Woman's Hour - Elizabeth Siddal and the Pre-Raphaelite women, Fibres - a play about asbestos, Women's cricket

Episode Date: October 19, 2019

We hear the stories of the women of Pre-Raphaelite art whose contribution has been overlooked with Dr Jan Marsh curator at the National Portrait Gallery and from Dr Alison Smith who curated Tate’s major Burne-Jones exhibition.One in 10 mothers who’ve had virginal births suffer from faecal incontinence. We hear from mums Kirsty and Sophie and from Dr Sarah Webb a specialist midwife in perineal trauma. Oliver Warren a colorectal surgeon and Sue Almond a specialist pelvic physiotherapist answers some of your questions.The author Jung Chang discusses her latest book Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister which tells the story of three women who helped shape the course of 20th century China.Are race and gender a double disadvantage in the workplace? According to a new report by the Diversity Practice 85% of BAME women leaders say this is the case, an increase of 20% compared to twelve years ago. We discuss the issues with Carol Campayne Director of Diversity Practice and Yvonne Coghill OBE, Director of the NHS Workplace Race Equality Standard Implementation Team and Deputy President of the Royal College of Nursing.The playwright Frances Poet tells us about Fibres her new play which explores the legacy of asbestos in the Glasgow shipyards. Phyllis Craig from the charity Action on Asbestos tells us about the women and families affected by the exposure.And we hear about a 20m pound boost in funding for Women and Girls cricket with Clare Conner Managing Director of Women’s Cricket at the ECB.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Good afternoon and welcome to the weekend edition of Woman's Hour. This week, a frank conversation about faecal incontinence after childbirth. Why are women continuing to suffer in silence? The author, Yung Chang, on her latest book, The Story of Three Women Whose Lives Helped to Shape 20th Century China, and we'll discuss a new play, Fibres. It's about the legacy of asbestos in the shipyards of Glasgow

and the women and families affected by it. These overalls would come home, they'd be covered with dust and these are being washed in a big tub, old style. That dust is in the air when they're being washed. I mean, I read heartbreaking cases of children pulling the asbestos out of their daddy's hair when they came home from work, who then have gone on to contract mesothelioma. We'll also look at why the future of women's cricket in England looks pretty positive and the untold stories of some of the women of the pre-Raphaelite art world.

We're trying to show them use in a more positive way, in the sense that the women who pose for the male artists played a key role in fashioning their own identity, selecting their costume, their jewellery, their pose, and they do strike these wonderful poses. In this edition of Weekend Woman's Hour, we'll look at the life of Elizabeth Siddle. First, though, it's become more common to talk frankly about childbirth and indeed its aftermath.

Often people, women, will admit that they leak urine and perhaps continue to do so for many months or even years. But people don't often talk about faecal incontinence. And this week on Woman's Hour Hour we have been doing exactly that. It's thought that injuries to the sphincter can affect one in ten mothers who've had a vaginal birth with a higher risk to those women having their first child. So why don't we talk about it more? Well you're about to hear some very frank conversations on the subject and we start with Dr Sarah Webb who's a specialist midwife in perineal trauma at Birmingham Women's Hospital. Kirsty, who is a midwife and has an eight-month-old baby.

And Sophie, also a midwife with a 22-month-old. First of all, here's Kirsty's experience. There is an assumption that only women who have sustained significant injury to the perineum, so that muscle between the vagina and rectum, are people that suffer postnatally with these issues but what's interesting about my story is that I had what was a really positive empowering birth. I had a very small tear to the perineum which didn't require stitches and I was actually you know fitting well in the postnatal period until about six weeks and then that's when my issues started to arise so initially it was struggling to open my bowels and when I say that what happened was that every time I tried to

open my bowels I was just unable to unless I was able to physically position my fingers in my vagina and push back against my rectum which going to my GP at six weeks, they were very clear with me that that was something called a rectocele. So essentially what happened was during childbirth sustained an injury. So the connective tissue between my rectum and my vagina had weakened to the point where there was a big bulge. So every time my rectum was full, it would push into my vagina. So every time I needed to open my bowels, I would have to position my fingers in and manually push that in order to have my bowels open.

You're a midwife. I am. Did you know this could happen? I had no idea, Jane. And I think, you know, when I talk about the kind of assumption that only women that sustain injuries really, you know, there's this assumption that if you don't work on any stitches and you don't have a deep tear, that your perineum will heal and everything will be fine and as a midwife I had

no idea and I had no follow-up in regards to that so the gap in knowledge in terms of the kind of research and the awareness of these issues I think is really really lacking in midwifery education but also in our dialogue in women's health issues generally. And can I just ask Sophie what happened to you? So you, well tell me about initially life after birth immediately. So yeah I had a normal vaginal birth and I had an episiotomy. Which is the cut. Which is the cut in the perineum just because I'd got a long labour and it was in a bit of a funny position. And yeah after giving birth to him I bled a lot from my

rectum for about four months and I just had really sudden urgency and I had to get to the toilet really quickly and it just never really went away and I went to my GP several times who just gave me suppositories and just said oh this is kind of normal. And I thought, is this normal? I've seen a lot of postnatal women. I don't think this is normal. And then I eventually saw a physio privately. He was about 10, 11 months old. And? Not much has changed, to be honest.

I'm getting better with my pelvic floor exercises, but I think the underlying message was if you want to do anything about it, like surgery, it impacts having future children and I want other children so why are women still reluctant to get help I think it's because it's an issue that's always been hidden and I definitely think and I agree with Kirsty about the midwifery education awareness about pelvic floor and the implications is still there and it doesn't seem to be being addressed in education so midwives

aren't aware of the long-term implications we're therefore not informing women what to do and this whole thing just carries on being hidden. Sophie did your GP actually offer any practical help? Not at the beginning on the after I saw a private physio she said no he really should have and so I went back and then got a referral for NHS physio because my private physio said I needed to go see sort of a urogynecologist. And you have to see an NHS physio before you get referred to that and have a whole course of that. But that's obviously quite tricky. I'm a single parent.

Do I get childcare for all these physio appointments? How does that work practically? Sarah, what should happen? What's best practice here? Best practice would be for hospitals to have specialists midwives like me that are links to the maternity that can then refer into urogyne.

But there will be people listening, women listening in their 60s and 70s who I suspect strongly are still suffering as the result of childbirth many decades ago. Can they have anything done, Sarah? Yes, they can. There are definitely services out there for them to be seen. One of the trickiest things is getting those women on the right care pathway and getting GPs aware of the right pathway and on how to refer those women. So those older women will be reluctant to go to the GPs if they do do the GPs know where to refer the women to and what language is required

to let your GP know exactly what you're going through Kirsty do you want to answer that yeah well I think maybe that's also maybe quite telling as to why we have three midwives in the studio discussing these issues is that you have to know and understand your own anatomy to be able to recognize that there's a problem. And on top of that, you have to kind of have an understanding of what a normal postnatal body is to know that yours isn't normal. And without that knowledge and understanding amongst women, how are they able to describe, you know, what they're feeling and what they're experiencing. And one of my experiences in talking to my peers about this is when I'm able to open

up with them, so many people have come forward and said, oh, do you know, I've experienced similar to that? Or, oh, really, I didn't realize, you know, I thought that was normal after having a baby. So I think there is an issue around language and an issue around feeling isolated in your symptoms, or maybe not even knowing that your symptoms are symptoms that are worthy of being discussed with a doctor. Well that's the problem isn't it? Sarah can I ask what should you expect? What would you count as normal post-childbirth? Should you in fact have any problems with pooing at all? We always say it takes nine months to make a baby, it takes nine months to get over a baby okay your pelvic floor is very badly designed it's very weak and having a baby through it

means that it's going to get tired but within the first six weeks you're going to have a disruption to you're not going to be able to hold things for as long as you used to but you shouldn't be having frank incontinence you will have an element of urgency but that should be bearable wind control will be very variable but over the six week period it should start to improve that's the voice of dr sarah webb and you also heard from sophie and kirsty who happened to be midwives but believe me that was actually coincidental when we came to setting up the item now there was such a big response to that, because people simply aren't used to hearing it, that we went back to the subject the following day and brought in Oliver Warren, who's a colorectal surgeon, and Sue Armand, a specialist pelvic

physiotherapist. Here's Oliver. It's incredibly common, all these problems are, both faecal incontinence and other difficulties with pooing and opening our bowels and so on and of course because everybody suffers in silence they think they're the only person so people are quite happy at dinner parties and things to say oh I'm having my shoulder done or my knees been playing up but they don't all sit around and say do you know what since I gave birth a year or two ago I'm having real problems with my bottom and it's leaking and I can't control it and yet it's just as common. I'm just going problems with my bottom and it's leaking and I can't control it. And yet it's just as common. I'm just going to read some emails to you both and you can just comment at the end. This older lady says, I gave birth to my only son in 1976.

I'm 69 now. I had an episiotomy in stitches but only began to suffer faecal problems about 15 years ago. I don't suffer urgency but I habitually leak during exercise and I keep pooing my pants. This also began to occur during sex. And for the last 20 years, I haven't had a sexual relationship. That's very sad. And I wonder, you mentioned to me earlier when we were talking, Oliver, that although you might have problems after birth, you are likely to get worse problems during the menopause. And that seems to have happened to this lady.

Yeah, so it's kind of like a two-hit process. We know that a number of women sadly suffer an injury that what we call an occult sphincter injury at the time of delivery and there's a lot of work going on at the moment to try and raise awareness around that and to try and help midwives, obstetricians and general practitioners to try and pick these injuries up a bit earlier because they're often missed. But what then happens is patients just about cope until they

go through the menopause. And then when you go through the menopause, all your muscles become weaker as a result of hormonal changes. And that second hit of your pelvic floor muscles weakening means that something that you might just about been coping with up until now, you now can't cope with. But everything feels like it's so longstanding. It feels like it's not the right time to go and talk about it. And so people don't come forward. But also, I wouldn't have known that. I wouldn't have known that if I had a problem after childbirth, it would likely get worse during my 50s.

I just wouldn't have known that. And I'm not sure how many women do know. I don't think very many people know at all because we've really struggled to talk about it. So, for example, we know that at least 10% of women after vaginal delivery suffer with an element of flatulence incontinence. So not being able to control your wind, your farts, if you don't mind me using that language. And nobody talks about that. And it's not mentioned in things like the six week health check with GPs. So urinary incontinence is on the syllabus for general practitioners.

Fecal incontinence isn't on the syllabus for general practitioners. Another listener says, I've been suffering from problems for over 20 years. My first birth, my son was a forceps delivery after an episiotomy. And I was warned that I might have nerve damage, which I think I do. I've asked several GPs about this, but they said nothing could be done beyond pelvic floor exercises, which I do regularly. I'm also prescribed vaginal oestrogen. This does at least reduce the frequency of UTIs.

What do you think about that, Sue? Yes, this is a common scenario that I have with patients that come to me. Very often they've seen their GP, they've gone away and tried their best with pelvic floor exercises without really knowing quite why they're doing it except to get a bit stronger down there they've been told oh just pull up those muscles or they've gone on the net to try and teach themselves a large percentage of them I find there's more than one cause you talk to some of them and they've got long-term constipation

from a child from school. We see schools where children are not allowed to go out and use the bathroom except at lunchtime. And a lot of this becomes a habitual thing. As we've spoken about, it goes on and the brain starts to think that this is a normal state of affairs. Thank you for talking about faecal incontinence, says another listener. I am unable to empty my bowels without manual

manipulation and experience urgency that dominates outings and I suffered for 10 years. I don't think any man would put up with that. I know that GPs and consultants are not treating this postpartum problem seriously and they're not offering help. Please, how can I find someone who would help me? Oliver? It's a very sad story. It's a story that I hear quite frequently in clinic, particularly around the requirement to manually manipulate the back of the vagina to help open bowels often after pregnancy. The problem with faecal incontinence is that it ties into lots of other problems and it's a multi-speciality problem. So what we need is

patients to be referred to specialised units that have both gynaecology, urology and colorectal services, all of whom are interested in pelvic floor and are interested in helping women and also men. And that comes on to the sort of second point i know i'm on women's hour and speaking as a man so i'm probably on slightly dodgy ground but it is also a problem that affects men and men are even worse i would say at coming forward and talking about faecal incontinence talking about leakage and there are men who need help as well we have to get better at creating clear pathways into these services and flagging these patients up from primary care as needing specialised units that look after them.

But this lady who's had a tough time for a decade, she doesn't, she shouldn't give up and assume this is what she's supposed to accept for the rest of her life. No, not at all. There's a lot of treatments, many of which don't require operations and surgeons and need people more like Sue with their expertise around physiotherapy, biofeedback, pelvic floor specialist nurses, all of whom can make a huge difference to patients' lives. But then there are also a group of patients of women and occasionally men who would benefit from certain interventions such as nerve stimulation, sphincter repairs and things like that done by very specialised surgeons in units that are recognised nationally for doing this work. Well, this listener asks, she's 31, she says, my female doctor whom I trusted implicitly asked when I went to her about this, asked if I had a good sex life and if I thought it was something I could live without. I responded that I couldn't and she inferred that should i have surgery to repair it i may well lose some sensitivity um now that's a question i don't know for either of you could

surgery affect your sex life negatively any idea yes i mean surgery on the vagina or on the anus and rectum can definitely negatively impact on on your um sexual um satisfaction and performance and can cause all sorts of problems it doesn't mean it always will i suppose that's part of a very important consent discussion between any surgeon and their patient so it's something certainly to ask about if you're going to have surgery at any point on the bottom at all or on the vagina is to ask about that because sometimes surgeons won't be feel able to be as forthcoming as probably they ought to be talking to a 31-year-old lady. But yes, it can. It won't always, but it can.

Oliver Warren and Sue Armand. And there are links to Mazic and to the Birth Trauma Association on the Woman's Hour website, bbc.co.uk slash womanshour. Yung Chang's book, Wild Swans, was incredibly successful, came out in the 1990s, in 1991, in fact. It's the story of the lives of three generations of Chinese women, her grandmother, her mother and herself. Her latest book is another story of three women,

this time the lives of three sisters, big sister, little sister, red sister. How were they then at the heart of 20th century China? Well, they had a quite extraordinary childhood. Their mother came from the oldest Catholic family. Their ancestor was converted by the Jesuits in the Ming Dynasty many centuries back. And then their father went to America as an unskilled laborer, but he escaped and ended up in the South of America and became the first Chinese person to be converted by the Southern Methodists. And he was educated there for seven years, and he was sent back to China as a preacher. But he then became a businessman, made lots of money, and he wanted to give all his children, including his three daughters, an American education.

The beginning of the book tends to concentrate on some of the men in their lives who you've mentioned. How important was their father in their development? Oh, the father was very important because he wanted to send his children to America for education. And that sort of laid the ground for them to become these very extraordinary women. And big sister Ai Ling went to America in 1904 when she was 14. And she was the very first Chinese woman to be educated outside China. And the other two sisters followed her to America. Mei Ling, later Madame Chiang Kai-shek, went to America when she was eight, and she spent 10 years in America and returned to China speaking better English than Chinese. And what's more extraordinary to me was that these girls were in America alone without adult family members to look after them

and such was their father's faith in American society and in the Methodist community. How did each of them attract men who would become as significant as they did in the development of modern China. Well, these girls came back to China wanting to change China and wanting to make China more like America. And then Red Sister Qing Ling fell in love with Sun Yat-sen, this man who's called the father of China because he was the first person to advocate republicanism, which led to the ending of monarchy, a 2,000-year-old monarchy in China. And she wanted to sacrifice herself for her husband. And, of course, she was let down.

And Sun Yat-sen was important also because he was the person who brought in Soviet communism to China, which still is there in China today. And then his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, after Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek changed their party, the Nationalist Party, into an anti-communist party. Little Sister and Big Sister were both passionately anti-communism. And so Little Sister married Chiang Kai-shek. And when Chiang Kai-shek became the ruler of China before Mao, and Little Sister became the first lady of China. What impact did that have on their relationships with each

other? I mean, that's straddling, very complicated politics, and clearly disagreeing with each other violently. Yes, well, I mean, you know, it's quite incredible. Because, you know, Red Sister Ching Ling was a communist and was Mao's vice chairman. She devoted her life, basically destroying the lives of her sisters and the whole family. And Chiang Kai-shek wanted to have Red Sister assassinated. And in fact, he cooked up many plots and even rehearsed one, which was a car accident. But he was stopped by his wife, little sister Mei Ling. So the sisters were torn apart by antagonistic political camps, and yet they remained fiercely devoted to each other and how they balanced this. And of course their relationships went through ups and downs,

but how they balanced their affection for each other and their loathe of each other's ideologies and relationships was a fascinating subject for me. The book is dedicated to your mother. Why did you dedicate it to her? Well, my mother is 88 now, and she still lives in China. She's frail. She's often in hospital, several times was dangerously ill. But she remains the source of strength for me because she inspired me to write Wild Swans.

And in my following books, I became a writer, but I'm also from going to China, except for two weeks, through the help of British Foreign Office, to see her. And of course, I live abroad. My mother lives in China and bears the brunt of the problems. She never asked me to mince my words, to pull punches, and she always encouraged me to tell the truth, as I have found out. And so I hugely admire my mother. Now this year has seen 70 years of communist rule,

30 years since Tiananmen Square. China has superpower status, but there are lots of things going on in Hong Kong with the demonstrations that are going on there. What do you see when you look to the country of your birth now? Well, I have very mixed feelings, because on the one hand, I see in the last few years, China has become more repressive and things have become much worse. So I'm very anxious. And there are also people, leaders who wanted to wind the clock back and go back to the more Maoist days. So I'm extremely anxious. But on the other hand, I can also see that they are encountering tremendous resistance. Those people who want to turn the clock back have been encountering tremendous resistance from, you know, everywhere in China. And because the country has opened its doors wide enough and for long enough,

and many people have traveled abroad, the economy has been linked to the world, and it's impossible for them to have that dream of going back to the Maoist dictatorship. So that gives me faith and a degree of optimism for the future of China. Yong Chang talking to Jenny and her book is Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister. Have things got worse for BAME women in the British workplace? Over 85% of BAME women leaders who took part in a recent study

by the management consultancy, the Diversity Practice, say that being female and BAME continues to put them at a double disadvantage. I talked to Yvonne Coghill, OBE, Director of the NHS Workplace Race Equality Standard

Implementation Team, and also the Deputy President of the Royal College of Nursing, and to Carol Campaign, the Director of the Diversity Practice. So Carol, have things got worse? I think when we look at the lived experiences of different women who are Black, Asian and ethnically diverse women, we do see that in terms of their organisational life that things have not improved. As I said, we did this 10 years ago. Certainly our expectation was that things would definitely

be in the upward trajectory, and that wasn't the case. But what has changed is different women's response to the organisational context within which they're working. Now, this is unashamedly about leaders, isn't it, this report, as was your previous one. Yvonne, you are at the top of your game, but it wasn't easy to get there. Just briefly, if you can, explain your career. I'm a nurse by background, and I think that I've been in the NHS for the last 42 years of my life, and it has been a really fabulous and wonderful career, I think. But there have been issues for me as a black woman in the NHS.

I originally wanted to be a director of nursing, and I went for five director of nursing posts after getting two master's degrees and lots of experience. So you'd done all the right things? I did all the right things because people told me that this is what you need to do in order to become a director of nursing. And I went for those five posts and got none of them and what that did to my self-esteem what that did to my confidence was it made me feel inadequate and made me feel bad and I think the reason why I am where I am today is as a consequence of the resilience that my mother

built into me my mother was formidable and I think that she would have been distraught if I had just packed up and gone home and, you know. Yeah. Yvonne, when you went for a job as, say, Director of Nursing, who interviewed you? Describe the people on the panel. Well, it was very interesting because it was white women, invariably. It was a nursing world. And we have quite a few nurses in the NHS from white backgrounds at senior level. Who get to the very top. Who get to the very, very top. And we've had initiatives in the NHS for white backgrounds at senior levels. Who get to the very top. Who get to the very, very top. And we've had initiatives in the NHS for some time, actually,

helping women to get to be the best that they could be. But it's some women, not all women. And I always say that. So you're sitting behind a desk with three or four white people, usually, asking you all sorts of questions in a way that you have to respond that suits them, that they understand. Okay, so this is where we really come up against it, don't we, Carol?

Because is it, do we play the game or do you change the rules of the game? What do you do? I mean, I think the kind of initial response to that is to try to play the game because that's safer and there's a psychological safety in that. It's kind of a bit of a known quantity and at the same time, it's become really important to change the rules of the game. I think that's why we're here today is that the rules of the game have changed

for the 30% club have more recently indicated that they've reached their target. 903 women or so are now on FTSE 350 boards. The question I ask is, who are those women? And I kind of took it upon myself to try and find out. And lo and behold, the question was never asked about the demographic profile of those women. And so we know that the 30% represents white women.

So where are black Asian and ethnically diverse women who represent 70% of the female population are non-white? Go on, Yvonne. Globally. Globally, yeah. Globally. Not in this country, yes. And I think, you know, the NHS is one of the biggest organisations in the world. And actually, I believe one of the best organisations, but that's another story. As it stands at the moment, 435,000 nurses who are qualified in the NHS, yet we only have 10 directors of nursing from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds, 10 out of that number.

And we have 1.4 million people working in our NHS. We only have eight chief executives from black and ethnic minority backgrounds and that's not unusual because what we know is that across the private sector and the public sector as Carol has already said that is a familiar picture. Yes and let's not leave the BBC out of this conversation either. No we can't. Well Carol Karen, I know you can say whatever you want to say about... No, absolutely. I mean, I think we see the very same experiences for black Asian and ethnic minority women being played out very publicly in the BBC. It's very clear that the BBC, as a public body, has the very, very same issues that the NHS,

the public and the private sector have and until we begin to have honest conversations about race racism and its impact then i think we'll still be here in 10 years time taking it to a really practical level i know that in the nhs ba me employees are more likely to face disciplinary proceedings. Now, why might that be, Yvonne? I think it's two reasons. I think that the system that we have called the NHS is perfectly designed to give us exactly what we've got. But I also think there's a lot of fear. And talking to my white counterparts, what they say is that it's easier to formalise a situation if there is a black and ethnic minority person

because they are fearful that that individual might, and I quote, I'm putting quote marks here, play the race card, that they will say you're only picking on me because. So as a consequence of that fear, they will go to the HR department and say... We're assuming that the manager is white. Invariably, the manager is white based on the structures that we have. And that individual will then go to the HR department and then it escalates because it becomes formal. The black and ethnic minority person becomes very anxious. They go to their union and then we get all the

issues that you get with a formal process. And we know that black and ethnic minority people are more likely to go through the disciplinary, formal disciplinary processes. And we also know that the sanctions on those people are much more severe than they are on their white counterparts. So there's a fear thing and a lack of understanding about other and difference. And unless we have the conversations, as Carol has quite rightly pointed out, about us working together for the benefit of all of our patients. We're not going to be able to crack this really tricky and thorny nut. And I have to say that the NHS is the only organisation that's doing what we are doing, which is looking at the workforce race equality standard and comparing the experience of black and ethnic minority staff

with white staff and actually trying to close the gap on that. Right. So rather than knocking the NHS, which I don't think any of the three of us actually want to do, we need to acknowledge that they are doing some important work that perhaps other people haven't even got close to starting. Absolutely. Carol, let's try to end on a relatively positive note. Where are the bright spots here? The bright spots are, you know, different women, are black, Asian and minority ethnic women. There's something really important about learning how we as women respond to this very murky, you know, context that we're in. You know, if I want to learn and understand, so how do you actually respond and lead in those environments, I will absolutely look at a different woman, because she tells me what not just resilience looks like, but what exception, what being excellent looks like.

Because a lot of different women say, I can't afford to just be average. I've got to be absolutely exceptional at what I do. It appears to be, Yvonne, that you did get a director of nursing job, didn't you? No. No, you never did. No, no. This is the first director of nursing post i've had in 42 years and i got that three years ago right so can i ask why did it suddenly go right for you

then was it just that you were so yeah you were so persistent or had you changed your attitude what was it it's a long story it was to do with a gentleman called uh nigel crisp lord crisp yeah that's what i was kind of trying to get to. You had someone. A mentor. A mentor. Somebody who believed in me, somebody who believed that I could do it and trusted in me to be able to do it and gave me the support and the help that I needed to be able to be myself and to be all that I knew I could be. Yvonne Coghill and Carol Campaign. Fibres is the name of a play that opened this week in Glasgow. Now, it's about the legacy of the extensive use of asbestos in the Glasgow shipyards. During the 20th century, the city and indeed the West of Scotland generally were at the centre of its

production. Mesophilioma is the deadly lung cancer that's led now to thousands of deaths. Phyllis Craig is from Action on Asbestos and Frances Poet wrote the play. I went to a music class with my daughter a few years ago and after the class they used to have a sort of coffee and we talked to other parents and there was a woman there who was taking her godson to the class. One day she told me that she'd lost her parents six months apart. Her father had been a ship's draftsman and had done an apprenticeship on the ships and the exposure to asbestos dust that he encountered there meant that all those years later he died of mesothelioma.

And her mother, who hadn't worked there but had washed his overalls, died six months later. So I was just shocked and moved to hear this story and went home and did a bit of research. I knew about asbestos, but I knew about it as something from the past. And when I spoke to a geriatric doctor friend of mine, she was all too aware of it because she was seeing so many cases. She told me at that point, this is a few years ago now, that the deaths from asbestos weren't set to peak till 2020. So every year more people are dying from asbestos related diseases than died the year before. Now Beanie and Jack are a couple in their mid-60s in the play. Jack of course is dying of mesothelioma. In the play, he's warned about asbestos dust. How aware were people of the danger at the time they were working there?

I mean, not aware that that's the problem. I think there was some awareness around the fact that some types of asbestos dust could be harmful. So I think there was a voluntary ban on Crosser Delight around the time that Jack would have been working there. But the sense was that the white stuff was much less dangerous than the blue. I read that the doctor at Turner & Newell, the asbestos factory, actually told people that they should breathe in the dust because it was full of magnesia which was good for you so there was so much misinformation around it at that time.

Phyllis from the work that you do how conscious would you say employers and employees were at the time of the danger? I think that the employees were not aware of the danger. There was some anecdotal evidence that there might be something or some issue with asbestos exposure, but there was no evidence. These men went to work, and they worked because they had to feed families and so forth. They were not aware, and that's why today, when they're pursuing civil damages, they're able to do that because they weren't aware.

I can't really say that that's the same case for the employers. A lot of these men were working with different is white asbestos, is still dangerous and they banned it in 1999. So these men went to work not truly knowing. There was always something there that someone would speak of about asbestos but the men were told by the employers, the men were told daily that there was nothing wrong and actually from the evidence that we've gathered from a lot of our insulating engineers was that if

they actually took a pint of milk then this would help and so they continue to work. Frances as you mentioned you've turned the focus to Beanie, Jack's wife, who got mesothelioma after washing her husband's overalls. How did that happen? Workers didn't know how dangerous it was. It would come home and they'd be covered with dust and the dust would be shaken off before being washed. And at different periods of time, these are being washed without a washing machine. These are being washed in a big tub, old styles. That dust is in the air when they're being washed. I mean, I read heartbreaking cases of children pulling the asbestos out of their daddy's hair when they came home from work, who then have gone on to contract mesothelioma.

Now, Frances, a family won a half million compensation case last year as a result of this kind of secondhand asbestos death. How common do you reckon it was for people to be exposed in such a way? Well, it's hard to focus down on a sort of specific statistic because asbestos was so widely used. So there were so many places that you might have encountered it. People have said that they feel that, you know, the majority of cases in men have been direct exposure, but the majority of cases in women and children have been secondary. Phyllis, how common have you found that secondary? It was often assumed that it was always a husband's overalls that would mean that the women's mesothelioma was caused by this or contracted by this.

That's a bit of a myth because nobody ever thought to say to women, where did you work? So a lot of women actually did work at that time. And so their exposure to asbestos was actually in their own right. in the pursuit of civil damages if you record that the husband's overalls was the main source of that exposure to asbestos. So there are differences. You can't say it's all people's overalls that were washed because people did work. But maybe a combination of both.

Why, Phyllis, are the numbers of ill people rising now when asbestos was fully banned in 1999? Well, I think that you've got to realise that the latency period between being diagnosed with a condition and being exposed to asbestos was between 20 and 50 years. So people who were exposed maybe 40 or 30 years ago are only being diagnosed now. There is, Frances, humour in your play,

which obviously you're touring around communities who may well have been affected by all of this. How easy was it to introduce anything that was funny in such a tragedy? I mean, I think the best theatre makes us childlike, really. It allows us to feel things more keenly. So it's always really important to me. I think there's so much pain and anger in the subject matter here.

And we, as an audience, you know, adults are very good at bringing up the shutters and making sure we don't feel. And I think humour and connecting with characters is the way to make sure an audience drop those shutters, connect with the characters and feel. And so I think audiences feel the pain more keenly if they've been laughing the moment before. I just wondered what you're hoping this play will achieve, being played in community centres in the way that it's going to be. The director says, I'm not allowed to call this my health and safety play because she says no-one will turn up, Frances. But actually, I think there is a passionate cry in the play

to say you have to, the bare minimum is that people are protected in their places of work and I want audiences who have been affected by the issues in the play can find the play a cathartic experience because we're carrying that anger for them and I think audiences that haven't been and don't know about it will carry that anger out with them into the world. Frances Poet and Phyllis Craig, and some people really were, as you might expect, affected by that conversation, wanted to tell us about their own family stories.

Derek says, My dad was a draftsman in the shipyards and just like the fellow in the play, of course, he served his apprenticeship on the shop floor where he was exposed to asbestos. My dad's was the last generation in Glasgow who piled out of school straight into the shipyards. They just didn't have much choice.

Thank you for raising this issue and bringing it to a broader audience. Helen says, At the fourth anniversary of my mum's death is in two days. She was a teacher. It was asbestos, this is, was only banned in 1999. It is in so many buildings and the diagnosis in school teachers is rising. My mum had cared for her own mother who had dementia. She only outlived her by a couple of years. The money given by the

government allowed her to take a last holiday abroad with my dad as once you're diagnosed you are uninsurable to travel. This vile disease has robbed my parents of their retirement together and she never got to meet my children. Helen that's obviously had a real impact on you and your family and I'm very very sorry to hear about it but thank you very much for spreading the word. Now an exhibition about the Pre-Raphaelite sisters is currently running at the National Portrait Gallery in London. No doubt you'll be familiar with some of the images of women with wonderful hair clinging on to pomegranates and generally being rather beautiful and incredibly captivating and languorous. I'm thinking of the Lady of Shalott and the Hiling Shepherd and names like Rossetti and Waterhouse and Holman Hunt.

Now, over the next couple of weeks, we're going to be looking on the programme at some of the women whose work has been overlooked. And we started this week with Elizabeth Siddle, who was famously the model for Ophelia by Millais. Dr Alison Smith curated the Tate's Major Burne-Jones exhibition last year. Dr Jan Marsh curated this exhibition, and she's the author of The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. Why should we care, I asked her, about Elizabeth Siddle? She's been entirely overlooked

and misrepresented, I think. She's represented as this frail victim of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, when she was actually a very energetic and ambitious young woman who got into modelling not through being discovered in a bonnet shop, as everybody believes. I was about to ask, how was she discovered?

But by her own efforts of showing her own drawings to the director of the School of Design and then apparently it would seem offering to model for his son Walter Deverell who was a good friend of the PRB's the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and that was Siddle's way into the art world because she had ambitions to be an artist herself. Right so but the story about her being discovered in a hat shop is everywhere you look. You google her and that's the story that crops up, so it's frustrating. Can I just tell people a little bit more about her? She was the model for Ophelia, we know that,

the muse and wife of Rossetti, and she died of a laudanum overdose. And Rossetti buried a collection of his poems with her, but after seven years he was persuaded to dig up her grave and recover the book of poetry so he could publish them and now that exhumation was 150 years ago this month and the BBC loves an anniversary so last night on Radio 3 Elizabeth Siddle played here by Lily Cole climbed out of her coffin to tell her own story. October 1869. It takes a long time for attitudes to change, but maybe people are willing to listen now, to really see me for who I am.

The first woman to exhibit with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. People forget that. First woman in a brotherhood. I don't need men to dig me out this time. I can do it myself. I can bloody well do it myself. And I don't give a damn if that upsets you. If I'm not to make you look. Don't turn away. And plot 5779, Unearthing Elizabeth Siddle, is available now on BBC Sounds.

Alison, this muse idea, what is a muse? A muse is someone who inspires an artist, who sort of embodies the spirit of their creativity. But a muse can also be a catalyst for creativity itself. So rather than being passive, a muse can also be active. It does sound passive, doesn't it? I think in this exhibition

we're trying to show the muse in a more positive way in the sense that the women who pose for the male artists played a key role in fashioning their own identity, selecting their costume, their jewellery, their pose, and they do strike these wonderful poses. And I think it's this element which gives these images

their incredible attraction and appeal. Well, the key pose, Jan, I guess, is the Elizabeth Siddle as Ophelia. Everybody will know that, even if they don't know it's her posing. Just describe that image, which I think is one of the... Is it the best-selling postcard at the Tate still? It's the most popular of the works in the Tate Gallery. Right.

Happily, in this exhibition, although we weren't able to borrow the Tate version, we have got a small autograph replica. So this is very exciting. We have another view, a copy of by Millais of his Ophelia. And Lizzie posed for this lying fully clothed in an antique dress in one of those long tin baths that the Victorians had to look like she was drowning in the river. She is Ophelia who falls into the river and drowns in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It can't have been much fun doing that, to put it mildly. That must have been quite an ordeal, posing in a bath for hours on end. Yes, and it's a tribute, I think, to Lizzie's commitment to the art world

that she wasn't deterred by those experiences. Well, we're perhaps falling into the trap of ignoring her own artistic abilities. Alison, was she a good painter? She was, and I think her works are coming to light, and people were saying, not only was she good, particularly for someone who was untrained, but she was very original and innovative

as well, and she might have influenced Rossetti and artists in his circle with some of her ideas. What's unique about her works is that she sees things from a female point of view. Her works concern female protagonists, not being seen as objects of the male gaze, but they're often women in these psychologically very tense, demanding situations. You say her work is coming to light. Where might people find it? There's still some in private collections. Quite a few are in public museums.

But they're not often shown. And I think in this particular exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, we have a whole room devoted to Elizabeth Siddle. And there are about five, six works, drawings, watercolours by her. And some of them actually anticipate later developments in art. For example, the beautiful drawing, Lovers Listening to Music, rather than showing the lover and his mistress, it's the lover and her boyfriend, or whatever it is, listening to.

And the two musicians are two dark-skinned women playing an exotic instrument. Now, that anticipates the ascetic movement, which happened a decade after, in the 1860s. So she's actually rather ahead of her time. And also being untrained, that allowed her to sort of heighten her imagination. And people in Rosetti's circle really surprised the idea of the amateur, or the artist who worked from their own inspiration alone. And Siddle really epitomises that tendency in producing these jewel-like works,

which show her great knowledge of poetry and English literature, but seen from her own unique perspective. Alison Smith and Jan Marsh and the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters is at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Big news this month for women's cricket. It's all looking rather rosy here. The England and Wales Cricket Board is investing more money, so too is the International Cricket Council, and in Australia there's a promise of equal prize money

for women and men in the next T20 World Cup. Will this mean that actually more girls get to play the game or are more attracted to playing it? Claire Connor is the ECB's Managing Director of Women's Cricket. What we're saying there is that we're trying to spread a different mindset across our sport, which is, you know, cricket has long been the domain of men and boys. And what we want to do is show women and girls that they are welcome in the sport at whatever level or in whatever role they would like to participate and so we're striving for a gender balanced sport because women and girls

deserve every opportunity in the game and we want that mindset to kind of permeate across the sport and across the organization and across cricket everywhere cricket clubs across the counties across schools so that women and girls feel that they've got a right and that they're included in the game. But that gender balanced idea, you're not talking mixed male and female teams, are you? No, no, we're not. No, we're not. We're talking about a little girl or a woman picking up a bat or a ball for the first time or wanting to work in cricket or coach or volunteer or be part of a cricket club. We want cricket to be a gender

balanced sport so that every decision we take, we ask ourselves as a national governing body at the ECB, are we creating a brighter, more inclusive future for our sport? Are we making it more modern, more inclusive? And are we showing women and girls that they are as welcome as men and boys? Now, I know you've got plans for men's and women's teams to have the same kit, the same branding, the same sponsorship, which is really important. Why is the whole package so important? Well, what you're referring to there is that the new competition next year, which is the 100, which is a new short format competition. It'll be the first time that our sport has launched a professional competition from the outset for men and women. So there'll be eight teams and each team will have a men's team and a women's team. And that's really important for us because that competition will have huge profile and reach across Sky and the BBC.

And it will show men and women and boys and girls that gender balanced ambition is that we're taking that very seriously. The plan that we launched last week, which you referred to, will receive 20 million over the next two years, with an ambition for that to become 50 million over the next five years. And that's a very holistic joined up plan for grassroots participation, for girls picking up bats and balls for the first time at the age of five or six, to show them that there is a pathway or a journey through the game for them at every stage, whether that's secondary schools, within clubs, within talent programmes, local talent programmes, within counties. And ultimately, that there is a route for them to make a career out of the game by becoming a professional cricketer.

How is this idea of speeding the game up and saying all right we'll have 100 tournament where only 100 balls are bowled how's that going to go down with the fans the fans who just want a five-day test that goes slowly and beautifully well we're not we're not taking that away from anybody in fact the test format is receiving a significant boost as well in men's cricket because of the World Test Championship, which has just started this summer. So test cricket is vibrant and healthy in this country and has got the backing of the international community through that test championship. But the 100 is about reaching a wider audience that perhaps haven't yet engaged with cricket. We know that we've got a long way to go to reach young people and more diverse communities that haven't necessarily been exposed to test cricket or even had much cricket in their community before. How different is it going to be now for a new young female player from when you played your first test in 1995?

Well, it's unrecognisable. It's already unrecognisable, actually. And what we've said in this new plan is clubs now offering the game to women and girls, is already unrecognisable from the game that I started playing as a youngster, where I had to play just in boys' teams. What passion for the sport would you pass on to a young girl who might be interested? What would you tell her is so great about playing cricket? I would tell her that it's a wonderful team sport it's sociable it teaches you good lessons for life you know it can be quite a cruel game but it teaches you good lessons it teaches good good things about leadership and teamwork and about being resilient and it can be the most unbelievable fun you know I've had an

amazing lifetime in the game already I've traveled the the world. It wasn't my job, you know, whereas now it can be. And one of the investments is that we will be tripling the number of professional players in this country from next year. So I would say to a girl now that if you, you know, if you like this game and you've got a bit of skill and you enjoy the sociable element of it, give it a go, and now you can see a pathway right the way through the game where you can play to the highest level, or you can just play and have lots of fun in a cricket club. Claire Connor, who is the Managing Director of Women's Cricket at the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Yvette said, I was listening to your piece on women's cricket. Ten plus years ago, our daughter played for the boys' jersey team to under 17. Then the ICC deemed it too dangerous to continue playing with the boys, but she was talented and used to open the bowling and indeed was the first girl playing for a boys' team to take an international wicket. It was against Ireland, as I recall, says proud mum Yvette. At the time, there was no alternative and she was lost to other sports.

So good to hear that plans are afoot to nurture these women. Yes it does sound pretty positive. Thank you very much for that Yvette. Join me live on Monday morning for Women's Hour two minutes past ten. I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.