head of PR for one of the Prince of Wales’s charities and since 2006 I’ve been doing the things described on this website.
