by Paul Rowson
However one evening five senior business people from South Wales and six residents got together in a room on the estate. Two of the residents were local hard men who had come in their best jeans and proper shirts, which was touching and quite a big gesture by them. The business people had attempted to dress down with embarrassing results. Both parties made nervous small talk before we began. Considering the gulf in life experiences round the table it could have been a lot worse.
The high point for me came in the only part of the meeting where voices had become strident. A business man who was making generalisations about the work ethic of residents stopped in mid sentence. I looked across the room and realised why. One of the estate’s hard men had, in the warm room, undone the top two buttons on his shirt to reveal tattooed across his neck the words. ‘Fuck the system’. He had done this unselfconsciously but you could see the business visitors realise the scale of what was being attempted on Penrhys. At least they were present and trying to engage.
Unfortunately many other senior executives, of course, merely commute in air conditioned cars, sometimes chauffeur driven, park in underground car parks and then take a lift up to the luxury of their well appointed executive suites. The world outside, and the lives of many people in it, is only of genuine interest to them when it/they trigger a change to the share price. When those executives visited they were the ones who were often visibly scared at having to confront scenes they had never truly believed existed in a rich western nation.
On one notable occasion a ceo phoned from his car not twenty feet away from our office door and asked to be met and escorted to the entrance, while another insisted his driver take the car off the estate and only come back on request to pick him up. Interestingly these were the people who tended to offer instant judgements or draconian measures as quick ‘cure alls’.
A very senior Whitbread executive was on a walking tour with me and opined that ‘nothing could be done and estates like this should be left to sort themselves out’. He quoted King Edward the eighth who, when visiting nearby Tonypandy in 1936 was so shocked at the transparent abject poverty, that he said publicly ‘Something must be done’. “What happened then?” I enquired”. “He fucking abdicated” said the Whitbread man in the smug certainty that the royal pronouncement and disappearance illustrated his argument totally.
Nevertheless despite this bluff Yorkshireman’s initial judgement he did become involved and months later when I asked him the reason why, his response was typically forthright. “When I were at school lad I got nowt…no exams…nowt….I never even passed a standing bus, so we’ve got to fucking do summat”.
We had our first grand opening of a converted tower block, which had been transformed into comfortable and secure sheltered housing. William Hague, the then Secretary of State for Wales came to open the building. I had been in communication with the Welsh Office as to the wording of the plaque to be put on the foyer wall to record the details of the great occasion, and they had then kindly agreed to provide the plaque themselves. Half dead with fatigue one Friday evening I signed a letter to the Welsh Office formerly addressed to ‘The Secretary of State for Wales the Rt. Hon. William Hague’ not noticing that what I had actually written was ‘I look forward to getting the PLAGUE from you’. His move from the Principality soon afterwards was I am sure, coincidental.
‘Summat’ was, however, done as a powerful Partnership managed to get momentum behind projects despite the ignorance and inertia of many local politicians. The truth is that there is rarely a happy ever after for places like Penrhys. As the Partnership converted wrecked housing blocks into a health centre, got companies involved in literacy and numeracy programmes, built sheltered housing, built an arts centre with recording studio and dance space, the Council were busy knocking half the place down. From three and a half thousand people in 1992 the population today is about seven hundred. When I left in 1997, after a five year stint it was already down below a thousand. This resulted understandably in jealousy and resentment from other estates in the Valleys who had three times the population but none of the facilities that Penrhys enjoyed.
Through the efforts of John Morgans and his church team, some young people did get employment and lives were changed for the better. John was described as ‘a devious saint’ by one of his fellow directors, although it requires more than devotion to get things done on the fringes of society. But with so much of the dwindling population transient it was hard to sustain a sense of community let alone progress. For all that and for relatively little money, dynamic enterprising public/private sector partnerships with focus and commitment, can achieve sustainable benefits. Working with residents and working independently, free of the shackles of monolithic Council bureaucracies some disenfranchised people can be motivated to better their lives.
12.
TRAUMA AND TRAVEL 1990-1992
In a job, in a dinner jacket, in a taxi with my wife and heading in a hurry for a Prince’s Trust Royal film premier at Leicester Square, self belief was running high and my increased ego had caused an enlargement of my cranium to the extent that I struggled to get out of the taxi door on arrival. Press photographers had rushed forward as it halted and then quickly turned away as they realised the occupants were ‘nobodies’ as opposed to the ‘C’ list celebrities due to arrive.
The Prince of Wales and Diana were in attendance which did give the event some genuine glamour and we were sitting two rows behind them. The audience and Royals then had to sit through ‘Steel Magnolias’ - a film of such unremitting awfulness that never at any point did it look like rising to mediocrity. It was late and we dozed through the last half an hour and then, as protocol demanded that nobody leave until the royal party had departed, we were awoken by the clamour as they did so. There followed an almighty crush as people rushed down the stairs to try and get in the press flashlights as the Royal Group chatted to crowds outside.
We decided to avoid this by going down another exit staircase only to be met by a couple of glamorously dressed attendees rushing back up. Clearly they had wanted to be in the limelight by going out of the main exit and were arguing vociferously as they tried to rectify their mistake. “You shouldn’t have worn that bleedin’ dress Debbie it looks crap”, was the final comment I heard as they disappeared back into the throng suggesting that the argument would continue long after they had departed from Leicester Square.
Conveniently I have excluded this period in my working life from subsequent CVs as, were it to be included, head hunters would have binned an application at the point they read about this disjointed but enlightening couple of years.
A multi millionaire property magnate had offered the Prince’s Trust ‘about a million and a half pounds’ to buy a building for residential courses. Without doubt this arriviste felt that his desire for a knighthood might be enhanced by a significant philanthropic gesture. Based on a feasibility study it was decided that the building should be northern central England. I was appointed as the first director and given the initial task of finding a property based on the requirements and budget. It was quite amusing for a man of my modest means to go into an estate agent’s in 1990 in the north of England and casually say that I was looking for a house, because after the first question from the agent which was usually about the price range, there usually followed an invitation to lunch. It was a surreal couple of months as our backer had given me the loan of his executive helicopter which came complete with Toby his pilot.
Eventually after seeing dozens of properties I had a short list of three and a date was fixed for the ceo of the Prince’s Trust and his deputy to come up to view them. By this stage I was becoming a little blasé about executive helicopter travel and, as they were being flown from London by Toby, I arranged to meet them at the first property just outside Huddersfield. The plan was for me to then fly with them to the next two and be dropped back at the first to pick up my car as they flew back down south.
Somehow the Huddersfield Examiner had go
t hold of the itinerary and ran a story ‘Prince to buy house near Huddersfield’. Consequently I and a small ‘huddle’ of curious onlookers were buffeted by the rotor blades of the helicopter as it landed in the grounds of a Victorian villa. I had booked the viewing so as to reserve the best until last and so after an hour’s tour by a fawning estate agent, four of us got on board for the flight to Northallerton. I couldn’t resist a regal type wave as we rose about the treetops, banked in a gentle arc and then headed north. The second place fitted the bill but was uninspiring and so we made the short hop to Smeaton Manor just outside Northallerton. This had everything and more. It was a beautiful red brick mansion in lovely grounds complete with swimming pool. After the tour we sat by the pool for a de-brief, and it was unanimously agreed that an offer to purchase would be made, subject to a ‘Princely’ visit to gain his seal of approval.
The deputy ceo of the Prince’s Trust had a ‘new fangled’ brick sized mobile phone which went off at this point much to his surprise. It was the PA to our property multi millionaire backer who said that the helicopter was required urgently after some corporate crisis meant that he had to get to France that evening. With that they immediately summonsed Toby who was sunning himself at the other side of the pool and, with hardly an apology for not having time to drop me off en route, rose into the sky and disappeared into the blue beyond.
I was left stranded and sixty miles from my car in Huddersfield, but in the grounds of a lovely mansion outside Northallerton, which was shortly to become my place of employment. The next and rather humbling move was to phone one of my friends, who had no doubt become irked my tales of executive airborne travel, and beg him to come and pick me up.
Older readers may remember the time the Prince of Wales broke his collar bone playing Polo. That was the day before he was supposed to come to view Smeaton Manor. The Prince’s trip was postponed and days later the property market began to collapse. Invitations to our backer’s luxurious corporate headquarters in Westminster for updates on the search became less frequent and a new limit of money available was set at ‘around seven hundred thousand pounds’. Further viewing was by car as Toby and the helicopter were never seen again.
I looked at a former mental hospital where I was shown round by the original medallion man who could hardly wait to finish the tour so that as he put it, “I can shag that bird waiting in the car before going home to pick the wife up and take her for a birthday treat – she’s fifty today”. I viewed a gothic pile, where I was shown round by a gaunt man in an oversized suit who volunteered that he had been let out of prison to help ‘sell’ the house. He was in for tax evasion and I think the Revenue must have thought a sale would help him clear some of what he owed. I considered a huge and remote farmhouse on the Yorkshire Moors where I was given the tour by an armed madman on a quad bike, but all to no avail.
Within three months our financial backer had lost a good proportion of his fortune and withdrew the offer to fund the project. A month after that, as The Prince’s Trust Board voted to abandon the idea of having a residential centre, I was made redundant.
As redundancies go this one was not too bad and in fact the Trust bent over backwards to handle it well. In addition to a very generous package they immediately gave me consultancy work looking at engaging young people on the toughest housing estates in Britain. So it was that within a very short space of time, I went from being whisked about the country in an executive helicopter and enjoying lunches in the best restaurants, to walking about the Easterhouse housing estate in Glasgow and lunching with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.
They were dramatic changes to my circumstances but I am glad to have experienced and enjoyed both. With our property multi millionaire I saw extreme greed masquerading as ambition and with the addicts and alcoholics recognised that there is not always much between holding it all together and total collapse. Pragmatically though, as the consultancy came to an end, I needed to indulge in less cod philosophy and do more in the way of urgent practical job search.
The early morning bathroom protocol in a Catholic presbytery in Kensington gave me ample time to reflect on the relative success of that search for meaningful employment. I had been given the offer of a room pro temps at the presbytery, courtesy of my cousin who was by this time a bishop. This was as a prelude to moving my family (again) down south now that I was the UK Director of London based BUNAC – the British Universities North America Club. After four tortuous rounds of interviews and much deliberation on both sides I eventually was offered the post, which proved to be a disaster almost from the off. When I started in 1991, BUNAC sent about ten thousand students to work in summer camps mostly on the East Coast of the USA.
The young staff team in the London office were a bright and friendly bunch and I was appointed to succeed the founder of the organisation who was to work with me on the handover. Unfortunately he was going through a desperate time in his relationship with his estranged wife who lived in a BUNAC owned house in Massachusetts. This meant at seven each morning when I got into the office there was a pile of fax paper on the floor, but still attached to the machine, containing details of his latest deficiencies.
On some occasions, and bearing in mind that it would have been the middle of the night in the USA, the fax machine was still actively spewing out further details of those deficiencies as I arrived. This tended to get the day off to a bad start. In many ways though it was a dream job, with leisurely days spent touring the summer camps and all without the hassle of mobile phones or blackberries. Liaising with camp directors was not too onerous and the students were often pleased and surprised to see someone checking that they were enjoying the summer.
Camp Directors are often also the owners whose main income is earned during the three months of the summer. There were camps for fat kids, camps for Jewish kids, camps for Catholic kids, camps for poor kids, and camps for rich kids. The one constant was that the word of the Camp Director was final. Watching the supervision of ten year olds being given buckets of Ritalin meant you were in a middle class camp where neurotic parental demands sometimes made life tough for the Director. By and large the UK students took it all in their stride brilliantly, which is why BUNAC did well with increasing numbers year on year.
At night, when in London, I would scuttle back to the presbytery and observe the insanity of the Catholic Church at close quarters. Because there was so much space in that building on Abingdon Road I was given a basic, but perfectly adequate, room at the end of a long corridor. It came with instructions not to hog the bathroom in the morning as visiting priests were often dashing off to get flights. This was the executive wing of the church and they flew business class to Rome on the early flight from Heathrow. Permanently in residence were a strange mix of clerics, served by and fussed over, by two Filipino women and occasional visiting nuns.
The eldest resident, who was also the parish priest, was a sad man. He neither understood the human condition, despite building his whole daily routine around East Enders and Coronation Street, nor showed much genuine empathy for his parishioners. His party trick if anyone, such as an occasional tramp, knocked on the presbytery door when the housekeepers weren’t around, was to put his coat on before answering and pretend he was on the way out to minister to a dying parishioner. Thus he avoided any contact with the great unwashed.
His comments about women were truly pathetic. The perfectly respectable dating agency Dateline, had its’ headquarters directly across the road from the main door of the presbytery. The parish priest made a point of apologising to those visitors who did make it through the door by describing it as a ‘notorious pick up place’. I’m pretty confident that the staff at Dateline brought more happiness to more people in the world than the combined efforts of the clerics on the other side of the road.
A young snobbish and effete priest from the north east who was in Kensington because he ‘felt his ministry was better served in the capital’ spent a good proportion of that ministry in
top restaurants or raiding the wine cellar at the presbytery. An exception was one extremely pleasant, delightfully well spoken and genuinely humble young priest who had a vocation which he pursued with energy and compassion. He also had a penchant for David Bowie’s music and one night we both got blotto while listening to it in his room after a rooftop barbeque.
I had agreed to help with this Saturday evening event, to which quite a few of the local Kensington glitterati had been invited, because I had to stay in London for a board meeting which BUNAC insisted on holding on a Sunday. The volunteering offer obviously involved me spending most of the night behind the barbeque grill or serving drinks to the guests, most of whom assumed I was part of the housekeeping staff or a hired hand. The parish priest behaved like a Hollywood socialite boorishly ordering the both Filipino housekeepers and me about with unnecessary instructions delivered at volume.
There is a great scene in ‘The Border’ - an early Jack Nicholson classic. At a barbeque by the small pool of his new duplex in El Paso, that his acquisitive wife has forced them to buy even though they can’t afford it, Nicholson who plays a border patrol guard in a corrupt operation, surveys the horrible drunken, shrill and shallow guests while serving them food from the grill. He loses it completely and tips the whole barbeque still laden with food and sizzling, into the pool and stomps off.
The temptation to off load the barbeque into Kensington High Street three stories below, was something I almost succumbed to that night on the presbytery rooftop.
