30 Years Supporting Red Balloon

I first heard about Red Balloon about 30 years  ago – I was engaged to be married and my future mother-in-law’s first cousin was Carrie Herbert, the founder of Red Balloon. I had met Carrie, whose reputation as a trailblazing campaigner for bullied children preceded her, and we got chatting.

I am the trustee of a family charitable trust set up by my father in the early 1970s, and Carrie and I discussed the possibility of the trust supporting Red Balloon. I mentioned it to my father, and it struck a chord with him, I think partly because my brother sometimes had a tough time at school. And so began a long association between our two families, not only through my marriage to Carrie’s cousin (still going strong!) but between Red Balloon and the Ingles Trust.

In the late 90s I was training as an auctioneer at Sotheby’s and Carrie occasionally invited me to Cambridge to take a fundraising auction for RB. I soon realised that keeping an audience of potential donors engaged and amused was much more challenging than my day job of auctioning violins and cellos to our customers, but the events were great fun, and have evolved over the years into events that have consistently raised tens of thousands of pounds.

The primary aims of the Ingles Trust are to help disadvantaged children and to support music education, and these two aims sit very well with our ongoing support of music therapy and music education at various Red Balloon Centres. It is genuinely inspirational and moving to see children who are too terrified to go to school rebuilding their confidence through singing and playing music together, and gradually recovering sufficiently to return to mainstream education.

These days Red Balloon is supported not only by the Ingles Trust, but also by my company Ingles & Hayday, which was founded in 2012 when I left Sotheby’s. And I have been lucky enough to take part in numerous Red Balloon fundraising golf days at Woburn, by some distance the poshest golf course I have ever played!