VIEW PROFILE: Leon Edwards

Laughter is the best medicine

THIS week View reporter TOM GLOVER talks to Bridport’s answer to Patch Adams, former clown doctor LEON EDWARDS, about his life clowning around and his battle to save the planet with green initiative Bridport TLC

AS THE oldest in a large family of five being raised by a single mum, Leon Edwards quickly became aware of making the most of what was around him.

He credits his mother for instilling this attitude into him and her influence remains today.

“Being a single mum in the Seventies was quite hard and she had a make do and mend ethos about her, a very post war attitude to resources being invaluable. I used to get embarrassed by her jumping into skips to pull things out and now I embarrass my children with the same thing,” he said.

“I owe most of it to my mum, my attitudes towards fairness and equality and the fact that there is one earth, one big rock spinning in space that we are charged with looking after and that should be our main mission.”

Having left school at 16 Leon went to study for a mechanical engineering apprenticeship, but just months from completing his four-year course, Leon dropped out to join the circus.

“I left to join a circus troupe called Circus Dropalot,” he said.

“Juggling and circus skills were an interest of mine, that is how I would while away my weekends and evenings. When they were offered a tour of festivals that summer it meant leaving my engineering apprenticeship, which I quite happily did.”

During that summer season Leon spent a lot of time passing on his circus skills to children and decided that this was probably his forte.

Inspired by his work with children Leon became the first man to complete a course at the Nursery Nurses college in Bristol.

After four years honing his skills in Bristol, Leon moved to Croydon to be with his partner of the time. Leon found work as a community care co-ordinator but subsidised his income with juggling workshops and children’s parties.

Through a combination of his circus skills and childcare qualifications Leon then found himself being headhunted to become the country’s first clown doctor, Dr. Leonardo, with a post at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital.

“There is all sorts of research showing that laughter therapy is a very good healer and so twice a week I would go in and do my rounds of the wards visiting sick children and making them laugh.

“A big part of it was for the benefit of the parents because the parents would see their child, who most the time was in pain or distress, laughing and relaxing. It made a massive difference to parents as well as the children,” he explained.

As the country’s first clown doctor Leon, under his stage name Leon Sea, began to develop quite a high profile in the industry, but with two young children of his own, the emotional drain of the job became too much.

Leon was still very much in demand and was booked for a number of TV adverts, extra parts

and high profile parties.

“My one big regret was that I turned down the opportunity to be the clown in Oasis’ Wonderwall video. I’d been pre-booked for a children’s nursery event slightly nearer on that day and I had to be professional and say no but I passed it on to a colleague who came back very full of himself with t-shirts and signed stuff. And of course it was such a brilliant single that Wonderwall song. I don’t have many but that’s a little regret.”

Leon’s busy work schedule began to put a strain on his marriage and so he took the opportunity to move with his family to Dorset, to raise his two young boys in the country.

Unfortunately Leon’s marriage still came to an end but he takes his parental responsibilities very seriously. From the outset he has shared an equal parenting arrangement with his ex-wife and the split led him to become a telephone volunteer for a group called “Families Need Fathers”.

Leon then became an unpaid community worker in Bridport. During his time Leon worked on the “Return of the Native” magazine, co-ordinated the Culture Forum for Bridport and was a major player in both the “stop Safeway’s expanding” and the “local market not supermarket” campaigns.

Leon then met Tess Dickson, now his business partner at Bridport TLC.

He said: “I can’t speak highly enough of Tess, she’s a wonderful woman. We shared the same creative and environmental ideas and objectives and we both like to play and perform and make things and this project grew from our interest in doing the right thing regarding waste.”

Bridport TLC was setup and their first project was to find a use for a major waste product in West Dorset, vegetable oil.

The centre began turning the oil into a more environmentally friendly bio-fuel, which it provides to a number of businesses and delivery vehicles in the area.

“Our bio diesel production in the last four years has reduced Co2 by over 100 cubic tonnes. It’s still very small but it means that our air is cleaner and the air that our children breathe is marginally cleaner than it might be if that fuel had been dinosaur diesel,” he explained.

“This project just grew from there and more and more people kept coming down and suggesting things and we can’t resist a challenge.”

The project aims to find waste streams for various materials particularly ones that local authorities do not offer to recycle.

“It’s quite hard to collect all the different recyclable materials there are in a rural community, one of the reasons they don’t collect plastic is because you will be creating more carbon by travelling backwards and forwards with lorry’s full of air and very little weight in plastic bottles,” he said.

“We didn’t want to duplicate anything; we wanted to find waste streams for those smaller things like cooking oil, aluminium foil, plastic milk bottle tops. We have kept two and a half tonnes of plastic milk bottle tops out of landfill in the last two years since we started that scheme and it all adds up.

“For every ton we save from landfill that saves the local council over £50 in landfill tax. We have kept over 1,000 tonnes of recyclable materials out of landfill where they would have gone had we not been collecting them.”

Leon may have taken an unorthodox route to where he is now but he wouldn’t change it. He admits that even his time as a mechanical engineer came in very handy when setting up projects like the bio-diesel processor.

“I don’t regret having done anything; like anyone, our experiences in life shape us to who we are now and I think the areas of work I’ve worked in have given me quite a comprehensive education.

“Being a clown and a street performer is what gave me the best insight into human beings because you have to work really quickly when you’re doing that. You have to think and analyse and find common ground with people. People either have that or they don’t and I think I realised that’s what my strength was.”

Bridport TLC prides itself on being an open and inclusive organisation and has around 30 volunteers from different walks of life and different social needs.

Among those are a team of volunteers from the towns “Fisherman’s Arms” day centre.

“It’s important for us to be supporting all aspects of Bridport society. We are an inclusive organisation and people here aren’t judged, I think one of the nice things about it is it’s nice and safe and people from all walks of life can be proactive and do something useful and not be judged,” he said.

“The guys from the Fisherman’s Arms have been really instrumental in progressing the workshop and the re-use scheme, repairing electrical items and, if you can’t repair them, then stripping them down and making plugs and cables and leads and fuses and stuff available to local people. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it but if it is broke then re-use it.”

The TLC was recently saved from closure thanks to great support from a number of local organisations, showing how much the centre is valued in the town.

Leon does admit he would like to take it easy one day soon and begin to have a bit more fun again with his performing but there are still a few issues he would like to see addressed in Bridport.

“Resolving the new Waste and Recycling Centre location should be the most burning issue for local councillors,” he said.

“Certainly more important than encouraging and allowing a Lidl to be built, and of far more relevance to local residents than the Town Hall development. Apart from that, Bridport is thankfully blessed with loads of innovative, creative and interesting ‘do-ers’ that make things happen.”

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