Pre-tax profits in 1999-2000 were £27m (excluding goodwill amortisation relating to the Druid deal), up from £17m the previous year. Turnover had reached £307m a year (up 35 per cent), and the company was still growing. Right across the business world, anyone who aspired to be at the cutting edge of management was looking at the kind of efficiency solutions that FI Group offered, from IT systems to outsourcing. If a company was a household name, it was a fair bet that it would have a working relationship with FI: Barclays, Bank of Scotland, British Telecom, Diageo, Kingfisher, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Boots - they were all FI Group clients, and the projects they commissioned were bigger than ever (for example, a joint banking venture with Bank of Scotland - now part of Lloyds TSB - that was worth £150m).
The company was also poised to benefit from the start of a new millennium: a lot of IT investment worldwide was thought to have been postponed until after 1 January 2000, because of concern about the “Millennium bug” (the danger, more serious than some people now imagine, that the change of date from a year ending in “99” to one ending in “00” might cause expensive or even disastrous malfunctions in middle-aged computer systems). FI Group had already been doing a good trade helping clients to protect themselves against the threat, but its passing would be better still for business.
All of this had made the company more attractive than ever to investors, and the share price had rocketed. In early 2000, shares in the group reached an all-time peak of 885p per share, giving the company a market capitalisation of more than £2.5bn - and making paper millionaires, as previously mentioned, of at least 70 staff members. Hilary herself had cashed in her share options in 1999, at a £17m profit, making her Britain’s best-paid female executive; she had also been appointed CBE that year. (She was appointed a Dame in 2004. I was on the Industry Honours Committee by then, and supported her appointment, although it was not me who nominated her.)
As for me, I was shocked to be told that I was listed in the 2000 edition of the Sunday Times Rich List as the UK’s 11th richest women (three places below the Queen) and the second-richest self-made woman (after Ann Gloag of Stagecoach). My total wealth was calculated at £140m.
Given that I had already given away tens of millions of pounds by this stage (to Kingwood, to Prior’s Court and to the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists), along with roughly a quarter of my FI Group shareholding, it was disconcerting - and faintly obscene - to find that I was now several times richer than I had been before I started. But such are the vagaries of capitalism. I took the news with a pinch of salt, knowing that paper wealth can go down as abruptly and arbitrarily as it goes up, and resolved to do as much giving as possible before my fortune shrank again.
I think it was this reasoning, combined with the realisation that I no longer needed to keep a big chunk of my wealth on one side to provide for Giles’s care after my death, that led me to get involved in a flurry of charitable activities around the turn of the millennium. The most prominent of these was Autism 99, one of the very first virtual conferences of any kind - and the first ever such conference in the field of disability. The idea (which seems obvious now but didn’t then) was that the worldwide web could be used to bring together people with specialist knowledge of autism from all over the planet, at a small fraction of the cost and inconvenience that a conventional international event would involve. The online event was a year in preparation and was, I think, a spectacular success. Some 65,000 people, from 114 countries, took part, from research scientists to ordinary people with first-hand experience of the condition. I say that it was a success partly because of the buzz it created and the numbers and names involved, but mainly because the connections it forged have continued to function and multiply ever since. The three-week “live” conference left a permanent online legacy (its archive can now be found at www.autismconnect.org.uk), as well as a living legacy of new relationships between experts on autism around the world.
There were dozens of other projects as well, all of which made demands on my time and attention as well as my wealth. Between 1998 and 2001, the Shirley Foundation gave support to 73 different causes, big and small, many but not all relating to autism. Their total value was about £20.5m. It would be tiresome to describe or even list them all, but a few stand out in my memory. One involved helping the Wirral Autistic Society to develop a community and IT centre with residential accommodation at Bromborough, Wirral. This was initially supposed to be a £15,000 upgrade to the society’s computer systems, but I realised when I looked closely at the project that it really wasn’t going to produce value for my money. Then I noticed a semi-derelict building near their headquarters, and discussed the idea of turning it into a proper computer centre - a bigger investment but a more strategic one. It ended up as a wonderfully rewarding £750,000 project, and I have remained involved with the society since. One of the things I liked about this little group was the way they used music to encourage self-expression. Some of the residents even formed a little band, The Beathovens. When I was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2010, one of my chosen records was a private tape of The Beathovens performing “Summer’s Child”, a song of their own composition.
Other significant support from the Shirley Foundation went to the Autism Research Centre of Cambridge University (for research into the prevalence of Asperger’s Syndrome - a mild form of autism - among primary school children); to Birmingham University (for a web-based distance learning course on autism); to the Department of Child Psychiatry at Oxford University (for research into sleep disorders in children with autism and the efficacy of behavioural therapies in treating them); to the World Health Organisation (for autism research); to PACE (Parents Autism Campaign for Education); to Resources for Autism (for three years of support for a service helping parents to obtain statements of Special Educational Needs for their children); and to a year-long public awareness campaign called Autism Awareness 2002.
The Shirley Foundation also facilitated the formation of an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Autism, as well as similar all-party initiatives in the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. This in turn stimulated my interest in autism in Wales, where more than 30,000 people are affected by the disorder. It occurred to me that, for non-communicating children, a bilingual country like Wales must be an even harder environment to grow up in than a monolingual one. Eventually, in partnership with an inspirational worker in the field called Hugh Morgan, I was instrumental in setting up Autism Cymru, a highly effective special interest group that started in May 2001 and has helped bring the needs of people with autism close to the top of the Welsh political agenda. (Autism Cymru worked with the Welsh Assembly to develop - and later on to help implement - the world’s first government-led national strategy for autism.)
Balliol College honoured me for my contributions (Oxford Internet Institute and St Cross church) by commissioning this portrait by Saïed Dai to hang in Hall. The image on the tablet in my lap is of the church’s sundial; the geometric solid indicates mathematics and – subliminally – my heritage.
There was also one large donation that had nothing to do with autism. This was the Oxford Internet Institute, a project first suggested to me in 2000 by some fellow members of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists who had been discussing the idea with Balliol College. The initial plan - once I had agreed to join them - was that the Shirley Foundation would contribute £100,000 seed-corn funding. Once everything was in place to go forward, however, I authorised a contribution of £10m, which (matched by £5m of core funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England) allowed the Institute to open as a university department in 2001, with its own dedicated building becoming operative in July 2003.
The institute’s raison-d’être is to be a centre of excellence for rigorous studies of the non-technical aspects of the internet - the social, legal, economic and ethical effects of a revolutionary communications tool -
in the hope that its findings will inform government policies worldwide. I have supported it because I think such work is important: the internet is dismantling old certainties as rapidly as any innovation since the printing press. But I have also found it enormously rewarding to be involved in such a pioneering, strategic project so late in my career, working with bright academics in an area that is still close to being my special subject. I enjoy the meetings and discussions in which the Institute has involved me. It’s not just that it’s flattering (although I can’t deny feeling gratified to have been made a foundation fellow at Balliol): it’s the fact that I simply find it more stimulating to talk to academics about abstract concepts than talking to people about where they went on holiday and what car they drive. I also get great pleasure from seeing my money working to such good effect. To that extent, good philanthropy is like good business: the reward comes from seeing a system achieve what you wanted it to achieve.
The more I gave during these years, the more I realised that I didn’t really want to be giving lots of little hand-outs to lots of piecemeal projects. I wanted to contribute my strategic insight as well as my wealth. So I began to be more discerning about what I supported, and to adopt a more conscious policy of investing rather than giving with no strings attached. I realised that the really empowering gifts are the ones that fund infrastructure rather than one-off projects; and that you get more bangs-per-buck (as the weapons industry puts it) from big donations than from little ones.
I also realised that what remained of my fortune would be more likely to make a difference to the world if I focused my giving on the specific areas that concerned me, rather than spreading it too thinly. One of these areas, information technology, now seemed well catered for by my donations to the Oxford Internet Institute and the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. But autism - or, rather, the battle to understand, cure or ameliorate the effects of autism - was still a cause in desperate need of all the support it could get. The £35m I had given to the cause so far had merely scratched the surface.
I therefore put it to my fellow trustees at the Shirley Foundation that henceforward we should fund only causes relating to autism. Specifically, we resolved in 2002 that we would consider funding only projects that were innovative in nature, with the potential to have a strategic impact in the field of autism spectrum disorders.
Since then, we have made around 20 different donations, to a variety of different projects. In 2011, for example, £250,000 was pledged to the new Autism & Disability Loan Scheme with an interesting charity, Paintings in Hospitals (founded back in the 1950s and revitalised in recent years by a young New Zealander, Director Stuart Davie). Edinburgh University got £1m for a microscopy unit for its Patrick Wild Centre for Research into Autism, Fragile X Syndrome and intellectual disabilities. And about £500,000 went to an organisation called Autistica (www.autistica.org.uk), which I helped to set up between 2005 and 2007 and whose infrastructure we have been funding, to the tune of several million pounds, since then.
My declared strategic aim is a huge one: to determine the causes of autism by 2014, and to halve the global cost of this perplexing disorder by 2020. In my mind, the mission can be stated more simply still: I want to devote what remains of my wealth and my life to finding a cure for autism.
Autistica chose to study autism spectrum disorders in Saudi Arabia because of its concentrated gene pool. Eileen Hopkins and I signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the Prince Salman Centre for Disability Research in 2006. Throughout my visits it was very obvious that I was serving yet again as a female role model.
Ambitious? Certainly. Unrealistic? Not necessarily. Another thing my experience of life has taught me is that the only people who achieve on a grand scale are those who dream on a grand scale. And it struck me that, although many brilliant minds had been grappling with the problem for many years, they had tended to be brilliant specialist minds: biologists, chemists, neuroscientists, behaviouralists and so on. But what if I added to the mix my own talents as a generalist? What if I applied to the problem some of the entrepreneurial and strategic skills that I had developed during my decades in business?
One of the first things I did was to commission a literature review of the research on autism to date, so that I could get a sense of what the main areas of exploration were. I was surprised to find that this had never been done before - which just goes to show how an ignorant outsider can sometimes make a positive difference. Perhaps, I reasoned, I could make other such contributions. I hadn’t needed to be an avionics engineer to design systems for Concorde, and, by the same token, I didn’t necessarily need to be a neurologist to contribute to this fight.
Such thoughts in due course gave rise to a project called Kaspar, a kind of macro-study in which I tried (with the help of such eminent professors as Simon Baron-Cohen and Geri Dawson and of such eminent institutions as Oxford, Cambridge and Washington universities and the MIND Institute in California) to form an objective picture of what was needed to get at the causes of autism. I saw this as analogous to the US government trying to establish what needed to be done to get a man on the moon in the early 1960s.
The answer that eventually presented itself in this case was that a budget of at least £400m would be needed. This was clearly way out of my depth, and, as a result, I was forced to think more strategically still. Who else was working on this? How were they organised? And could their collective work be made more effective or efficient?
The two main organisations working in the field were both in the US: Cure Autism Now (CAN), on the west coast, and National Alliance for Autism Research (NAAR), on the east coast. I became involved with NAAR, which seemed the more strategic and science-based of the two, joining their board (in 2004) and helping them to make better use of IT in their fundraising. This eventually led to the establishment of a NAAR in the UK, which in due course evolved (at its third naming) into Autistica. Autistica is now the main vehicle for the Shirley Foundation’s activities in this field. It is also the largest UK charity raising funds for medical research into autism. That, for me, is part of the attraction: it generates funds as well as dispensing them. I know that the challenge we face is so huge that my limited wealth - even in its entirety - can do no more than facilitate a few scratches at the surface. But by injecting my money at the right strategic point, where it can be used to leverage more and bigger donations and to ensure that whatever money is raised goes to the projects with greatest potential, I can get the maximum possible benefit from what I give. Autistica provides grants for researchers, mentors fellowships to recruit new researchers to focus on autism and provides funding for larger, collaborative programmes. It also tries to draw together and coordinate the findings of experts in different disciplines (immunology, epidemiology, behavioural sciences, molecular and cellular biology, genetics and neuroscience) and different countries.
At the time of writing, Autistica’s hopes of a breakthrough reside mainly in four encouraging areas: the study of susceptibility genes for autism led by the Autism Genome Project (the largest research collaboration ever assembled); research into the younger siblings of children diagnosed with autism, which may allow earlier detection, diagnosis and treatment; new forms of neuro-imaging clarifying structural and functional differences in the brain, to help diagnosis; and studies of human brain tissue - the world’s most precious resource - looking for markers for autism at a cellular level. (I am proud to say that, since 2009, Giles’s brain has been among those available to researchers via Oxford’s Brain Bank for Autism.)
Will anything come of this? Who can say? All I know is that it is worth trying.
I know that money cannot guarantee scientific advances; I know that research cannot be rushed; I know that all my donations may ultimately come to nothing. But, equally, I know that there is nothing I would rather have done with the money. It is better to fight and fail than simply to shrug and declare that nothing can
be done. There are about 130,000 children on the autistic spectrum in the UK today, out of perhaps 500,000 people altogether who have some aspect of the disorder - and, of course, there are many hundreds of thousands of parents and other relatives who experience daily the indirect agonies that this condition inflicts.
Leaving aside the financial implications - and the annual cost of autism to the UK economy has been estimated at £28bn - I believe that it is simply wrong to give up in the face of human misery on such a scale. To accept autism as something unavoidable, which cannot be eradicated and thus is not worth fighting, strikes me as on a par with saying, in the 1930s, that there was nothing that could be done about the thousands of Jewish children in Europe whose lives were at risk from Nazism.
There were plenty of people in Britain who did say that. But there were, luckily for me, others who took a less supine view.
24: For Richer, For Poorer
THE FLOW of millions from FI Group always felt too good to be true, and, sure enough, as the new century unfolded the company’s fortunes changed. The dot-com bubble burst in March 2000, and continued to deflate until late 2002. FI Group coped with the initial run on technology shares better than most; but the sector’s continuing decline eventually took its toll.
It was, by now, a truly global business - a fact reflected by its announcement in March 2001 that it was going to change its name to the less parochial-sounding Xansa. (I approved of this change: global brands need brand names that resonate all over the globe. But I was hurt not to have been forewarned about it.) It was also a very substantial business, with a workforce of over 6,000 people, including about 1,200 in India; a market capitalisation of £1.2bn; and forecast sales for 2001-2002 of £515m. So it didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger of collapse.
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 28
