Iain Gregory: My great-great-grandmother would chain herself to railings
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Iain Gregory has become a high-profile campaigner on the state of Caithness roads and what he sees as the wider neglect and marginalisation of the county.
What may be less well known is that he comes from a long line of social activists – including a great-great-grandmother, Enid Dawson, who was arrested a number of times over her dedication to the suffragette cause.
Mr Gregory talks about his family background in a new recording for Wick Voices, the online oral history project of the Wick Society.
"My great-great-grandmother was one of the early suffragettes, as was my great-grandmother and grandmother, and my mother was named Emily in honour of the lady [Emily Davison] who chucked herself in front of the King's horse and was killed," he explains.
"She was from a family with a very, very strong suffragette background.
"My great-great-grandmother was the wife of an industrialist – they were wool merchants – and she was arrested on a number of occasions because she had this radical view that women should be allowed to have some say in how the country was run and could maybe have a vote, which was not well received by the establishment. And when they didn't listen she would chain herself to railings and generally be noisy and upset politicians."
Mr Gregory (70) served in the police for more than 30 years, retiring as area commander for Caithness and Sutherland.
In 2021 he co-founded Caithness Roads Recovery (CRR) with Helen Campbell to demand more investment in the local roads network. CRR quickly became a focal point for anger and frustration among road users and it has also taken on a wider campaigning role on behalf of the county.
"This whole thing that I've taken up with campaigning here, it's quite simply because the situation with the roads and the infrastructure is a symptom of a much deeper underlying malaise, which is the total neglect of this county," Mr Gregory says in the recording.
"My mother always said she would retire here. She did. It has given us a home. And I'm dashed if I'm going to sit back and see it being trampled all over by politicians and so on who, as far as I can see, neither know nor care. We have to stand up."
He adds: "I have no intention of quitting until we get this fixed... I'm not giving up on this battle for Caithness."
The 27-minute recording can be heard at www.wickvoices.co.uk.
Wick Voices began in 2016. There are now well over 400 recordings freely available to listen to, with more being added regularly.
Collectively they have been played more than 464,000 times.
