Elaine Boyes
speaker
157 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Elaine Boyes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, gosh, this is the difficult bit to talk about, to be honest. I'd better be careful what I say on here. Better be careful.
Because I'd had quite a difficult childhood. I remember my dad used to argue a lot and my dad could be quite violent. You do everything to appease and you avoid conflict and that's what I was like. This compliant female that's very friendly and outgoing on the surface but underneath it she's not going to ask too many questions.
Well, meeting Rowan was interesting because it was a blind date. I was introduced by two friends. They kept pastoring me, actually, for about a week. They kept saying, we've got this chap, we'd like you to meet this chap.
It was January 1980 or 81. It was absolutely freezing, and we met up in a pub.
Oh, gosh. I would say he looked like a good-looking Cliff Richard now. Cliff Richard is good looking, but he reminded me of Cliff Richard.
His eyes. Again, it's his eyes. Yeah, yeah. He's got brooding eyes. He's got depth eyes.
I managed to get him to talk about photography and things that he's interested in, and we hit it off quite well, yeah.
When we left the pub, he said to me, he said, how do you fancy meeting and going to York tomorrow for the day? And I thought, oh, that'd be nice. So we did.
I felt safe in his company. Ron was very placid, very quiet. He seemed very caring. And I felt safe with him. I felt safe around him.
He had this rack system installed. One of his main passions was hi-fi equipment. It was a Pioneer rack system with these huge speakers. I've never seen anything so big. And he was so proud to put it on and show me his hi-fi equipment. It looked like jewellery and he touched the, what do you call them, the knobs like they were jewellery. And the first track he put on was Paul Simon, I Am A Rock.
It was heaven. It came out of the speakers, the sound, and it was like, wow.
As time went on, he got depressed, and I came to realize that he probably would never be happy until he went back to Canada, because he would be constantly talking about it.
In walked this gentleman and he inquired about, well, it was a painting that was in a display cabinet outside on the pavement there.
And we had a chat about auctions and about fine art, and that was really how I met him.
He seemed like a gentleman, well-spoken, polite. He had a presence about him, and he seemed very warm. He came across as American. He said he was living in London. He didn't like London. He didn't like the smog. He didn't like the dirt.
An hour of conversation passed in a blink, when finally... He said, I'm thinking of setting up a business locally, and I think you'd be a great person to work for me.
That was a bit of a shock, really. He said, I like you. He said, I like your attitude. I like your friendliness. He said, I really could do with somebody like you working for me.
First of all, he said, we could set up an antique business selling antiques. And I said, well, to be perfectly honest, I don't know anything about antiques. So he said, well, what about a secretarial agency? Do you fancy running a secretarial agency? I said, no way. That's the last thing I'd want to do.
I said that if I was really honest and I wanted to set up a business, I would set up doing photography because that's something I had considered.
So he said, that is absolutely brilliant. We could do that. He said, and what I could do is send you to Geneva and you could photograph the fountains of Geneva. He said, because they've got the most amazing fountains. He said, we could do one of these coffee table books with all the fountains of Geneva. He said, that would be absolutely brilliant.
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