Jane Hatton Podcast Transcript

Melody Moore:
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Welcome to the Secret Resume podcast, hosted by me, Melody Moore. In this podcast, we explore the people, places and experiences that have shaped my guests, those which have influenced who they are as people and where they are in their work life. Today you can listen in as we have a rich exploration of often unexamined and undiscussed, but very important aspects of their lives. Or as I like to call it, their secret resume. So my guest today is Jane Hatton. Jane, I’m absolutely thrilled to have you here today. You have got a great story.

Melody Moore:
So, Jane, can you just start off by telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Jane Hatton:
Yeah. Thanks, Melody, and I’m delighted to be here. Yeah, it sounds bizarre to say what I’m about to say, but I am the CEO of the only global social enterprise and global disability job board that is run by and for disabled people. It’s a global social enterprise that I founded 13 years ago. I’m also a traveller and a grandmother and all sorts of things. I live in London, none of which I ever expected to happen.

Melody Moore:
And we’re going to talk a lot more about how you got there in the next hour, probably. So let’s jump right back, shall we, to the beginning, to your childhood and some of the things that went on there that really are still, you know, having an impact and are influencing you today.

Jane Hatton:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think my childhood was necessarily remarkable compared to, you know, anybody else’s. I lived, and I was very lucky, privileged. I lived in a nice leafy suburb in the West Midlands, went to a nice school. I was an only child, but I lived in a road where there were lots of other families. So I had lots of friends that were very, very local next door and just down the road. And of course, this is in the sixties, so there wasn’t much parental supervision. It just went around each other’s houses and he disappeared off for the day and came back when the streetlights came on. I had a really wonderful mother.

Jane Hatton:
She was a bit of a pioneer, really. So she was a social worker and she was a qualified social worker, and there were very, very few qualified social workers in those days, so she was a bit of a pioneer in her own way. My father was an industrialist, quite successful, not such a nice person. He was actually quite an abusive father in many ways. But I think, like a lot of families in those days, he was largely not really there, so he would kind of be out at work during the day. He’d come home. We’d have dinner and then he’d sit behind his newspaper or watching the television. So he wasn’t really a very present figure in my life, I’m very grateful to say, because when he was, it wasn’t pleasant.

Jane Hatton:
He had a very unpredictable temper. Could be quite violent. Not necessarily. I wouldn’t say he hit me a lot or. But, you know, there was a violence there that made you. I was always frightened of him. I remember always being frightened of him, never knowing when he was going to, you know, go into a rage or whatever. And he was occasionally sexually abusive as well.

Jane Hatton:
And that makes the whole childhood sound horrific. And it really wasn’t, because my mother was kind of a counter to that. Whereas he would tell me I was a disappointment and I was fat and ugly and stupid and all of those things. She was very much the opposite. She never defied him or stood up to him, but she was obviously with me a lot more than he was and she was very. She thought the sun shone out of me. She thought I was amazing and I felt very loved and secure with her. And so I would say it was a fairly unremarkable but largely happy childhood with some episodes of fear intermingled with that.

Jane Hatton:
And I don’t know if that was what started my brain. You know, how children go through that it’s not fair stage, where fairness is a really important thing. I kind of got there and stuck there and I’ve never really grown out of that kind of developmental stage. And I was really conscious about fairness and whether that was because I didn’t feel the way I was treated was fair. I don’t think it was that, because at the time I didn’t realise it was unusual. I assumed every family was like mine. I didn’t question it, but. And I don’t remember this happening, but I remember my mother telling me about.

Jane Hatton:
There was a time when I was about eight, I think, and I loved school. I loved junior school, as we called it then. It was a way of getting away from home. It meant I had friends, I liked the teachers. It was a really lovely local state, you know, primary school. And I suddenly stopped wanting to go and didn’t really vocalise why. I would just say, I can’t go to school today because I feel sick. And I remember my father getting incredibly angry because he recognised that obviously I wasn’t ill, there was some reason why I wasn’t going, so he would shake me and, you know, get really quite strict.

Jane Hatton:
But eventually my mother apparently got it out of me that I was outraged that the children who had free school meals had to queue up in a different queue to those of us that didn’t have free school meals. And in my sort of eight year old innocence, it’s not fair kind of stage, I was absolutely outraged at this. Why would we have two separate queues? Why would we all have to know who had free school meals and who didn’t? It just seemed awful. And so my mother listened to me say this, and I was. I find it really quite hard to verbalise to her, I think, but she took me to the head teacher and said, look, is this going on? Is this a problem? This is really upsetting Jane. And they changed the system. So what they did was they gave the children who had free school meals tokens, and we had money, and we all queued up in the same line and paid for our school meals in the same way as each other. And I didn’t know who’d got coins and who’d got tokens, and so it kind of changed the system.

Jane Hatton:
And I don’t actually remember that happening. I remember the not wanting to go to school and I remember my father shaking me, you know, so hard I had to clamp my jaws together so my teeth didn’t crash into each other. But apparently that was something that I was really outraged by. And it doesn’t surprise me, because I am. I do get very wound up by injustice or things that I perceive as injustice. And so that’s kind of been a bit of a theme, looking back, that’s gone throughout my life, although it wasn’t an intentional one, it kind of fell into that. Into that realm. And it’s often, I think, only when you look back over your life that things start making sense and you can see the pattern of them at the time.

Jane Hatton:
It’s all very random and doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. But that. That absolute outrage at unjustified injustice is something that has never left me, and I’m certainly not alone in that, you know.

Melody Moore:
So you weren’t having free school meals? It was other people? It wasn’t that you were the one?

Jane Hatton:
No. You know, my family were relatively well off in the area. You know, we lived in a nice house, we had a car, we went on holidays. I didn’t have free school meals, but I just felt it was outrageous that we should be segregated by who had free school meals and who didn’t. It just seemed just. Why? Why would you do that? Why is it necessary for anybody to be judged on anything as ridiculous as how much money of your parents. Your parents got. It just seemed unjustifiable and outrageous to me.

Melody Moore:
So there was a. I was going to say teenage activist. You weren’t even there. You were eight year old activist, Jane.

Jane Hatton:
Yes. Who knew?

Melody Moore:
And did, do you think there’s any sense of, you know, a sort of anger at some of what was happening to you at home, maybe being, you know, thinking, oh, and therefore spotting unjust things in others?

Jane Hatton:
I think it could well be. It could well be that, because there were certainly times when I felt that I was unjustifiably being punished for something that wasn’t my fault. So. Oh, I mean, just really stupid things. Like my father occasionally would. Would make an effort to try and be a good. I mean, he was not all bad. Nobody’s all good or all bad.

Jane Hatton:
And, yeah, you can go back and say, well, was he wanted as a child? And maybe not, but that doesn’t. Never justifies abusing a child. But he would do things like he’d say, oh, come, come and help me in the garden, which seems like quite a nice thing for a father to say to a daughter. And I would freeze in terror because I would know that at the moment he’s in a good mood. But at some point I’m going to do something wrong and it will all change. And it would be something like we would go into the garden and he would say to me, and I might be five or six, and he’d say, go and get the secateurs from the shed. I have no idea what secateurs are. So I’ve got two choices.

Jane Hatton:
I’ve either got to say, what are they? And immediately I’m going to get. I’m stupid. And every other child would know, and why don’t I know these things? Or I’m going to have to go to the shed and guess which of all the implements in there are secateurs and hope against hope that I get. I guess, right, because if I don’t guess right and I take the wrong thing back to him, then I’m going to have the. And so inevitably, at some point, I would do something wrong and he would get down to my level. He’d put his face in, right in front of my face, you know, like a few inches away from my nose. And his face would go purple with rage and he would. And I’d kind of back away and he would come forward as I was backing away.

Jane Hatton:
And it’s only so far you can back away until you come against a wall or edge or something. And then I would be pinned there and he would be either shouting or worse, whispering for what felt like hours. It was probably not. It was probably only a few minutes, but it felt like hours. About how stupid I was, how every other child in the road would have known what that was or whatever it was that I’d done wrong, what a disappointment I was, you know, all of those things and I. Part of me believed him. Obviously, he’s the grown up, so he must be right, because I’m only five. What do I know? And he’s telling me I’m stupid or ugly or fat or, you know, whatever it was.

Jane Hatton:
Of course he’s right, because he’s a grown up. But I think there was a kernel of something inside me that thought, actually, this isn’t fair. I’m not deliberately doing these things that you’re accusing me of. In fact, I’m doing everything I can to avoid doing these things because I know what the consequences are. And I think, although part of me believed him, which was obviously harmful, because you start thinking, well, I am stupid, I am fat, I am ugly, I am all of those things he said. But there was another part that said, this isnt fair, because if I am ugly, I cant help being ugly. If I am stupid, I cant help being stupid. And yet youre punishing me for these things.

Jane Hatton:
I dont know, its easy to go back and. And justify things and put things in place, but I suppose I’ll never really know what that was all about. And to be fair, my mother was also very. Because she was a social worker, she was also very interested in fairness and in some bizarre ways, so was my father, because I remember he was the managing director of a factory and he was. I mean, in the sixties, there was a lot of racism around, you know, racism, Washington, the norm. And he wasn’t anti racist, but he was colorblind, which was actually quite a good thing to be, as opposed to being racist. So he just didn’t notice people’s colour. And his expectations of me as a daughter weren’t, oh, well, you’re a girl, so you’ll get married and you’ll be looked after.

Jane Hatton:
He had really high expectations of me. And, you know, as a teenager, he had lots of opinions on what were proper jobs and what weren’t proper jobs, you know, what I should do. And he really wanted me to go into engineering, which we’ll talk about later, I did do for a short while. And so he wasn’t, you know, he had that women should also have careers. He married a woman who was unusually, you know, in those days, qualified with a degree and doing a profession, and he wasn’t. Well, he probably was threatened by that, but he married her nevertheless. And he had high expectations of me as a girl having a career, and he was colourblind. So I think in his defence, he had a lot of fairness around race and gender and things like that.

Jane Hatton:
And he was also a very, very good businessman. So he was a good role model, model in lots of ways. But like all of us, you know, he had flaws. So did I get. I don’t know. I don’t know where I got that fairness thing from, but it’s been deeply ingrained and I know it is in a lot of, you know, people I talk to and certainly people I work with now, often, who have also had very difficult childhood. So whether that is something that’s relevant or just coincidental, I’m not qualified to say, really, but, yeah, it’s. It is what it is.

Melody Moore:
And he had quite an influence in terms of. You mentioned the engineering there, but you wanted to be a musician. I can’t even say the word musician.

Jane Hatton:
Yes.

Melody Moore:
Didn’t you tell us about that?

Jane Hatton:
Yeah, I loved music. I really. I’ve always loved music. And in that in junior school, we were allowed to play the recorder, that awful, horrible instrument, when it’s played badly. And those of us who showed any promise at the recorder, they started. It was. You know, it was in the. I don’t know, it must have been 1968.

Jane Hatton:
So we’re going back a very, very long time. They just started looking at peripatetic music lessons. And we had a teacher come into our school who taught either the violin or the cello. And the teachers approached those of us who’d shown a little bit of promise with the recorder and said, would you be interested in doing these lessons which were free in those days and I firmly believe they still should be. So. And so I chose the violin purely because it was lighter to carry around than a cello. I had no particular love for the instrument, but I was keen to play a musical instrument. Those were the two on offer.

Jane Hatton:
This was the lighter one of the two and I loved it. I don’t think I was exceptionally gifted, but I loved playing the violin and I played in youth orchestras. And then the borough where I lived had amalgamated with other boroughs and there was a bigger youth orchestra and I really loved it. It was for all sorts of reasons. I think music speaks to part of you that you can’t put into words. And I just felt that making music with other people, Washington, magical. And it was very social. So the people of the orchestras I played in became, in some cases, lifelong friends.

Jane Hatton:
And it was an escape from home, it was escape from school. It was something that was just for me and it was. I didn’t. I wasn’t particularly gifted, so I had to work hard at it. And that meant that if I went to an orchestra rehearsal while I was there, all I could think about was the notes because I hadn’t got any spare capacity to think about what I was going home to, what was going on, or anything else in my life, good or bad. I was just completely absorbed and I decided that’s what I wanted to do. I just loved it. I wanted.

Jane Hatton:
And I didn’t have high ambitions. I just thought I’d love to play in a professional orchestra, even if I’m just in the second violins at the back, no soloist, no particular spotlight. I just love to do this music o level. And those days there were o levels and started doing music a level with. My thought was, I’m going to be go to university, study music, and then I’ll go to some provincial orchestra and that will be my life. And that would be fantastic. And I’d gone through the usual childhood things of wanting to be a barrel, barely baller, I can’t say it, ballerina or, you know, a tightrope walker at a circus, or graceful. So that was never going to happen.

Jane Hatton:
Then a vet and then, you know, you go through those phases. But this was obviously seriously what I wanted to do. And I was doing the qualifications with a view to going to university to do music. And he wanted me to go to university. He thought that was a good thing to do. He’d never gone to university, but he’d gone to evening class and things and learned how to be a draughtsman when he came back from the war and all that kind of stuff. So he was very pro education. And so that was it.

Jane Hatton:
I was in my amateur youth orchestras. I was studying a levels. I was learning the violin. I then started learning the flute and the piano. So I had other instruments. And then he was in one of his, you know, occasional rages, saying, what are you messing about at? What are you going to do with your life? And I said, well, I want to play in an orchestra. And he said, that’s not a proper job. And anyway, you’re not talented enough, you’re not good enough.

Jane Hatton:
And because I’ve been conditioned, I think all of my life by him, that I was not good enough. Because anything I do was never good. I remember in the second year of secondary school, coming second in the whole year in English, which was a big deal. It was about 100 kids in each year. It was a big grammar school. And I can remember him railing at me for ages about why I’d not come first. And I just thought, whatever I do isn’t good enough. And so he said, you’re not good enough to be a professional musician.

Jane Hatton:
It’s all right to have as a hobby, but you’ll never be good enough. And I believed him. And so. And also because I had this kind of low self esteem, I could look around other people in the amateur orchestras that I was playing in, and so many of them, of course, were so much better than me. So obviously what he said was true. Looking back, I don’t know if I would have been good enough to play in the second violin section in a provincial orchestra. I like to think I would have been, but it became not an option. And that was pretty dramatic, because by this time, I’m 17, halfway through a levels, and there is no plan b.

Jane Hatton:
It was never, well, if I can’t do this, I’ll do something else. That was what I was going to do. That was what I did, and there was no plan b, so I was absolutely floundering. What do I do then? So there’s no point in continuing doing these a levels, which were all geared towards me going to university to do music. So there’s no point in continuing with these a levels. But what. So what? There’s a big void. What do I do now? It’s a bit of a theme, actually, the.

Jane Hatton:
What do I do now? Looking back. And so he persuaded me to go. Well, persuaded. Told me to go to do business studies at college, because then I could get a proper job.

Melody Moore:
Jane, did he prevent you from doing music? Did he say, you are not allowed?

Jane Hatton:
No, it was more.

Melody Moore:
You’re just. You’re not good enough.

Jane Hatton:
He told me I wasn’t good enough and I believed him.

Melody Moore:
Yeah.

Jane Hatton:
And things like playing in an orchestra isn’t a proper job. You need to have a proper job. You need to have a secure job. Part of it might have been motivated by his concern that I would have a secure life. You know, I’m not saying it was all bad, but I just think if he felt that I wasn’t good enough, he was probably trying to prevent me from being disappointed when I didn’t get a job in an orchestra, and then what would I have got? Music degree and nothing to do with it. So it was probably out of, in a sense, misplaced concern for me. But in his eyes, it wasn’t a proper job and so I should be doing a proper job. And also a lot of his ego was reflected on external how he looked.

Jane Hatton:
So I think also a big part of that was he wanted a daughter he could be proud of. He didn’t have the self awareness and I didn’t have the knowledge then to recognise that he would never have a daughter he was proud of. Not because of the daughter, but because whatever they did was never going to be good enough. Because if they did do something that was good enough, they would then be a threat to his ego. So it was a. It wasn’t a battle I could ever win under any circumstances. But, of course, at 17, you don’t necessarily haven’t dissected all that. So, yeah, he convinced me that I didn’t believe that it wasn’t a proper job, but I did believe that I wasn’t good enough to do it.

Jane Hatton:
So I just flailed around, just, well, what the hell am I going to do now? So there was a local college that had a business studies course. So I enrolled for that for a year. It was a two year course. I was desperately unhappy because I didn’t enjoy any of the subjects that we were, ironic, as I now run a business, but I didn’t enjoy any of the subjects. We did statistics and economy and all sorts of stuff, economics and stuff, and I just. Business studies. I just wasn’t interested. And was desperately, desperately unhappy, both at home and at college, because by this time the abuse had stopped.

Jane Hatton:
It stopped when I was about 13, as in the sexual abuse, but the tempers were still there and the putting down was still there and I was terrifically unhappy at home. We’d also moved to a street where. Which was quite isolated. So instead of being in this lovely little road where everybody had gone to the same local state school and we were all in and out of each other’s houses and it was like having brothers and sisters, but better because you could get away from them. From the age of 13, we moved into this road of beautiful, beautiful houses with no public transport, not able to get to. My friends at school couldn’t really relate to the friends who lived in the road where I lived because they lived different lives. They all went to private school. They had straw boaters and stripy blazers.

Jane Hatton:
They all had ponies. You know, their parents drove. Their mothers drove Jensen interceptors. You know, it was just a different world that I didn’t fit in. And I sort of did feel quite isolated because my friends at school and then at college didn’t live that life, so I didn’t really fit in with them either. I was a bit of an outsider because I was the kind of rich kid in my school and college environment, but then I was the poor relation in my street, so I didn’t, you know, it was. It was a difficult time. I was envious of my friends who got ponies and then realised that was ridiculous because nobody at my school had a pony.

Jane Hatton:
So, you know, it was just one of those really weird. And when you’re a teenager as well and you’re coming to terms with who you are and I boys and, you know, all of that kind of stuff, it was just very difficult. So I hated college and I hated being at home and was really quite unhappy. And what happened then? So I decided I was going to leave college. So again, it was, what the hell am I going to do now? Because I still didn’t have a what will I do? So I wanted to work because I wanted to be independent. And so I got. I went for and got a job at a local department store which had a management training programme, so you’d be paid while you were doing it, and you go around the different departments in the department store, and the idea was that you were training to be a manager of one of those departments. That was the proper job.

Jane Hatton:
So he was quite happy with that one. And it was due to start the following September. And this was, I don’t know, the June or something. I thought, well, there’s no point in continuing at this college, which I hate. What will I do between now and then? And so there was a temporary role going at the local engineering services department, where we would be walking around the roads and making notes of potholes, measuring the height of curbs, seeing what the state of the road was, seeing what the state of the pavement was. And it all went into an algorithm and you were trained to do it and it was kind of full time. And I did this for about three months and I really enjoyed it. It sounds the most boring job, but the reason I really enjoyed it was because I was a novelty, because in this engineering department, so we’re now talking 1978, there were no women, apart from what they were then called telephonists, secretaries, typists.

Jane Hatton:
And I was the. I was in the engineering department. I was a woman. I say woman. I was an 18 year old blonde teenage girl. So I was the novelty and I quite liked being the novelty. And I was getting lots of positive attention from the men around me, the other, you know, the engineers. And it was quite nice being the novelty.

Jane Hatton:
And people took notice of me in a positive way and it was good. It fed my ego. And so a job came up there in the engineering services department, where I could be a trainee civil engineer and I would be paid. I would have a paid job and then I would be. It’s a bit like an apprenticeship. I would be going to college one day a week to get a qualification in civil engineering. And I thought, oh, I quite like this because I love the people I was working with. It was great.

Jane Hatton:
So I went for that job and got it. And I was absolutely flabbergasted that I got it as a woman because the odds against me were so great. But I don’t know if I was like a token woman that they took on because I don’t know. Anyway, I got the job and actually did something that pleased my father, because this is a proper job, an engineer, this is a proper job. But I remember he used to drive me occasionally to work on his way to work. And I would say, can you park round the corner? Because I dreaded anybody knowing where I lived or what my father did or the fact that we were, by this time, relatively, you know, in that area, relatively wealthy, because I would be ostracised again. And I didn’t want that. And he was furious about that because he wanted me to be proud of the fact that he drove a Daimler and that he was managing director.

Jane Hatton:
You know, if people said to me, what does your dad do? I’d say he works in a factory. I wouldn’t say he’s the managing director of the factory. And so he was hurt by that. And I get that. I get why he would be hurt because he worked hard to get there. You know, he didn’t have a privileged background, particularly. He did work hard to get there. And I was kind of ashamed of it.

Melody Moore:
And, you know, you were trying to fit in.

Jane Hatton:
I was trying to fit in. I just wanted to be one of the. It was already hard. I was the only woman. And, you know, the people I was working, I was working with largely lived in capital houses. They lived locally, and I wanted to be as much as I could, being the only, you know, blonde engineering technician. I wanted to fit in anyway. So I did get the job and in the end, I didn’t really enjoy it, but a few good things came out of it.

Jane Hatton:
So I learned what it was like to be a woman in a man’s world. And although I enjoyed the novelty of being the kind of mascot for a while. It wasn’t that long before I realised, yeah, but I’m never going to be taken seriously in this profession, because even at college, you know, I remember one of the. Actually, I’m overstep. I’m overrunning the tail a little bit. While I was at the engineering services, a flat came up that was available to people who worked at engineering services. It was a council flat. It was.

Jane Hatton:
It sounds lovely. It was on where the council tip is, so where all the rubbish refuse wagons came in and out. But to me it was freedom. So this came up and I went for it and got it, and I went to my mother and I said, how cruel was I? I said to her, you might want to put up with him, but I don’t have to. And it was like an escape. I can leave home, I can be independent and get away from this. And although he wasn’t physically abusing me at that point, or sexually abusing me, there was still a lot of put downs. Nothing I did was good enough.

Jane Hatton:
He would still fly off into a rage over who knows what. That was completely unpredictable. And it’s psychological, isn’t it? It’s horrible. Yeah. And I lived in this stupid place where there was no. I couldn’t get anywhere independently because there were no buses. You know, I just felt isolated from life and stuck in this road. I didn’t feel I fitted in.

Jane Hatton:
And with this father that I couldn’t get far enough away from. So, anyway, I moved into the flat, which was great. Met another engineer there, got engaged. It was all good. But I did realise this isn’t actually what I want to do. It’s fun as a novelty, but I really don’t want to be a civil engineer. And I decided to go into social work, which is kind of. Oh, my God, you’ve let the whole of womankind down because you were a pioneer.

Jane Hatton:
A woman in a man’s world, being a, you know, breaking down all those barriers, and now you’re going off to look after children, which is what women traditionally do. So I felt the burden of letting down the whole of womankind, but knowing that I had to do what felt right for me. So I.

Melody Moore:
Did anyone ever say that to you, or is that just what you were thinking?

Jane Hatton:
There were women in the engineering services who were doing other jobs. There might have been secretaries or pas or whatever they were called in those days, and they, I think, in not horrible ways, but they expressed their disappointment that their cheerleader was going and that I had started to challenge some of the ways that people were spoken about. I remember one of the managers referring to his secretary as my little girl and saying, my little girl. I said, I’m trying to work out which of those words I find are the most offensive. And she said, what do you mean? What do you mean? She loves being called that. I said, she’s a woman in her forties. How is she your little girl? It doesn’t make any sense. No, she’s flattered by it, she likes it.

Jane Hatton:
And so I think the fact that I was making those waves was welcome. But then I left and looked after children, so I kind of let everybody down a bit and I felt as though I’d done that a bit. And, of course, social work wasn’t a proper job, right? So I’d left my proper job, which was probably the only thing he’d approved of in my entire life, and gone to look after children in children’s homes. But I left home by then, so it was less relevant what he thought. And although I still carried a lot of that low self esteem with me, because you can’t just switch it off when you’ve had it all your formative years, I was able to intellectualise some of it and say, actually, he might not think this is the right job for me, but I think it’s the right job for me. And, you know, I knew that a lot of his views weren’t views that I shared. Some of them were, you know, as I say, he wasn’t particularly racist and whatever, and he did want me to have a proper job, you know, I think I would have been, in a sense, more offended if he’d said, oh, you know, go off and be a. Whatever he saw as a stereotypical female role.

Jane Hatton:
The fact that he was pleased I was an engineer was a plus, really. But then obviously let all that go, so I ended up.

Melody Moore:
And what was it? Why did it feel like the right job for you? It was the same job your mum had.

Jane Hatton:
No, I don’t think it was that, because I remember when I was little saying to her, why did you work with children? I would always want to work with animals. I couldn’t. I couldn’t see the. See the point of working with children. I think it was. I don’t know. I think the thing I didn’t like about engineering was that other than your colleagues, you didn’t really do much. It wasn’t to people.

Jane Hatton:
I love people. I’m an extrovert. I get my energy from people. I love interacting with people. And although I enjoyed the kind of what I then saw as flirtatious banter, and I now look back and think, actually that was a bit sexist, I didn’t have that interaction with people. It wasn’t a people job, it was a thing job. And although it was an important job because people need to have highways that work for their cars, it wasn’t something that turned me on, it wasn’t something that lit my fire. Whereas that people interaction, you know, I was realising I was a people person.

Jane Hatton:
The fact that I wanted to play in an orchestra rather than be a soloist was because I wanted to be part of that group that made that noise. And so I was that kind of people person. So I think it was about wanting to work with people, really, that drew me into that role. And I loved it. You know, I was there for a long time and I loved working with children and I went on to do a qualification. I was quite ambitious. There weren’t many in those days because, again, we’re now talking late seventies, early eighties, most house mothers, as we were known then, who worked in children’s homes, didn’t have qualifications because it wasn’t seen as a professional role. But it was beginning to change.

Jane Hatton:
And then we started being called residential social workers rather than house mothers or house parents, which reflected a slight change. And I wanted to. Again, there was so much unfairness in this role, not just in terms of how society treats what we now call looked after children, but in those days, children in care, but also the unfairness that goes on within those institutions. And I wanted to be in a position where I could challenge that and influence that. And when I went worked in my first children’s home, I was 19. So the children were teenagers. Some of them were only two years younger than me. So it was, you know, was I one of them or was I one of the staff? But a lot of the staff were very young, so it was very young staff group, but the.

Jane Hatton:
The people who ran that children’s home were a couple, married couple. So the husband was the officer in charge, as they were then called, and she was the deputy officer in charge and they were married and they were horrible people. And unfortunately, as we know, you know, organisations like children’s homes, schools, hospitals can attract people who want to make the world a better place, but they can also attract people who want power over vulnerable people. And this couple were a very inadequate pair of human beings, in my estimation. And I think they were lured to this job by the thought of having that power over people who had no power. Maybe they felt powerless in their own lives. I’m not going to defend it, because whatever the reason, it was indefensible. And they were.

Jane Hatton:
They treated some of those kids really badly. I remember we had one of the young children whose name I won’t mention, but she was ten, but she. She clearly had learning difficulties and probably functioned at the age of about four. And the only member of her family that ever had anything to do with her was her uncle. It was also the council rat catcher, as it happens, and he was a bit unreliable. So sometimes he would make. He’d say, I’m going to come and see this girl on Sunday. And then he wouldn’t turn up and she’d be sitting there in a coat waiting for him to come and pick her up and he didn’t arrive.

Jane Hatton:
And this deputy officer in charge would say, oh, he’s not coming for you. He doesn’t love you. Nobody loves you. I can remember thinking, what the hell? And, you know, there were kids that she clearly had favourites. She was evil, one of the two. She would make the bullets for her rather inadequate husband went afire, but she clearly had favourites and she bullied the kids that she didn’t like. And it was just horrible. The way that place was run was horrible.

Jane Hatton:
And us youngsters that were there working under this couple, you know, we’d say, this is horrific, this is awful. And so again, I was the one that said, well, it’s no good as just telling each other it’s awful. We’ve got to do something about this. Nobody else would come with me, but I went to the management in the local social services office and said, I think you should know what’s going on at this children’s home. And I would give them examples. So, for example, this is an incident I witnessed. This is an incident I witnessed. It’s not just me thinking this, that the rest of the staff there think this too.

Jane Hatton:
Unbeknownst to me, this manager that I gone to make this official complaint to was a mate of this couple. So actually, all that happened was he went and told them what Jane’s been saying about you. So I’d been applying to go on the one qualification that you could do as a residential social worker. And of course they blocked me because. And my life there was not great after that, so they would turn the kids against me and, you know, whatever. I had unfair disciplinaries for things that were, you know, made up. It was awful. So I left.

Jane Hatton:
I left and I went to another children’s home. And I went back to the managers in the social services and I went above the person that I’d complained to and I said, I’m not there now, so there are no consequences for me in telling you this. You need to know what’s going on at this children’s home. And so I really pushed it. I wasn’t happy just to leave and let it carry on, so I really pushed it. And I said, you need to go talk to the children, talk to the people who live in that home, whose home it is, and see how they feel. And anyway, eventually, and it took a long time, they did break them up as a couple. They didn’t discipline them or sack them, which is what they should have done.

Jane Hatton:
What they did was they gave him the job of officer in charge at another children’s home in the borough. And she was given a really good reference, so she was the deputy in another borough at a different children’s home. So they were still working in the field, unfortunately, but at least they’d been split up. And that children’s home became. It closed down. So there was a lot of unfairness that I could see within the services as well as outside of social service. And I got. And I was very ignorant.

Jane Hatton:
I mean, I didn’t know. I’d never. We never did any training. That three year course that I did eventually get on to make me a qualified residential social worker. Three years. We did one half day on what we called in those days equal opportunities. That was it. And they talked a bit about race and a bit about gender, but again, this was in the early eighties, so not much legislation around a bit.

Jane Hatton:
And it was very much about legislation compliance rather than about anything we might talk about today, like unconscious bias. So I was very, very ignorant about equality and diversity and all of those things, but I was still angry. So I remember we had a young girl at one of the children’s homes that I was working in. I think she was about 15 and she was mixed race. And I found her in the bathroom with a Brillo pad, trying to get her skin off. What on earth are you doing? And she said, I hate my skin. And I said, what do you mean it’s beautiful? It really was. I mean, she was stunning.

Jane Hatton:
What do you mean it’s beautiful? And she said, white people don’t like me because I’m too black and black people don’t like me because I’m too white. So I need to get rid of it. And I was so ill equipped to deal with this. I’d never been a victim of racism, obviously, as a white person living in Britain, and I didn’t really. You know, I said stupid things like, you know, we spend a fortune every year to go on holiday so our skin can become colour like yours. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful skin colour, but it’s not. If that skin colour means that you become a victim of racism or you’re excluded from every group that you’ve got the opportunity to be in because of it.

Jane Hatton:
I just didn’t understand and I could see that, you know, teenagers that left care were really badly treated. You’re 18, right? We’ve got no responsibility for you now. You’re out on your own. And if you’ve lived in a children’s home for most of your life, you have no idea about families, about budgeting, about cooking. You know, there was a cook at the children’s home who cooked all the meals. It wasn’t like when you’re at home and you grow up and you watch your mom cook the meals or your dad cook the meals or whatever it might be, there was no preparation for independent living. And once you were 18, that was it. You’re out on your own, no budgeting.

Jane Hatton:
No. You know, you were given a flat, but that was it. And that was diabolical as well. I mean, obviously we did as much as we could and we said, oh, come around for Sunday lunch and bring your washing round and that kind of stuff, but there’s a limit to what you can do. So I was very conscious of unfairness then. And in the meantime, I’d got married and I was pregnant and I got married to a man who was looking back, I don’t think this was the decision at the time, but looking back, I got married to a man who was nothing like my father. I knew I wanted children, I knew I didn’t want my children to go through anything like I had gone. So I think subconsciously, I don’t remember consciously thinking that, but I was drawn to a man who was very even tempered.

Jane Hatton:
He didn’t have flashes of temper, he was very even tempered. He didn’t get. He wasn’t. He was very, very predictable. He came from a family who were very loving, he had a sister, they both were adored by both of their parents. And so I thought, oh, if he’s going to be that kind of father, that’s the kind of father I want for my children.

Melody Moore:
It sounds safe.

Jane Hatton:
It was very safe. It was very safe. And I was right in that assessment because he was very even tempered. He never tried to change me in any way. He supported anything I wanted to do. He never told me that what I was doing wasn’t good enough. You know, if I said, I don’t know, oh, I’d like to do this qualification. Yeah, yeah, go for it.

Jane Hatton:
And it was so refreshing to be with. To be living with a man that I didn’t feel frightened of was. Was lovely. It was just lovely, you know, it was great. And so then I. We got pregnant and I was still working shifts in a children’s home and recognised, actually, this isn’t something I want to carry on doing when I’ve had my child, because I don’t want to be paying someone to look after my child while I look after other people’s children. Shift work really wasn’t going to work and I didn’t know at that point what kind of a mother I was going to be or indeed what kind of a father he was going to be. So how did that happen? When I was doing my qualification, I had.

Jane Hatton:
There was a role, a woman who was my study supervisor and she was the link between what I was learning at college and what I was doing in the. In practise when I was. So I was two days a week in college, one day, three days a week in the children, same or whatever, three shifts a week. And she was wonderful. I loved her. She was a great role model. She was also. She used to say, you’re so angry, because I used to rant about the things that were wrong with the system.

Jane Hatton:
Why is it that children in care are treated so badly? Why is it that we just abandoned them at 18? And she said, but you use your anger very positively. Don’t lose it, but make sure it doesn’t destroy you. Use that anger in a very positive way. And I loved her anyway. She retired and that job came up, so I wasn’t working after I had my first daughter, Alex, and then when she was about 18 months old, there was a leaving due for this woman. So I went to the leaving do and one of the managers there said, why don’t you apply for the job? And I hadn’t considered really working. I was very, very fortunate and privileged that my husband was earning enough for me not to need to work. It was a bit tight, but, you know, it was okay.

Jane Hatton:
But I just thought, oh, God, wouldn’t that be great? Because part of me thought, I’m missing using my brain, you know, I loved being a mother, I loved spending time with my daughter, but there was a bit missing that was kind of I like being a mother, but I’m a sure that there’s other things I can do too. So I went for this job and got it and absolutely loved it. And then we were doing training on equality and divert. There was the race awareness training courses, rat as they were disaffectionately known. There were rudimentary, I think, looking back, but the beginnings of that kind of education around what we still called equal opportunities, which absolutely lit my. You know, I’d go on these courses, oh, my God, this is what I should have known all along. And I’m not real. And actually things are far worse than I thought they were because I’ve not lived through racism personally and, you know, I suppose even sexism to a certain extent, I hadn’t because I got the job I wanted to get and all the rest of it.

Jane Hatton:
And that really, really excited me and the whole thing about, oh, my God, the world is even less fair than I thought it was. This is awful, we’ve got to do something about this. And it really kind of litanous something in me. So when I got pregnant with my second daughter, didn’t know she was a daughter, the second child. I went to my manager who was managing me, being this study supervisor, and said, you know, I want to come back to work after I’ve had this child. And he said, bad news. They’re changing this qualification. There won’t be a role as a study supervisor in the new qualification.

Jane Hatton:
The role that is the most similar to it would mean you’d have to be back in practise. And I didn’t want to work shifts with two children, so I thought, what the hell am I going to do? And I’d done a lot around by this point, equal opportunities, seeking out opportunities, shadowing other people and all of the rest of it. And he said, why don’t you become, set yourself up as a self employed consultant? And I nearly fell off my chair laughing. I mean, the thought of setting up. I’d always worked for the public sector. I was an engineer then I was a social worker. I knew nothing about being anything other than a public sector worker. There wasn’t a world outside of that.

Jane Hatton:
And I remember going home and saying to my husband, you’ll never guess what he suggested. It’s ridiculous. He suggested I should be a consultant and train social workers. And I thought he’d laugh with me and he didn’t. And he said, well, what kind of things would you be training people on so well, you know, I’d be training social workers on equal opportunities, but also maybe management. And, you know, because I was one of the very few qualified residential social workers, I will be able to do training courses. And he said, I think it’s a brilliant idea. What? So anyway, he was really supportive.

Jane Hatton:
And so during my pregnancy with my second child, I did all the research and discovered what I needed to do and set up as a self employed consultant, which was absolutely out of the blue, nothing that I was prepared for, equipped to do or anything. But he had faith in me. And actually, when he said it and started talking about it, I thought, sure, I probably could do that because there’s still that low self esteem that is, I’m not good enough to do this and how good, I’m not good enough to train other people. But I really enjoyed training because I’ve done a lot of training in this role and I’d really enjoyed that. So I thought actually this maybe. And it would fit around having children, because if I was self employed, I could decide how much or how little I wanted to work. And so I did. That’s what I did.

Jane Hatton:
And it went relatively well. I mean, fairly slow, but it fairly quickly. I moved completely into the equal opportunities space and dropped the social work stuff. And again, my husband said, this isn’t just about social work. This is needed everywhere. You don’t just need to be training social workers in equal opportunities. Everybody needs to know this stuff. And of course he was right.

Jane Hatton:
And then I spread out. So I was training other public sector departments, not just social services, you know, housing and leisure and all of that kind of stuff. And also some private companies as well, who were beginning to be a little bit interested mostly in race awareness, which I would train with a black co trainer. Because what I’d found when I was learning was that I learned best if I could hear the lived experience, because I’ve not had that lived experience. What is it like to be a black person living in a racist society? I don’t know. I need to learn. But it was also good to have a white person who was on this journey too, that I could relate to. So how would they learn what they had learned? How could they.

Jane Hatton:
How could we be good allies? How could we? How could we, as white people, make a difference in this awful situation? You know, eighties are still awful, but it was even worse then. In fact, I’m not sure. We haven’t gone backwards recently. And so I did a lot of, for years, that’s what I did. I did that. I moved into this kind of training consultancy all around. What then was started to be called equality, so that, you know, the terminology changes. It was around the MacPherson inquiry, so there was lots of emphasis on race at the time, and so there became more opportunities.

Jane Hatton:
And then I got a contract doing some consultancy on sexual harassment in a council when I was interviewing women. And, you know, and that was horrific, what you found out that women were enduring. And then look back on my own, with a sort of hindsight, on my own experiences in engineering services, and none of it was meant maliciously, but I was definitely the victim of sexism, even though it was just the way people were then. But you look back and think, yeah, I was never going to be an engineer. And it was really hard. And those women that did, those real pioneers, as opposed to me, who gave up and did go on and be engineers, had a really hard time and they really had to fight hard to. To be taken seriously as engineers. And they really were pioneers for others.

Jane Hatton:
And even now they still work in often, you know, sexist environments and environments where, you know, expectations are lower or, you know, they wouldn’t get the promotion or the development opportunities that their male colleagues would get. And it was, you know, obviously much worse then. So it became an absolute passion and having gone from a number of situations of, what the hell am I going to do now? You know, I can’t be a musician. I’m not really happy being an engineer. I don’t really want to be in social work anymore. This kind of floundering around, what the hell am I going to do next? I’d found what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in this space, I wanted to be in this equality. I wanted the world to be fairer because there was no, absolutely no justification for why it wasn’t.

Jane Hatton:
There was no justification for people of colour, black people, as we would have said then, having poorer housing, poorer experiences within, you know, the law, the legal framework, having poorer outcomes in health services, poorer education, there was absolutely no justification for that. And, you know, same with girls and boys, and disability was kind of there on the periphery, but it was seen as much less important, which it still is, actually, as race and gender.

Melody Moore:
Can you tell us about your current company, even break focuses on disability. Can you tell us about what led you to really focus in that area? As you say, it was not, and still is lower down in terms of people’s priorities. But, yeah, talk about your own personal experience that led you there.

Jane Hatton:
So I was very conscious of disability being another whole range of unfairness. I was a little bit frightened of it because I didn’t know a lot about it. It’s very broad. I didn’t have lived experience, I wanted to learn. So I did some work with some of the disabled employee networks, with some of the council, because still doing a lot of public sector work with some of that, with them that I was working with, and I was learning a bit about it. And of course, if I was talking to managers or organisations about diversity, equality in its broadest sense, I would always talk about disability. If I was doing something specifically about disability, I would bring in someone with lived experience, who was also a good trainer and work with them. And one of the things that I recognised when I was talking about disability with employers was, and again, this is still in the eighties, is it? Eighties, nineties.

Jane Hatton:
Nineties now, maybe, was that there was this. There was kind of a beginning to recognise that we need to do something about race, we need to do something about gender. But they were doing it in a very rudimentary and actually not very successful way. But disability really wasn’t talked about much at all. And when I did bring disability into the conversation, employers would either kind of say, well, why would I want to employ a disabled person when there’s so many non disabled people out there? Or able bodied? As they then said, terminology changes. And that was really disappointing to hear, because when I was working with these disabled networks, I was seeing so much talent that wasn’t being used. You know, they were under. They were employed, yeah, but they were underemployed.

Jane Hatton:
And the kind of vibe when I was talking to them was, yeah, I know, you know, things aren’t great, but we’re just grateful to have a job. And I thought, you shouldn’t just be grateful to have a job, you should have the same opportunities as anybody else. And I was angered not just by the impact on disabled people, but by this whole waste of talent. You know, it’s not just bad for disabled people, it’s bad for the society that we’ve got this amazing pool of talent that just isn’t able to use that talent, we’re not able to benefit from it. And then other employers would say, actually, we get it, we understand that this is a pool of talent we’re not tapping into, and we really should, but we don’t know how and disabled people don’t apply. So I’m going to disable people still in my privilege of being non disabled and not having experienced any ableism, and said, why aren’t you applying for jobs at those organisations that want your talent? And they said, because we don’t know which is which. Every organisation these days says, we are an equal opportunities employee, we are an inclusive employer, but we know that for pretty much every job we go to, the minute they find out we have a disability, that’s the point at which we’re rejected, so why would we keep knocking our head against that brick wall? And I can remember thinking, that’s just ridiculous, that’s just awful. Why doesn’t somebody do something about that? You know, like we do when we’re in race, somebody should do something about that.

Jane Hatton:
And I didn’t feel equipped or I just. It was out of my depth altogether. And then I really had one of these quirky twists of fate where I had. I’d had a riding accident when I was 23 and I’d broken my back, which sounds really drastic, and it wasn’t. It was just that one of the vertebra split across. It didn’t move. I was young, fit, healthy. They just said, lie flat for six weeks, it will heal.

Jane Hatton:
I lay flat for six weeks, it healed. And I’d had a lot of backache over the years, but everybody has backache over the years, so, you know, you don’t think much of it. I’ve had two successful pregnancies, so there was nothing too badly wrong. But then I had a slipped disc, which doesn’t sound drastic, but was. And it turned out that all of my discs were damaged and it must have been from this, we think from this riding accident, that although the bone healed, the discs were damaged and then the ageing process of those discs was greatly accelerated. So I had degenerative discs which were kind of what a 90 year old would. Had. And I was only, you know, 40 or something, and so I had various surgeries.

Jane Hatton:
I was in denial. You speak to most disabled people who become disabled as adults, which most of disabled people do, 83% of us do. And it’s like that bereavement cycle. So you go through a denial, you know, I’m not to say this is going to get better, this is temporary. And so I had various surgeries and I had one pretty major surgery where. Which had gone not as well as it could, and I actually ended up in bed, not able to. I could walk very short distances, stand for a very short amount of time and probably sit for no longer than a minute, you know, so I couldn’t sit to eat meals. I basically spent my life in bed.

Jane Hatton:
And I remember lying there feeling very sorry for myself and also surprised at how I was reacting because of everybody. I should have been the one that knew this wasn’t the end of the world, because I had been telling employers for years, disabled people make great employees. They build resilience, they have skills that they’ve developed over being disabled. But all of a sudden, I was disabled and all I could focus on was what I couldn’t do. And I was a single mom by this time, I got divorced. I think my husband and I just kind of, you know, drifted apart like people do. And I’ve got two daughters who were in their early mid teens who didn’t need a mom to look after them, but they needed a mom, you know, to drive them around everywhere to and all the rest of it. And I was.

Jane Hatton:
I can’t be a mom. I can’t drive them to the dance classes they have, I can’t go to parents evenings. I can’t do this, because I was so. I spent a lot of time feeling very, very sorry for myself, but also thinking about, actually, this issue that I found so ridiculous, that disabled people can’t find jobs because either employers don’t want them, or even those employers who do want them don’t know how to find them. We should do. I am one of those disabled people now, so. And nobody is doing anything about this, and disability still is at the bottom of the pile. And those issues that were the case when I discovered them still are the case.

Jane Hatton:
So, in the meantime, I’d set up a normal, traditional company with shareholders that was a training and consultancy around diversity company. And so I decided, well, I’ve got the knowledge, you know, I might be lying here in bed, but I know about. I’d done. Also, I’d done a. Sorry, just going back a little bit. When I went into this consultancy thing, which was so new to me, I did more training, so I did a postgraduate thing and then I did a master’s degree. I wrote a chapter in an academic book about anti racism in the public sector. And so I’d done a lot of self development and learning, and I thought that learning hasn’t gone anywhere.

Jane Hatton:
That’s still there. This problem is still here. I do now have lived experience. This is a bit up close and personal. And one of the shareholders from the previous business had said to me on one occasion, he’d said, you know, I employ people who are really, really diverse in lots of ways, from different nationalities, speaking different languages. We’ve got women in traditional male roles. I don’t think we employ any disabled people, or at least not people who say they’re disabled. What can I do to attract disabled candidates.

Jane Hatton:
So in my kind of trainer mode I wrote a great big long list of about, I don’t know, 50 things that you can do to attract disabled candidates. And he said, you know, this is great, but I don’t have time to do all of this because this is only one part of the recruitment and it’s a lot of work. He said if only there was an organisation out there who could do this for us and together more him, to be fair, than me, we kind of came up with the idea of why not have a job board that is just for disabled people looking for new or better work and just for those employers who saw us as a pool of talent rather than a source of problems. And he came up with the working title of even break and we said well we’ll use it as a working title since we think of something better. And actually we didn’t. So it’s still even break now. And so I actually formed even break lying flat with a laptop suspended over me and made the decision then. Well a number of decisions, but two of them, one Washington.

Jane Hatton:
This is not going to be your traditional shareholder profit making business for a number of reasons. One was I dont want to profit out of ableism because its a horrible thing and I dont want to make money out of that. But also in my previous business the shareholders had been very influential in the direction of the business and I didnt want even break to be run by whats going to make us the most money. How can we get lots of dividends for our shares? Whats the exit strategy so we can sell the business and make lots of money. I didnt want that to be the driving force behind decisions that were made, I wanted it to be run by whats best for disabled people. So I decided it was going to be a not for profit and this is in 2011 and social enterprises have been around for a bit but id never heard of them. So I thought I don’t want to be a charity because that’s giving out, you know, I’m saying to organisations, this is a whole pool of talent you should be employing because it’s going to benefit your business. If I’m a charity, it makes our candidates look like charity cases and they’re not charity cases.

Jane Hatton:
And employing a disabled person isn’t an act of charity, it’s a really good business decision. So I couldn’t be a charity, I didn’t want to be a profit making organisation. Then I learned that there was this thing called a social enterprise, which means you operate as a business, you make money, you trade in the same way that any other business trades, but instead of the profit going to shareholders, it goes back into the business to support whatever the social impact is that you’re trying to create. And so I decided it was going to be a social enterprise. And the other thing I decided was, because having been in this field of diversity inequality for so long, being to loads of conferences, I had been to so many arenas where we had men talking to other men about what women needed, or white people talking to other white people about what black people needed, or non disabled people talking to. That’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. So I decided, if ever we get big enough to employ people, then I want us to only employ disabled people, because I only have lived experience with my disability, but I need.

Jane Hatton:
We need to have that internal intelligence. And so that’s kind of how it started. And then it grew and grew and grew. Over the last 13 years, I got more mobile, which is great, took me a long time, so just walking a little bit longer each day, sitting a little bit longer each day, you know, just learning, using the water. So I used to do aquaerobics in a pool that was down the road. But I think in terms of my recovery and even breaks growth, the biggest catalyst of that was I moved to London from the Midlands.

Melody Moore:
Yeah.

Jane Hatton:
I’d lived in this lovely house, suburban house, where I’d raised my two daughters as a single, you know, as a single mom. My mother, who was disabled, so I learned a lot from her, lived just over the road from me, and I deliberately moved there after I got divorced and she lived in a two bedroom bungalow. So I’d been tied for all my life, really, to that area, because when I got married, my husband had a business in that area, then my children went to school in that area, then I was my mother’s carer until I became disabled and we both shared carers for a while, which was hilarious. But she died and my children had left home and one was living in London, one was living with her soon to be husband, now husband. And so I was in this four bedroom house on my own, rattling around, only using the bedroom and the kitchen, really, because I couldn’t really use the other rooms and thought it was ridiculous, me living here. I need to move somewhere that’s much more appropriate. And I was looking for places locally to live because the thought of living anywhere else had never really happened. But I’ve now got a bit of asset because I’ve got my four bedroom detached house, and I got my mother’s two bedroom bungalow.

Jane Hatton:
So my daughter, my youngest daughter that was living in London, came and said, could you afford to live in London, mom? And everything just fell into place, because a lot of what I’ve been doing with even break was in London. So I’d have a driver, I would lie flat in the car, the driver would bring me down to London to whatever meeting it was. I’d stand up in the meeting because I couldn’t sit down. Then he’d drive me back to the Midlands, and I would be in agony for two days because of the journey. And I thought, actually, if I lived in London, life would be. I could be so much more independent because I could stand on the buses or the tubes and I could get to places. So I ended up selling both properties, buying a flat in London, where I still live. And it’s central London, but a kind of less expensive part of central London, but I can get anywhere by cab or by tube or by buses very, very quickly.

Jane Hatton:
So it meant that I could go to events, I could go to face to face meetings with people. And I gradually got more mobile because I was doing more walking, more sitting, more standing every day. You know, I walked to the bus stop, stand on the bus, walk from the bus stop at the other end to wherever I was. And I just gradually got more mobile and in less pain. And also, there was a pool where I live, so I can do a lot more aqua therapy there. And I saw different consultants, so different kind of drug regime in terms of painkillers. I had a consultant who said, don’t use that back brace anymore because it’s doing the job your muscles should be doing and need to be developing those. So it was a whole perfect storm of things that came together and actually meant that I became much more mobile, but it also meant that that even break grew, because I could be at those events, I could be at those.

Jane Hatton:
I could go to face to face. This is long before the pandemic. You know, people didn’t do meetings like over Zoom or over teams. You did face to face meetings, because I found that so difficult to do from the Midlands, when most of the people I wanted to talk to were in London. Now I could do those things. And so I got more mobile and even break grew, and we employ more and more disabled people. We became global because there isn’t an even break in lots of other countries. And the candidates were coming to us saying, can we come to England? And I was saying, well, you know, you shouldn’t have to relocate just because you’re disabled.

Jane Hatton:
We started offering training and consultancy. We started during the pandemic, we started a resource for disabled people to find career resources, you know, career coaching and things like that that were specifically there for disabled people because there wasn’t much of that around. And so even break grew to fill those needs that weren’t currently being met. And kind of then it was now. But it was transformational for me as a person because now I felt not like I was a. A burden on my kids because I couldn’t do all the things that I wanted to do or that I couldn’t be a really good employee because I couldn’t do all the things I should be able to do. I felt that I was able to mobilise other people to make things happen. And I don’t have many talents at all, but I think one of them is able to spot the talent in other people.

Jane Hatton:
And what I’ve done with even break is found other disabled people who’ve got skills I haven’t got, so that we have all the skills we need in even break. And I wanted us to be a role model employer because we only employ disabled people. So we’ve got to get this right. And so things like flexible working, workplace adjustments, job carving, looking at job design in different ways, we’ve taught ourselves, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t work over the years. And so we’ve got to today where we have, I think, 23 employees, all of whom have different barriers that they face and which I learn from every day. We learn from each other every day and we help organisations become more inclusive and accessible. We help candidates navigate around those barriers that they face. And it’s great.

Jane Hatton:
And I’m able to travel, which I couldn’t barely get downstairs for a number of years. But now my youngest daughter lives in Australia and I’ve going over to see her again for the second time shortly. So my life has absolutely changed. And I’m not here to say, don’t worry, disabled people, you’ll get better, because most don’t and I shouldn’t have done. Mine’s a degenerative condition. I’m just lucky that I was able to do things that made me able to be more mobile. I still have a lot of pain, I still have a lot of symptoms, but I’m able to live life in a much more full way than I was, you know, ten years ago maybe, before I moved to London.

Melody Moore:
What’s next? What’s next for you? What’s next for even break, looking forward.

Jane Hatton:
I have incredible ambitions and they won’t be realised in my lifetime. Our mission is to create a world where even break doesn’t need to exist, so we don’t need specialist job boards for disabled people, because every recruiter will look at talent on its merits and won’t have this bias about skin colour or ethnicity or disability or gender or whatever it might be. That’s not going to happen in my lifetime. I’m 64. But every step we make towards that means that more disabled people get more opportunities, that we’re reducing some of those barriers that we’re helping. So doing that globally, it’s a massive ambition, but it’s really about us being seen as the place to go to until people don’t need a place to go to, so that we have the expertise within. We do a lot of partnership working as well. So working in partnership with lived experience organisations in Australia and Malaysia and USA and Singapore, wherever, so that every disabled person on the planet, if they can and if they want to work, have the same opportunity to as non disabled people.

Jane Hatton:
So much more global work, much more influencing, much more changing the narrative around disability. Very, very exciting.

Melody Moore:
And just looking back, if you were to give some advice to your younger self, younger, any age, what would you say to younger Jane?

Jane Hatton:
I think that one of the things my mother said a lot was things never stay the same. And what she meant was, if things are really bad, they won’t always stay bad, but if things are really good, they won’t always stay good, they never stay the same. And I think if I could have learned that earlier, that would have been better. So when I was growing up, I had no escape. Obviously, until you’re 18 ish, it’s really difficult to become independent from your parents without. And I didn’t tell a soul about some of the abuse until after my mother died because I didn’t want her to know about. You know, I didn’t know she did know, but I assumed she didn’t and didn’t want to have that conversation because it would have crucified her. So.

Jane Hatton:
But if I could have said to myself at a young age, this isn’t your fault, this is about him, not about you. I learned that intellectually later on, but it’s almost a bit too late because the feelings are still there, even though the brain challenges it. If I could have said to myself at five, this isn’t your fault, this is about his inadequacy. Maybe he can’t help the way he is, but don’t let it affect how you feel about yourself. And when I was really unhappy at college, doing business studies and really unhappy at home, that that would come to an end, that wouldn’t be forever. And when my marriage was unhappy, you know, things can change. And biggest of all, when I was in a really, really low period of depression, when I first learned that I wasn’t going to get better and in fact, it was going to get worse, I couldn’t deal with that at all. And I thought, it is impossible to live like this.

Jane Hatton:
It just can’t be done. If I could have seen how I am now, but of course, there was no way I could have known that. But things do change. And even it’s weird that that depression was before I had that really major surgery that made me much, much worse. But I didn’t have that depression, even though I was much worse. The depression, that awful, you know, crushing feeling. I was upset, I was sad, I was angry, but I wasn’t depressed. And there’s a difference, isn’t there? And I think it was because I knew.

Jane Hatton:
I learned to live with the way things were. I didn’t like it. I wish it wasn’t the way it was, but I had learned to live with being in pain. I had learned to live with not being able to do things the way other people could. If you’d have said to me even three years before that, you’ll learn to live with this, I would have said, it’s absolutely impossible. Nobody could. And then, and you do you learn to live with it doesn’t mean you like it, doesn’t mean you embrace it, but you do. Things do change.

Jane Hatton:
And so I think what I would say if I could have said to myself, this is horrible at the moment, but it will change, as well as the really, really good times, you know, relish every moment because this isn’t going to be forever, you know? I know now I’m able to travel. I’m trying to travel as much as I can, because at any moment, things could change. There could be another global pandemic. My disability could suddenly get worse again. I could, you know, who knows what happens in the future? So I’ve learned to. To grab every moment and relish it, really. And even little tiny things now. And I think I’m a very chirpy, cheerful, optimistic person generally.

Jane Hatton:
And I think that’s because I’ve learned to really enjoy all the good bits, whether it’s an amazing thing, like going to Sydney and seeing my daughter and standing on Bondi beach when I couldn’t even get downstairs in my own house. Or it’s just something little like the sun coming through the clouds on a cloudy day or. Or the bus turning up on time, or, you know, something that’s little that we don’t even notice. I focus deliberately on those things now and it’s made me a much better, happier person than I was. And I can honestly say I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life. I still have pain, I still have symptoms I wish I hadn’t got. I still have nights I just can’t sleep because of the pain. Days I struggle to function.

Jane Hatton:
You know, there are lots of things I would change if I could, but actually, overall I’m much happier than I was even before I became disabled. So I think it would. Things change and you learn to adapt and cope.

Melody Moore:
Now, I know you’ve written a couple of books yourself, so just let’s get that out there. What are the names of your books? Tell me.

Jane Hatton:
Yeah, I mean, they’re not academic tomes, they’re sort of conversational, the ones from the title. So the first one is a dozen brilliant reasons to employ disabled people. And that was because employers were saying, oh, poor things, we ought to give them a chance. And I was saying, no, it’s nothing to do with that, it’s about talent. And so I thought, let’s get all that in the book. And then the second one is a dozen great ways to recruit disabled people. So it’s okay. Now, we’ve persuaded you that disabled people are a great source of talent.

Jane Hatton:
What do you need to do in order to attract and recruit and retain them so that the second one is that one. So, yeah, I don’t sell them, I just use them as kind of educational tools.

Melody Moore:
Perfect. And what would be a book other than your own that you would recommend?

Jane Hatton:
Yeah, I still. I love learning from other people’s lived experience because I think it’s so powerful. And so one of the, I mean, many people read this book, but the why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. Rennie Eddow Lodge, I was lucky enough to meet her at an event. She was talking about the book and what had happened since. And for me, it’s a must read. Every. Well, every white person.

Jane Hatton:
Every person. It’s shocking, but it’s also really enlightening and really does make you think so. That’s a really good one. There’s another one that’s Trevor Noah, who is kind of a comedian, but he wrote a book called born a crime because he was born mixed race in South Africa, and it was illegal at that point to black and white to have relationships. So just by the virtue of being a mixed race child, he was a crime. And that’s an interesting read. And then there’s another one. Again, it’s about race, which is, no, you can’t touch my hair.

Jane Hatton:
And that’s by Phoebe Robinson. And that’s really great, again, about the experience of being black, being a black woman, and the experiences you have that. That I’m never going to have. Nobody comments on my hairstyle and says it’s a political statement. You know, I just try and find a style that suits me, that’s easy to deal with because I’m lazy. But for a black woman, do you have it natural if you have it straightened? Are you. You know, there’s a political statement about whatever you do with your hair. It’s.

Jane Hatton:
And learning all of that is, I think, really valuable just to get an insight into what lives are like that aren’t like mine. And any books like that I find just fascinating. Fascinating to read.

Melody Moore:
And my final question is, do you have a tagline or a title for your story?

Jane Hatton:
I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t know. One of it is about a child stamping their foot and saying, it’s not fair. Exclamation mark, which my. I have a six year old granddaughter, and she does that sometimes. Cause she’s gonna be a strong woman, like her mother and her aunt and her grandmother and her great grandmother. So there’s the kind of, it’s not fair, but also there’s a kind of what the hell am I gonna do now? Theme that kind of things change, that are out of my control. And there’s been that kind of, what the hell am I gonna do now? But then it always seems to work out somehow.

Jane Hatton:
So I don’t know whether it would either be it’s me stamping my foot, saying it’s not fair, or whether it would be me saying, now what?

Melody Moore:
Brilliant. Thank you. Well, I will choose one of those because that will become the title of the podcast episode. Jade, thank you so, so much. I literally have been sat here thinking, you really should write your autobiography, because I think people would love it. I think it would be a best seller. You’re wrinkling your nose and, yeah, I.

Jane Hatton:
Don’T suppose anybody thinks their own story is particularly interesting because you’ve lived it. So it’s kind of what you know, and it doesn’t feel remarkable in any way. And there are so many, you know, autobiographies out there, a lot of which I’ve read and enjoyed, but I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t have the time. I’m too busy dominating the world and trying to get everybody to save in the world. Yeah.

Melody Moore:
Brilliant. Well, thank you so much. I have thoroughly enjoyed this. I’m sure the listeners are gonna be really, really intrigued by your story. So thank you so much for. Yeah. For coming on the podcast.

Jane Hatton:
My pleasure. It’s given me lots to think about, too.

Melody Moore:
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