It is thanks to an enterprising initiative first created in Sweden back in the late 1960’s, that visually impaired people across the UK now have access to Talking Newspapers and Magazines giving information on local issues, events and news stories. Following a study visit by Ronald Sturt to Sweden in 1968, when he returned to Aberystwyth where he worked in the College of Librarianship Wales, he was full of enthusiasm for the talking newspaper that the local association for the blind had started in conjunction with the Västerås library. After considerable fund raising by the local Round Table and the support of a raft of volunteers, in January 1970, one of the first Talking Newspapers was launched when tape cassettes were dropped through the letterboxes of twenty blind people in Cardiganshire. Some four years later a number of Talking Newspapers had been established in other parts of the country resulting in the establishment of the Talking Newspapers Association of the United Kingdom.
By 1978, it was the turn of Cheltenham, Tewkesbury and the North Cotswolds to benefit from a Talking Newspaper providing local news to visually impaired people in the area. A group of volunteers, including Eddie Watson, one of the first technical directors, Geoffrey Beddow, the group’s fund-raising organiser and Eric Walker, the Inaugural Chair of Trustees set about establishing The Cotswold Listener in 1976. Eric, a former president of the Cheltenham Lions’ Club and founder member of the Winchcombe and Bishop Cleeve Lions Club, had chosen a talking newspaper as his project whilst president. In under two years, with the support of the Lions’ Club’s various fund-raising initiatives and with the support of the Gloucestershire Association for the Blind, sufficient money had been raised to get the initiative launched.
The cost of the equipment to produce specially adapted cassette tapes with a two-hour run time was comparatively high, as were the specially designed tapes adapted for use by a visually impaired person at £5 each. Produced bi-monthly, the tapes held news gleaned from the Gloucestershire Echo, Chronicle, magazine articles, information from Social Security together with important information on sales, shop closures, road closures and obstructions.
It was the Committee’s aim to extend the completely free service to about 400 visually impaired people in Tewkesbury, Cheltenham and its surrounds including Winchcombe. A group had already been established in Gloucester and it was hoped one would also be set up in Cirencester. One of the Committee members, Mrs Doris Ochronek, who was registered blind said: “This talking newspaper will give us an opportunity to voice our needs, instead of sighted people voicing them for us.”
At the end of the first ten years, The Cotswold Listener had moved from cassette tapes to CDs with 80-minute running time. The studio had been relocated from Ellerslie House in Albert Road to its present location in Rodney Road in 1999. With continual developments in computer technology, listeners were moved from CDs to USB memory sticks and supplied with free King’s Sovereign memory stick players, starting in 2014. By the end of 2019, all the listeners were using memory sticks – which can hold several hours of audio material – so the recordings were no longer limited to the 80-minute running time dictated by the length of a CD. As the new decade dawned in 2020, The Cotswold Listener became available on the BWBF App and increased its weekly running time to around 120 minutes. In 2021, it was made available via Alexa.
In the last twenty years The Cotswold Listener has had seven Chairs of Trustees, with the present incumbent, June Little, the charity’s second female Chair. The charity is still run solely on donations and fund raising and with the help of many volunteers. Listener numbers never quite achieved the numbers that Eric Walker and his Trustees had hope for, but it is hoped with continued marketing and creating awareness of what the organisation does and offers a completely free service to visually impaired and blind people, listener numbers will continue to increase.