Hon Penelope Sally Rosita (Polly) Fenwick-Wilson (1970-2010)
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Michael Rhodes
Jun 7, 2010, 1:43:59 PM6/7/10
to Peerage News
Polly Renton, who has died aged 40 in a road accident in Kenya
together with her four-year-old daughter, Sita, was a brilliant
documentary maker who later used her experience to train young film
makers and journalists in East Africa, playing a major role in the
transformation of television there.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/7798694/Polly-Renton.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Renton,_Baron_Renton_of_Mount_Harry
Having started her career in 1994 as a researcher for the director
Peter Kosminsky, she went on to direct highly acclaimed films for
Channel 4: My Mate Charlie (2000), about cocaine use in Britain, and
Waiting for Sentence (2001) about the experience of prison.
Her film about sexually transmitted diseases, Sex Bomb (2002), won the
Royal Television Society award for Best Independent Programme, and was
typically acute and sensitive. Polly Renton was adept at getting the
very best out of her interviewees, giving them the confidence to speak
openly about their experiences. She was a tenacious yet compassionate
director, and her humour and kindness were evident even in the
bleakest filming situations.
In 2000 she went on holiday to Kenya and decided to make the country
her home. Struck by the mediocre and highly restricted local news
programming, she began using her experience to its greatest effect.
With sponsorship from the Ford Foundation she set up Media Development
in Africa (Medeva) in Nairobi to train a new generation of Kenyan
television film makers, and helping them to make a series of factual
magazine shows about Kenya for Kenyans.
With the exception of its founder, Medeva was entirely staffed and
managed by Kenyans, and it survived countless political upheavals and
pressure from politicians to whom its standards and independence were
completely alien and not always welcome. It trained well over 100
Kenyans in television journalism and production techniques – and paid
them. It also made five series of a current affairs magazine show
called Tazama! ("Look!" in Swahili), the most popular Kenyan
television show after the news, with more than four million viewers
each week.
In addition, Polly Renton produced three seasons of Agenda Kenya, the
country's first and most impartial political talk show, where senior
politicians faced a live studio audience in the style of the BBC's
Question Time, whose presenter David Dimbleby, a family friend,
advised her on how to transfer the essence of his programme.
The atmosphere was often incendiary, and it became so popular that
when a power cut prevented it from going out, students demonstrated in
the streets, thinking that the government had taken it off air. The
programme was later syndicated to Uganda, and Medeva is now training
young journalists in Tanzania and Rwanda.
In 2009 Polly teamed up with her brother, the journalist Alex Renton,
to produce films for the Department for International Development
about various issues affecting Kenya, notably maternal mortality in
rural areas and the savage poverty in Nairobi's slums. Her latest film
about African children with HIV was screened in Britain last week. She
was due to have worked on a new series for BBC 1 later this year
filmed in the slums of Kibera, in association with Comic Relief.
Polly Renton was born on March 4 1970, the youngest of five children
of Tim Renton, the future Conservative government minister, and his
wife Alice, the author. She was christened Penelope Sally Rosita – the
last after her great-aunt, the explorer and writer Rosita Forbes, with
whose sense of adventure and drama Polly seemed increasingly to become
imbued.
She was educated at Windlesham House School, Roedean and Magdalen
College, Oxford, where she read Modern Languages, rowed, and played
the violin in the university orchestra. She then went to work in
Guatemala, helping to rescue children from prostitution until threats
to her life drove her from the country.
An apparently promising if unlikely career at ICI Zeneca was abandoned
after 18 months, when, inspired by a lecture by Peter Kosminsky that
she had heard while at Oxford, she went to work for him as a
researcher on his drama documentary about child sexual abuse, No Child
of Mine.
After moving to Kenya, she met, and in 2005 married, Toby Fenwick-
Wilson, who had already established a successful career as a safari
guide. They made a beautiful home at Ulu, which looks across the vast
Kapiti plains towards Kilimanjaro, and became deeply involved with the
local community, helping to establish a conservation area and a ranger
service to encourage wildlife, and obtaining funding for a health
clinic.
Polly Renton was herself a serial breaker of bones. In her short but
active life she had broken her back, her neck, her collarbone, her arm
(twice) and her legs three times. A surgeon, asked whether she had
brittle bones, replied: "No, she's just careless."
But her zest for life and peculiar knack for making friends meant that
she was rarely deterred by adversity. She travelled throughout Albania
with a leg in plaster (stuck out of a car window) and, although
written off in a school report as a poor swimmer, became an
accomplished scuba diver – she recently went diving with her arm in a
cast, wrapped in a plastic bag.
Polly is survived by her husband and their year-old son Tristan, who
was unscathed in the accident of May 28, in which their car was hit by
an oncoming truck driving on the wrong side of the road.
together with her four-year-old daughter, Sita, was a brilliant
documentary maker who later used her experience to train young film
makers and journalists in East Africa, playing a major role in the
transformation of television there.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/7798694/Polly-Renton.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Renton,_Baron_Renton_of_Mount_Harry
Having started her career in 1994 as a researcher for the director
Peter Kosminsky, she went on to direct highly acclaimed films for
Channel 4: My Mate Charlie (2000), about cocaine use in Britain, and
Waiting for Sentence (2001) about the experience of prison.
Her film about sexually transmitted diseases, Sex Bomb (2002), won the
Royal Television Society award for Best Independent Programme, and was
typically acute and sensitive. Polly Renton was adept at getting the
very best out of her interviewees, giving them the confidence to speak
openly about their experiences. She was a tenacious yet compassionate
director, and her humour and kindness were evident even in the
bleakest filming situations.
In 2000 she went on holiday to Kenya and decided to make the country
her home. Struck by the mediocre and highly restricted local news
programming, she began using her experience to its greatest effect.
With sponsorship from the Ford Foundation she set up Media Development
in Africa (Medeva) in Nairobi to train a new generation of Kenyan
television film makers, and helping them to make a series of factual
magazine shows about Kenya for Kenyans.
With the exception of its founder, Medeva was entirely staffed and
managed by Kenyans, and it survived countless political upheavals and
pressure from politicians to whom its standards and independence were
completely alien and not always welcome. It trained well over 100
Kenyans in television journalism and production techniques – and paid
them. It also made five series of a current affairs magazine show
called Tazama! ("Look!" in Swahili), the most popular Kenyan
television show after the news, with more than four million viewers
each week.
In addition, Polly Renton produced three seasons of Agenda Kenya, the
country's first and most impartial political talk show, where senior
politicians faced a live studio audience in the style of the BBC's
Question Time, whose presenter David Dimbleby, a family friend,
advised her on how to transfer the essence of his programme.
The atmosphere was often incendiary, and it became so popular that
when a power cut prevented it from going out, students demonstrated in
the streets, thinking that the government had taken it off air. The
programme was later syndicated to Uganda, and Medeva is now training
young journalists in Tanzania and Rwanda.
In 2009 Polly teamed up with her brother, the journalist Alex Renton,
to produce films for the Department for International Development
about various issues affecting Kenya, notably maternal mortality in
rural areas and the savage poverty in Nairobi's slums. Her latest film
about African children with HIV was screened in Britain last week. She
was due to have worked on a new series for BBC 1 later this year
filmed in the slums of Kibera, in association with Comic Relief.
Polly Renton was born on March 4 1970, the youngest of five children
of Tim Renton, the future Conservative government minister, and his
wife Alice, the author. She was christened Penelope Sally Rosita – the
last after her great-aunt, the explorer and writer Rosita Forbes, with
whose sense of adventure and drama Polly seemed increasingly to become
imbued.
She was educated at Windlesham House School, Roedean and Magdalen
College, Oxford, where she read Modern Languages, rowed, and played
the violin in the university orchestra. She then went to work in
Guatemala, helping to rescue children from prostitution until threats
to her life drove her from the country.
An apparently promising if unlikely career at ICI Zeneca was abandoned
after 18 months, when, inspired by a lecture by Peter Kosminsky that
she had heard while at Oxford, she went to work for him as a
researcher on his drama documentary about child sexual abuse, No Child
of Mine.
After moving to Kenya, she met, and in 2005 married, Toby Fenwick-
Wilson, who had already established a successful career as a safari
guide. They made a beautiful home at Ulu, which looks across the vast
Kapiti plains towards Kilimanjaro, and became deeply involved with the
local community, helping to establish a conservation area and a ranger
service to encourage wildlife, and obtaining funding for a health
clinic.
Polly Renton was herself a serial breaker of bones. In her short but
active life she had broken her back, her neck, her collarbone, her arm
(twice) and her legs three times. A surgeon, asked whether she had
brittle bones, replied: "No, she's just careless."
But her zest for life and peculiar knack for making friends meant that
she was rarely deterred by adversity. She travelled throughout Albania
with a leg in plaster (stuck out of a car window) and, although
written off in a school report as a poor swimmer, became an
accomplished scuba diver – she recently went diving with her arm in a
cast, wrapped in a plastic bag.
Polly is survived by her husband and their year-old son Tristan, who
was unscathed in the accident of May 28, in which their car was hit by
an oncoming truck driving on the wrong side of the road.
Richard R
Jun 8, 2010, 7:12:47 AM6/8/10
to Peerage News
Thanks Michael
For those not near the usual reference works, she was the youngest of
three daus of the life peer Lord Renton of Mount Harry (cr UK 1997, gs
of the 1st & last Baron TYRELL ext 1939, a former Ambassador to Paris
and President of the British Board of Film Censors) and his wife Alice
Blanche Helen dau of Sir James FERGUSSON of Kilkerran, 8th Bt. (Note:
Debrett's has Polly's marriage to Fenwick-Wilson dating from 2006, the
year their dau was born.)
See the note on Leigh Rayment's site as to the eccentricities of
another ancestor, Lady Tyrrell (a scion of the URQUHARTS of Urquhart):
http://www.leighrayment.com/peers/peersT2.htm
On Jun 7, 6:43 pm, Michael Rhodes <mig73allenford2...@yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
For those not near the usual reference works, she was the youngest of
three daus of the life peer Lord Renton of Mount Harry (cr UK 1997, gs
of the 1st & last Baron TYRELL ext 1939, a former Ambassador to Paris
and President of the British Board of Film Censors) and his wife Alice
Blanche Helen dau of Sir James FERGUSSON of Kilkerran, 8th Bt. (Note:
Debrett's has Polly's marriage to Fenwick-Wilson dating from 2006, the
year their dau was born.)
See the note on Leigh Rayment's site as to the eccentricities of
another ancestor, Lady Tyrrell (a scion of the URQUHARTS of Urquhart):
http://www.leighrayment.com/peers/peersT2.htm
On Jun 7, 6:43 pm, Michael Rhodes <mig73allenford2...@yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
> Polly Renton, who has died aged 40 in a road accident in Kenya
> together with her four-year-old daughter, Sita, was a brilliant
> documentary maker who later used her experience to train young film
> makers and journalists in East Africa, playing a major role in the
> transformation of television there.
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radi...
> together with her four-year-old daughter, Sita, was a brilliant
> documentary maker who later used her experience to train young film
> makers and journalists in East Africa, playing a major role in the
> transformation of television there.
>
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