RaW turn it up with charitable tour

Four members of RaW, Warwick University’s student radio station, have travelled 1,820 miles and visited 52 other student radio stations across the country to raise money for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research.

Phil Atkins, Tom Davies, Tasha Jones and Sam Stopp beat their initial target amount of £1,000 and, according to the RaW on Tour website, will have reached nearly £1,500 when all the promised donations are received.

The group began the tour by travelling to northern England, spending the next six days working their way across the country, broadcasting at stations as far north as Durham and as close to the south coast as Portsmouth. Jones, who drove the group throughout the campaign, said that the “scariest and longest” stretch of driving was from Durham to Lancaster, which “felt like a lifetime”.

The team remained together throughout the tour except when they reached London, where Atkins, Davies and Stopp had to use public transport to make their way around the capital to broadcast whilst Jones waited for them in Greenwich.

At each station the group spoke on air to raise awareness and encourage people to donate to Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, a charity which aims to find treatments and cures for all blood cancers. The charity was chosen because a friend of Davies, Leo Truscott, was diagnosed with leukaemia last year. The group spoke of Truscott on the RaW on Tour website as “a shining example of positivity” and said that he “was keen to stress how he wants to give something back to all the people who have helped set him on the road to overcoming leukaemia”.

The group found their way to each station with the help of a satellite navigation system they named Debbie. A ‘co-pilot’, however, was always sat next to Jones in the passenger seat in order to ensure that Debbie was actually giving the correct directions.

When not broadcasting or travelling, the group edited blog entries, video diaries and clips of their experiences at the different university radio stations and uploaded them online to keep people updated on their progress across England.

This left little time for the group to sleep, and food options were limited as all meals had to be acquired along the way. Jones said: “I ended up eating so much yoghurt,” and Stopp commented of the whole experience being “like a slow descent into madness”.

The group arrived back on campus on Sunday 20 February after a highly successful six days. For Jones, the most challenging part of the trip was when the other members fell asleep as she drove between Brighton and Canterbury. Jones told the _Boar_: “Looking back on it now, I can’t believe I actually did it. Looking at a map of England, it seems like some crazy nightmare but also wonderful at the same time.”