Silence Is the Sound Gynae Cancers Make: Jenny Halpern-Prince on Lady Garden, Grit, and Getting People Talking

Dokkcast, Episode 9

There's a line Jenny Halpern-Prince returns to more than once in this episode, and it's the kind of line that sticks: the sound that gynaecological cancers make is silence. No noise, no warning, no fuss — just symptoms that get dismissed, conversations that don't happen, and time that runs out.

Jenny is the co-founder of Lady Garden, the UK charity tackling the five gynaecological cancers — vaginal, vulval, ovarian, womb, and cervical — and the founder of Access Aspiration, an education charity focused on social mobility. She's also spent three decades building and scaling a communications agency from her father's spare room to a business with 60-70 staff. On this episode of the Dokkcast, she takes us through all of it: the fashion PR beginnings, the Christmas Eve sacking that became a turning point, and the twelve years of building a charity that's gone from a garden shed operation to a gold-medal-winning presence at the Chelsea Flower Show.

From Joseph to her own agency, the hard way

Jenny's career started in the fast, unforgiving world of early-90s fashion retail, working in PR at Joseph — a brand she describes as brutal in the best possible way. "It wasn't like now, where everything's quite PC about how you give feedback," she says. "It was just, it was wrong. Do better." That old-school, sink-or-swim training became the foundation for what came next.

At 23, she set up her own comms agency — not from a grand strategic plan, but out of what she calls "a vulnerability moment": she was let go from Joseph after her attention had drifted toward the business she was quietly building on the side. She hadn't seen it coming. Looking back, she frames it simply: "failure doesn't necessarily mean failure. It's about getting yourself back on track. It was part of my journey — the end of one chapter and segueing into the next."

That agency, run initially from her father's mews house because she couldn't afford a computer, went on to work with Hermès, Tiffany, Burberry, Five Guys and Nielsen Holidays, among others, before she sold it into a partnership backed by WPP roughly thirteen years ago. She's stayed close to the business ever since — still in the Monday morning meeting, she says, even though she's handed the operational reins to two people she describes as doing a better job than she did.

Why "Lady Garden"

The charity wasn't always called Lady Garden. It started life as the Gynaecological Cancer Fund — a name Jenny calls "extremely boring, and not very memorable." Coming from a career built entirely on comms and brand positioning, she knew the name was doing the opposite of what the cause needed. People are frightened of talking about gynaecological health, and a clinical, forgettable name wasn't going to change that. Lady Garden — direct, a little cheeky, unmistakably English — was designed to lower the drawbridge.

The charity itself began with personal loss. Jenny's friend Tamara Beckwith lost her mother to ovarian and endometrial cancer, after symptoms — spotting, bloating, needing to urinate more often — had gone unspoken for around 18 months. Along with other co-founders who'd lost mothers to gynaecological cancers, Tamara asked Jenny to get involved in something that would honour them. Twelve years on, Lady Garden is focused on a number that Jenny repeats with real weight: 60 women diagnosed and 21 deaths every single day in the UK from gynaecological cancers, unless something changes.

A gold medal garden with a serious message

One of the most vivid stories in the episode is the charity's garden at the Chelsea Flower Show — the first gynaecological cancer charity ever to have a presence there. Named "Silent No More" and designed by triple-gold-winning designer Darren Hawkes, the garden won gold and drew attention from an audience of 145,000 people, plus TV and social media reach far beyond that.

Jenny made a deliberate choice to build the garden facing outward, toward the crowds who can't normally step inside a Chelsea garden, rather than treating it as an enclosed, precious space. The result: men in particular — a demographic charities in this space often struggle to reach — stopping to ask questions about the five gynae cancers, the HPV vaccine, and how these issues might affect their wives and daughters.

The idea for the garden traces back to a young woman named Emily Blaine, a patient of gynaecological oncologist John Butler at the Royal Marsden. Emily had been misdiagnosed with IBS for a year before being told she had stage 3 ovarian cancer. She died at 28. Months before her death, having visited Chelsea Flower Show herself, she told Jenny she wished there could be a "Lady Garden garden" full of pink and purple flowers. Her mother went on to run the volunteer team at the Chelsea garden built in her memory.

It's a story that captures something Jenny returns to throughout the conversation: the tragedy of gynaecological cancers is so often compounded by delay — symptoms dismissed as something else, both by patients and, at times, by doctors, because they're frustratingly non-specific. Bloating, spotting between periods, needing the loo more often, pain during intercourse that wasn't there before. Individually, easy to explain away. Collectively, and if they persist for more than a few weeks, worth taking seriously.

Educating the next generation, and everyone in between

Since 2022, Lady Garden has run a university ambassador programme, starting with a single cohort in Manchester and expanding to 50 universities by this September. Ambassadors are trained to talk to their peers about gynaecological health, including the fact that 413,000 children in the UK are not receiving the HPV vaccine — a gap that matters for boys as much as girls, given the vaccine's role in preventing not just cervical cancer but also head, neck and throat cancers later in life.

The programme has a celebratory side too: ambassadors are honoured each year at an event in the House of Commons, hosted by Baroness Nicky Morgan, alongside a networking session that folds in Jenny's other charity, Access Aspiration, connecting students with leaders across medicine, law, media and beyond.

On the more immediate, community side, Lady Garden has also launched a chatbot on its website, built on NHS guidance and reviewed by the charity's medical director, designed to help people work through symptoms without falling into what Jenny calls "that horrible doom-scrolling" of searching the internet at 2am. It's explicit about its limits — it doesn't diagnose, it points people toward getting checked out — but it's there 24/7, which a GP surgery isn't.

And then there's the Lady Garden Tea Party — a new, deliberately light-touch initiative inspired by the Macmillan Coffee Morning model, intended to give people a low-stakes, sociable setting to talk about gynaecological health with friends. Because if the whole point is to break the silence, sometimes that starts with scones, cream, and a T-shirt printed with every nickname there is for a vagina — Jenny's favourite being "Lawrence of Labia."

The throughline

What comes through clearly across the episode is that Jenny's commercial career and her charity work aren't really two separate stories — they're the same skill set applied to different problems. The instinct to rebrand something boring into something people will actually engage with. The willingness to fight for a seat at the table (Lady Garden wasn't funded to be at Chelsea; they raised every penny themselves, donor by donor). The belief that community, humour and plain speaking do more to shift entrenched stigma than a purely clinical approach ever could.

Her message, stripped back, is simple: don't let a symptom sit unspoken. Talk to a friend, a partner, a doctor. If something's changed and stuck around for more than a few weeks, get it checked. It might be nothing. But the alternative — silence — is the one thing gynaecological cancers depend on.