I started Jiu Jitsu in 1992 at Wolverhampton with my first instructors: Daryl Cooper, supported by Ady Treadwell. My first session was an exchange for some of the Jiu Jitsu women to try out at the rugby club where I trained. Straight away I loved how physical Jiu Jitsu is and it reminded me of the Judo I had done in the RAF as a child. I stayed and became an instructor because I love helping people to improve and because of a determination to prove some people wrong. It’s fair to say that I have faced a fair amount of discrimination from a minority of male grades over the years, but it is improving, and I’d like to think that I’m a part of that work.

I left Wolverhampton in 1994 as a green belt and moved to Oxford Brookes where Chris Cooke was the instructor. When Nigel turned up in 1995 and took over the club, I was a purple belt. After spending a year at green belt, I eventually took my blue belt with Pete Farrar and my Brown belt with Dave Walker running the grading in March 1997 – the same year that we moved to London. I continued to support the Oxford Brookes club through the next year or so.

I started my first club, Imperial College London, in October 1997 after a long campaign of writing and meeting with the union. They agreed that I could run a stall at freshers’ fayre but would not agree to give me any session times until I had over 30 people committed to training. Eventually with 35 signed up I demanded session times a month into the start of term. 5 weeks later, I had to firmly ask another martial arts club to vacate the room on my first session in order to start Imperial’s journey. Imagine being a female brown belt with 30 new novices trying to face down a whole established martial arts club just to get started. I received my hakama almost immediately afterwards at a very large session at Crystal Palace when Brian Graham received his 6^th dan from Matthew Komp. From then, we referred to him as Shihan Graham. Matthew Komp went down the line of instructors demanding to know how long each had been doing Jiu Jitsu. At the time the maximum being about 25 years.

Imperial was not an easy club to start. We were given Thursday 7-9pm followed by Sunday 2-4pm. Every Saturday night the dojo was used as a bar so we had to clean it up before we could start to train, so it always smelled like stale beer. However, the students were keen and so I took 26 students to the first nationals in Nov 1997. It was one of my proudest moments after such a hard battle to get the club opened. The club was a super-tight group of wonderful people, and we got up to a few shenanigans; running breakfalling in a secret location and in the foyer of the local tube station to a crowd.  Several students from that time include Robb Kerr, Alexander A’Air, Paul “Bungle” Beckett, Kostas, Elena – many of them achieving brown in time there or in my follow up teaching at Kings.

Up until about 2003 I was teaching at Imperial twice per week as well as training and teaching at Kings three times per week. Saddened but proud, in 2003 I handed the Imperial Club onto my most senior student and decided to focus my main teaching interest at Kings, sharing the club with Nigel. This truly was a great time and place to teach Jitsu – a moment that to me, cannot be beaten. We had so many male and female senior grades; many of them blue, browns and dans. Throughout this time and for about a decade, I was attending the monthly national brown and dan courses which often entailed driving all over the country each month. I carried on teaching at the brown belt courses after Nigel handed them on to Colin Mortimore for some years afterwards. I began leading breakfalling courses to meet a need in London and further afield and I was part of the team that helped established NNK within the syllabus after Richard initiated these courses as the technical direction after 2005. I was also organising and teaching at the annual Lakes Summer school, taking over from John Hamer in 1997 through to 2009, when I handed them over to Eric. Our various clubs were always present in great numbers at these events. I also attended every nationals, which I believe is the key to making a really strong club identity. I’ve attended every adult nationals (except one misplaced holiday booking clash) since 2003.

My increasing involvement persuaded people that I would make a good London Regional Coordinator at some point around about 2005. I believed it would be better organised as a committee as the job was really too big for one person to do well. This worked well at that time as London was quickly expanding the number of clubs and needed larger training facilities.

Somehow, I also managed to squeeze in teaching the London Nautical Junior Club from 2004-2006 after Tony Gill left London. I was supported by a blue belt, David Palmer, who took over after he achieved Brown belt. Awkwardly the club was on a Wednesday 3-5pm which meant sneaking out of my City Lit ceramics course and then training/teaching later the same evening at Kings. This was my first junior club. After moving to Cornwall and becoming a teacher, I opened and taught a couple of junior clubs in my schools from 2012 until covid shut it down in 2020 and I’m planning to restart a new club as soon as it is feasible. Taking my Cornish juniors to the junior nationals in Wolverhampton is a highlight of that time.

After achieving Sandan (now Yondan) in 2008, I soon became involved in the work of the promotions board (PB) which is where I now give most of my teaching service. In my day job I’m an assistant head teacher with responsibility for maintaining teaching standards within a school context so it made good sense for me to be involved in improving the standards of coaching within the TJJF. Ian Lambert handed responsibility for leading this board to me in 2012/13 since which the team has gone from strength to strength. This work requires us to ensure candidates meet the criteria for promotion to every grade from hakama through to Yondan. We also form the assessment panel that makes judgement on and coaches the senior instructors through the significant black top process. This work is really fulfilling although it does require pretty much all my time at each nationals event. I feel that the process has become far more rigorous as a test and a really progressive experience for the black top. Currently, I am awaiting surgery for a missing knee ligament after which I hope to return to more actively teaching on the national mat and junior jitsu, so watch this space. In the meantime, the promotions board keeps me busy. It is because of this work that I was finally recognised with a promotion to the tertiary board, being the first woman to achieve the rank of godan in the TJJF.