I did my silver in Rangers, in the 1970s, for which I helped to decorate our Ranger Den, helped with Brownies, and went to Badminton classes. Helping with Brownies encouraged me to become an adult leader when I reached 18 and to gain my Pack holiday licence, which led to some great experiences for lots of Brownies.
When I did my expedition, we discovered that several farmers had fenced off footpaths that crossed their land, causing my team to have to rethink our route and making us 2 hours late for reaching our destinations. We explored churches along the way and had anticipated meeting the assessor at one of the churches, then we were supposed to walk through some very dark copses before reaching camp. As it would be getting dark before we reached the copses we took the decision to walk along the main road, in the grounds of safety and had assumed we had failed the expedition but our assessor asked us to write a report explaining why we took the decisions we had and she passed us because she said we had shown that we could adapt the circumstances that were out of our control and made adjustments for safety.

Several times through my life I’ve had to change my route so I think I learned a big life lesson on that expedition!
I completed everything on Gold except the expedition, because I left my Ranger group and didn’t have a group to complete it with. I’ve always regretted not completing it and was extremely pleased when my son completed his gold at the age of 17 two years ago and was honoured to accompany him to Buckingham Palace.

I would personally like to thank Prince Philip for making the opportunity possible for both of us