PROFILE: Rosanne Bostock

IT was a trip to the other side of the world that first inspired Oxford's annual spring litter pick.

Rosanne Bostock had been travelling Australia when she heard of a clean-up operation – started in Sydney Harbour – where residents joined up once a year to remove tonnes of rubbish blighting their neighbourhoods.

The 77-year-old brought the idea back to her home city and in 2007 organised the first OxClean, with The Oxford Times backing the campaign ever since.

The Oxford Civic Society initiative has proved a huge success and now Mrs Bostock hopes to continue to 'pass good on', by sending it across Britain.

She says: "There is a certain wind on the litter front, why not go with the wind?

"We went to Australia and I came back I was shocked. I am madly proud of Oxford – it's one of the most beautiful cities in the world – but I came back and found it in a blooming mess."

It was then she spoke with the then-Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, Sir Hugo Brunner, who persuaded her to join the civic society, where she formed a committee and launched the famous litter pick.

Mrs Bostock said her 'very good committee' at the society was one of the reasons OxClean had 'really gone from strength to strength'.

"We got going and collected 10 tonnes the first time", she adds.

It wasn't the first time she had been involved in positive change. Mrs Bostock has strived for most of her life to make a difference.

She says it can be traced back to a single phrase, which struck a cord, from a former headteacher: "Pass good on."

Born in London in July 1939, Mrs Bostock moved with her family to Headington Hill as a toddler and lived near Morrell's Brewery, now the location of Oxford Brookes University. 

"We used to go and look at the trenches down Headington Hill, because Hitler was going to make Oxford his base, rather like Charles I, so we used to go and examine the trenches on Headington Hill," she recalls.

"You can still see them – just."

The eldest of three siblings, Mrs Bostock, her brother David and younger sister Rosemary would go into the market garden of the brewery and pick bluebells and other flowers.

"We kept chickens during the war", she says. "We had a nice garden with roses and our garden backed onto the drying ground of the laundry. It was a very outdoorsy life and we used to roam around the woods too."

Her father, Col Atherton George ffolliott Powell, known to many as Tony, fought during the war in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and served at Dunkirk and Monte Casino.

A young Mrs Bostock – then Miss Powell – was brought up by her mother, Pamela and a nanny, and attended Rye St Antony, a Roman Catholic School in Headington.

Her father returned from Egypt in 1945 but wanted to go to Australia – but her mother didn't.

"He had been away a lot, we hardly saw him. Between the ages of nil till 18 I saw my father, probably less than 20 times."

Still a child, her parents decided to divorce in 1948, which left the family in hard times financially.

"My mother could not afford my sister and I's school fees but, instead of throwing us out, the school educated both of us anyway – and I'm protestant," she said.

"Much later on I went back to my old headmistress and said to her, I could pay you back. 

"It was about £1,000 over my education so it was affordable. But she said 'no, pass good on'.

"I think that's a great thing. The bad stops with you."

When Mrs Bostock left school, she studied at Mrs Sprules's Secretarial College until she went to live with her father for a short time in Ottawa, Canada, aged 18.

She travelled the country, took up skiing and worked for the British High Commission, before moving in 1959 to take a job at the British embassy in Washington DC, working under the ambassador's private secretary, Lord Nicholas Gordon Lennox.

She said: "It was a lovely job, very dynamic. I lived in Georgetown with a bunch of other girls. 

"I always wanted to travel. At the end of my time in Canada I went right across the country and back again. At Salt Lake City I ran out of money, which was quite a lesson – I was more interested in buying books than food. 

"It was a great time and I was very lucky. I used to go up New York on a weekend and five plays on and off Broadway." 

Returning to Oxford after a year, she got a job translating the Bible from Greek to English, before going on to work for renowned philosophers Freddie Ayer and Isaiah Berlin as a secretary.

Then, in 1960, she Bostock met her future husband, Stephen Richardson, a geologist, who she married in January 1962.

The couple had two daughters, Joanna and Isobel, before the family moved back to Georgetown, Washington DC and then moved to Edinburgh, Scotland.

"I had a part-time job with Judge Francis Biddle who was US attorney general under Trueman," Mrs Bostock recalls. He had also been a judge at the Nuremberg trials.

In Edinburgh the couple's third child, Vanessa was born, before the couple moved back to Oxford in 1969 and bought a house in Chalfont Road, North Oxford, for £6,750, which is the same home Mrs Bostock lives on today. 

Mrs Bostock said coming back to the city, was something she always had wanted to do but sadly her marriage broke down and she and her husband divorced in 1979.

She added: "I was devastated. It took me about 10 years to work it out. I basically reinvented myself I think."

Mrs Bostock then spent two years at Ruskin College to read English before attending, the then called, Manchester College and graduating with an English degree.

"It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful I loved every minute of it," she said.

"All mature students come with extraordinary baggage and I thought the attitude from Ruskin was just marvellous.

"I was very keen for Manchester college to become a mature students college." 

Mrs Bostock then went on to work for the Centre for Modern Chinese Studies, which she said was her 'most interesting' job.

Retiring in 1999 aged 60, Mrs Bostock returned to work shortly for Richard Dawkins, while she began going out with David Bostock, a fellow of Merton College and a philosopher, who she married in 2002.

She and her husband share an interest in poetry and politics, with the grandmother-of-eight grandsons saying she would have 'quite liked to be a political journalist'.

The couple travelled the world, including Australia, which was where Mrs Bostock was inspired by the work of environmentalist Ian Kiernan who started Clean-up Australia - the foundations of her very own OxClean.

She added: "It's the passing good on. It stuck with me. I was very impressed with that."

As for OxClean, the litter pickers continue to remove tonnes of waste around the city every March as an example to the rest of the country, which Mrs Bostock now sets her sights on cleaning up.