Windrose Rural Media Trust has been giving a voice to
people living in the wilder areas of Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire for 38 years
by Faith Eckersall.

From its smash-hit online film festival in lockdown, to a playwriting workshop for young people, to caring for an archive of documentary footage stretching back to 1905, the Windrose Rural Media Trust certainly lives up to its name.
Trevor Bailey, who helps run it from his Gillingham home, explains.
“The archive grew almost by accident, it started with people giving us their old film footage, things they’d acquired or shot, which covers a huge number of different aspects of life in our three counties”.
That footage ranges from the only known animation by Heath Robinson to a 1918 film made at the behest of James Ismay (brother of Bruce Ismay of Titanic fame), showing how a Dorset village community survived the impact of the First World War.
“We’ve used it in a whole variety of different projects which are relevant to the present as well as for nostalgia,” says Trevor.
Those projects include the week-long, online film festival during lockdown which drew in a virtual crowd of 24,000. The work is popular with groups helping people with Alzheimer’s and with newcomers and established Dorset families alike.
They’ve also taken their show on the road to well over 200 occasions and their audiences, who runs into the tens of thousands now, always react appreciatively.
“People are most surprised about the changes in their area, even from, say, the 1960s until now,” says Trevor. “You tend to get different reactions – an awful lot of the rural population have come here quite recently and to them it’s a revelation, because they’ve never really encountered anything like this.”

People with strong roots in Dorset tend to be the quieter ones but, says Trevor, occasionally, during a screening, people will recognise a person in the film and call out “That’s my granddad!”
Some of the shows intersperse the footage with live interviews from people who lived and worked in the old days and occasionally, they have traditional music.
Other stand-out projects for him include oral history projects, video productions to assist people with mental health problems living in rural areas and a radio drama project, which was assisted by a Radio 4 playwright working with young people.
“We budgeted for six plays to be completed but ended up with 14,” says Trevor. “It nearly broke the budget but they had so much to say on so many subjects, from extreme fantasy to high social relevance, and only one person in the entire workshop dropped out – normally you’d get more. People really wanted to do it.”
He’s currently working on a project to help small local museums where people will be filmed talking passionately and knowledgeably about their favourite item in that museum. There is also a partnership with King’s College London to produce a film about the history of the great historical pageant movement which began in Sherborne in 1905.

Funding drive
This lava flow of accomplishment is even more amazing when you consider that Windrose Trust actually has no formal funding. “We work on a project-by-project basis, applying for grants and funding as we can,” says Trevor.
What he and his fellow volunteers would really like is some permanent funding: “Even £5,000 or £10,000 a year,” and younger volunteers to help carry the charity forward.
While they wait for this to happen, they can be supported by Gift-Aided regular donations and also by sales of DVDs and CDs of their projects and movies from their website shop.

And, in the meantime, Trevor is keen to explain the real importance of Windrose Trust’s perhaps less considered role in the community it serves.
“You can use the experiences people have in seeing what we do to get them to reflect on change in their own community,” he says. “We think this helps people to have a longer perspective about the place where they live.”
And that’s vital, because: “It lays the foundations for much more sensible decision-making today. It means you’re not just thinking about the here and now but looking at something in a much longer timescale.”
Find out more about the Windrose Media Trust at windroseruralmedia.org.