Campaign helped by archive of voices
POWERFUL TOOL: EACH DAY this week we will look back to a memorable story from the last five years of the Yorkshire Post’s Loneliness: The Hidden Epidemic campaign. Today, we revisit the audio archive.
DOZENS OF voices, some shaky and timid, others more confident in telling their stories. All with one thing in common – a shared loneliness.
In February 2015, on the first anniversary of the Loneliness campaign, The Yorkshire Post set about recording the real stories of people suffering in isolation to show that loneliness could affect any of us, at any time.
They included 74-year-old Joanne, whose voice was shaky as she explained the loneliness she felt following the death of her husband.
“I come back in the evening to an empty house. I feel as though I have absolutely nobody – it’s the really depressing loneliness that gets me,” she said.
“I thought I was a strong person, that I could have coped.”
Ernest, 87, told how he “no longer has the incentive” to go out after losing his wife, and Joy spoke of how she felt trapped in her home after developing mobility problems.
Maud, who lived with her best friend for more than 60 years, spoke of how she “got into a rut” after she died. “I didn’t care about going out,” she said. “I had no family.”
The aim of the project was to build an archive that would make the authorities “stand up, listen, and act”, said Nicola Furbisher, then managing editor of The Yorkshire Post.
Laura Alcock-Ferguson, executive director of the Campaign to End Loneliness, partners in the Loneliness: The Hidden Epidemic campaign, said the archive brought people’s stories to life in a way that made the issue “impossible to ignore”.
“Policymakers must listen to these stories and recognise the devastating impact loneliness can have on our mental and physical health,” she said.