Our March ‘Inspiring Speaker’ was the Indefatigable Penny Melville Brown.Around 20 Eye Matter members listened spellbound to the stories of heroism and determination delivered by Penny on Friday, 13th March, live on Zoom.
Her career began in the Royal Navy, where she became the first female commander.After having to medically retire, Penny turned her life to supporting other disabled people. A chance encounter with Baroness Margaret Hodge MP ledPenny to develop a business model encouraging disabled people into employment. This was operated in two mining villages over a 3-year programme to encourage disabled people into the public sector, NHS, private sector, into training and the voluntary sector. Part of this programme was for employers to recognise their own vulnerable employees and talk about the benefits of employing other disabled people as part of their workforce. However, by 2014, despite the ongoing success of this project, a disagreement with the DWP, who cut her Access to Work support, shelved the whole operation. Although an appeal was launched, it took a further 7 years to be resolved in Penny’s favour.
Two years later (2016), Penny had another idea. Like many disabled people, she realised she could never be a Paralympian and turned to her love for cooking for inspiration. She began creating videos and making Christmas cakes. Subsequently, in early 2017, she received an invitation to a competition, organised by the Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired (founded in 1905). To apply for the James Holeman prize. Coincidentally, James Holeman (1768-1857) was also a Naval Officer and, equally strange, had the same eye condition as Penny.
This project took her all over the world, cooking in top restaurants, deep into a jungle, America’s largest Naval base in Virginia, and China. Running in parallel, or as a consequence of this project, was the awareness of blindness and people’s attitudes towards it. In China, she described how some of the chefs had never met a blind person before and were wary of her in their kitchens. Moreover, in bringing blind Chinese people into the kitchens, they had to be taught how to use a knife.
Whilst working with an Australian indigenous chef, they encouraged her to use an axe when cutting down leaves to wrap around the food they were about to barbecue.In Africa, she experiences discrimination from some, but was able to cook in fire pits with a blind drummer.
Penny recounted the traumatic car accident she was involved in and her marriage in 2018. During COVID, she released a succession of YouTube cookery videos and published a book about her international tour. More recently, she has published a book about disabled people’s constant fight for employment.
There was a great response to Penny’s presentation and honesty. One commented, “that it seemed as one door shut another opened.” Another member asked, “How to competently cut onions?” Penny explained having chopping boards with edges, sharp knives, cutting the top and bottom of the onion so it can stand them flat to remove their peel before cutting.
Yet another member wrote this, “This was an amazing event. I think many of us can relate to being forced into reinventing ourselves as disability appears in our lives. I had been taught to hide my disability as a child and did not have any extra help at school or college. If only I had known about the support, and as disability rights grew stronger, I would have had leverage to avoid being forced out of jobs because I could not drive or because I could not use the systems they had. Knowledge is power, and I am so grateful to hear of someone who has dedicated so much of their time and energy to assisting people to live their best possible lives. I know that this is something that Eye Matter does every day, but Penny started way back when it was even more difficult to carve a life out for yourself as a disabled person. This illustrates the fact that disabled is actually a bad term, as we all show our abilities and aptitude for finding new ways of doing things.
Thank you.