Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  Bit by bit, we began to believe that we would pull through. We ended the 1972-73 tax year back in the black, with profits of just under £2,000, on hugely reduced turnover, and the sense that my hard work was making a difference proved highly motivating. I spent a lot of my time on the then unheard-of practice of telephone marketing: not cold-calling, but ringing round existing contacts just in case any opportunities were in the air. I had a crude but effective system of little cards, each summarising what I needed to know about each target (e.g., name of company, name of the person I was dealing with, what sort of equipment they had, what we had last talked about, and so on), and I felt proud of my ability to make a large number of effective calls in quick succession. Only a tiny percentage yielded so much as an appointment to meet - but without that handful of positive results we would have had no new business at all.

  We also looked further afield for openings, in the US and in continental Europe. When I formally reabsorbed F2 into Freelance Programmers, I had given their controlling company the grand-sounding new name of F International. The “F” was an echo of the original “Freelancers”, although I liked to say that it also stood for “female”, “flexible” and, indeed, more or less anything else that people wanted it to stand for. The “International” was more problematic. We had, at that stage, had only one truly foreign client: an Antwerp-based company called Agencie Maritime Internationale (who became so exasperated by our well-meaning attempts to translate all our documents into French that they pleaded with us to leave them in English). But “International” sounded good, and we decided to start looking for opportunities overseas. I remember gate-crashing a big insurance industry function in Paris with Frank Knight around this time: I felt terribly embarrassed doing it, but Frank was well-connected in the insurance industry, and we felt that we couldn’t afford to neglect even the remotest chance of making a useful contact. The short-term benefits to the company were minimal, but such thinking would ultimately yield considerable dividends, and, in the meantime, it did wonders for morale to be thinking in terms of expansion rather than contraction.

  Eventually, after extensive market research across Europe, we set up a small subsidiary in Denmark, whose manager, Charlott Skogøy, ran a team of seven (six of them mothers with young children) from her stylish home in Fredensborg, near Copenhagen. The adventure contributed little to our finances but did teach us valuable lessons - not least about the perils of market research if you don’t interpret it correctly. We had chosen Denmark on the basis that it had one of Europe’s most educated and numerate female populations, which meant that we ought to be able to recruit plenty of top-quality programmers. What I hadn’t taken into account was that Denmark was so far in advance of the UK in terms of equal opportunities, with an excellent state-funded childcare system, that there was nothing like the untapped reservoir of frustrated female talent that we had found at home. Talented Danish women who wanted to work tended to be in jobs already.

  The whole venture was fraught with problems - including the breakdown of our relationship with Charlott, who eventually formed a breakaway operation. But at the time that scarcely mattered. The important thing was that we believed in ourselves again. We were growing. We were no longer clinging on by our fingernails. Instead, we had (as Franklin D Roosevelt had urged Americans to do during the Great Depression) converted retreat into advance.

  The creation of a further subsidiary in 1976, in the Netherlands, brought with it a different set of unanticipated local difficulties, chiefly relating to employment protection legislation - which played havoc with our traditionally relaxed approach to freelance hiring. But, again, there was symbolic value in the fact that we were still growing. Back in the UK, potential clients that had hesitated to do business with a struggling little company from Chesham felt quite differently about hiring a fast-growing concern that appeared to be a major international player.

  There was never a recognisable moment when our troubles ended. We just carried on struggling, week after week, and the weeks turned into months and the months into years, and somehow we always managed to return some sort of profit at the end of each year, however pitiful. Eventually I began to feel that, since the crisis hadn’t killed us off, it must have made us stronger. I don’t think I ever again felt entirely relaxed about the future. But I did begin to contemplate our prospects with more equanimity.

  Unfortunately, my troubles were by no means over.

  11: The Great Crash

  BY 1975, the worst of the economic storm was over. A blizzard of red tape came fluttering in behind it. More or less simultaneously, the Department of Health and Social Security and the Inland Revenue began to take what seemed to us to be an oppressive interest in our affairs. Both were exercised by the unorthodox nature of our employment arrangements - and had decided that now was a good time to call us to account. We wondered if the large job we had just completed for the DHSS - compiling an early database called CUBITH - might have drawn us to their attention.

  I have no intention of revisiting the detail of these tiresome episodes, or of the endless correspondence and interrogations they involved. I would merely say that I resented them. Both inquiries concluded that we had done nothing wrong. But both seemed to be predicated on the idea that our flexible approach to employment in some way constituted “cheating”. This seemed to me an outrageous view to take of an approach that had brought rewarding work to a whole class of people who had hitherto been entirely excluded from the workplace. And what seemed scarcely less outrageous was the thought that my taxes (and those of my flexible workforce) were funding a series of bureaucratic intrusions that were scarcely less debilitating for the business than the recession. Had the various inspectors involved made such exorbitant demands on our time and woman-power a year or two earlier, it might well have finished us off. I shudder to think how a smaller or weaker company would have coped.

  But one of that year’s run-ins with the state provoked a more ambiguous response. In November, the Sex Discrimination Act was passed. You might have expected me to applaud such a landmark in the struggle for gender equality at work; and with part of my soul I did. But in our case, as several commentators enjoyed pointing out, the legislation had an effect almost diametrically opposite to the one intended. We were one of the few companies in the UK that already provided real opportunities for women who wanted to work. Now our policy of “providing careers for women with dependants” was illegal.

  It caused us no difficulties to make the necessary amendment to our methods of working. I had never objected to hiring men, and, indeed, there had rarely been a moment in our history when we hadn’t had a few men working for us. In 1975, all but three of our 300-odd freelance programmers were women, and all 25 of our project managers were women, but nearly a third of our 40 or so systems analysts - on the F2 side of the business - were male. (Our Netherlands subsidiary even had a staff member who had started off as a woman and then had a sex change.) Conversely, I don’t suppose we would have ended up with a radically different gender profile had we never explicitly espoused a pro-women policy. The preponderance of women working for the company was partly a reflection - the mirror-image - of the gender bias in the wider workforce. Most male programmers of sufficient calibre were already in conventional employment and had no interest in the kinds of opportunity we offered.

  None the less, it was a striking irony - and one that rather irritated me - that, because we mentioned gender in our mission statement, we became one of the first companies to be brought into line by this landmark piece of pro-women legislation. I don’t think Freelance Programmers had been a consciously feminist organisation when I founded it. I hadn’t even heard of “feminism” in 1962. But by 1975 F International was seen by many as part of the women’s liberation movement. One of the things that had helped us through the dark days of the recession was the conviction that we were working not just for money, but because we believed in a parti
cular way of doing business. And I, at least, was convinced that, in fighting to save the company, I had also been leading a crusade for women. Without that idealism I might have found it easier to throw in the towel.

  Now, as the realisation dawned on us that the company had survived the storm, I think we became collectively even more aware of our feminine identity as an organisation. We had, we realised, come through a test that countless “male” organisations had failed. Surely the fact that we were women - and ran our organisation in a distinctively different way - had something to do with this?

  I felt strongly that my “female” approach, which had attracted such scorn in the business’s early years, had been vindicated, and it irked me that the state, in addition to its other meddlings, had now declared that approach illegal. Still, there was no point in quarrelling with the law, especially such a well-intentioned one. At a board meeting that December we amended our personnel policy again. Our purpose was now to provide employment for “people with dependants unable to work in a conventional environment”.

  It felt like an important landmark in our history, marking the end of our 13-year adventure as an “all-women company” but also seeming to draw a line under the trials of the previous five years. Times were still hard, but businesses were starting to invest in the future again, and our survival no longer seemed in doubt. We had got back into the habit of ringing up freelancers to offer them work, while our core of permanent staff seemed stronger than at any point since Pamela’s defection - a fact that I recognised at around this time by making Suzette Harold group managing director in my stead. In so far as all can ever be well with a business, all seemed well with F International.

  As any woman with a demanding career will tell you, however, what happens in the workplace is only half the story. And in my case, the other half of the story had taken a turn for the worse.

  In the summer of 1974, Giles had finished his time as a weekly boarder at his special primary school. It was a sad moment for all concerned. They had understood his needs at The Walnuts, and had had the time, the patience and above all the staff to manage his idiosyncrasies. We had been dreading the moment when his time there came to an end, as had the school, who kept him on until the latest possible moment. He was loved there - they used to call him their “ewe lamb” - and it was hard to believe that we would ever find another institution that would care for him so well.

  In fact, it turned out to be hard to find another institution that would care for him at all. We tried him at a succession of day placements, from the general to the specialist, but none could cope with his increasingly difficult behaviour. He had, after all, been legally classed as “ineducable”. Others gave blithe reassurances that all would be well, only to find that it wasn’t. I grew to dread the almost inevitable phone call that would come a few hours after I had dropped him off somewhere, saying that they couldn’t manage him and (through gritted teeth) please would I come and collect him, now.

  Unfortunately, puberty had hit Giles like an out-of-control lorry. It does so with many autistic boys - and, to a lesser extent, with boys generally. In Giles’s case, the hormonal turmoil turned what had been an almost benign eccentricity into a raging nightmare of unpredictable violence against inanimate and animate objects, including his parents and himself. He had periods of calm; then, without warning, he would lash out with fists or feet, punch himself, hurl furniture over, bang his head against the wall - and all with the force of a strapping young man rather than a tantrum-throwing toddler. He once tried to throw our piano across the room, and nearly succeeded.

  At around the same time, Renate and Clare moved back to Australia. We had all been suffering from the lack of privacy that results from two families living right on top of one another, and, now that Clare was old enough to start proper schooling, it made sense for them to pick up their lives in the country where they meant to live. I imagine, too, that they must have been relatively pleased to see the back of Giles. They had both been very good with him, but it was hardly fair to expect their lives, as well as ours, to be dominated by his tragic agenda. (A few years later, I wrote to Renate to ask if she would be prepared to become Giles’s guardian if anything were to happen to Derek and me. After a delay, she wrote back with a thoughtful letter in which, in the kindest possible way, she declined. She wished Giles well, she said, but simply did not think that she could cope.) But while I entirely understood Renate’s migration, I did not relish trying to manage Giles’s frightening new problems without an older sister to fall back on for advice or moral support.

  My mother was still nearby, just around the corner from our new house, but age was catching up with her, and the bigger, stronger and more violent Giles became, the harder it was for her to deal with him. Nor was there much comfort to be gained from the fact that we had acquired another new neighbour: my beloved Uncle. Auntie, who had been poorly for some time, had died in 1974, and after a few months of adjustment he had been persuaded to come and live round the corner from us. It was lovely to be able to see more of him, and to be able to repay some of the kindness he had shown me. But he too was frail - more so than my mother - and in my mental categorisation of the extended family came under the heading People to be Looked After rather than People to Help with the Looking After.

  There was, unfortunately, a lot of looking after be done. Giles, on top of all his other problems, had developed epilepsy. This is not uncommon with autistic children, but no easier to deal with for that. In the midst of, as often as not, a violent rage, his body would abruptly go into spasm, his limbs would twist inwards, his face would contort and he would fall to the ground. Sometimes, this would be preceded by a terrifying, primordial scream - a ghastly sound, in a voice that it was impossible to recognise as his.

  Derek, in particular, found Giles’s fits desperately upsetting. He felt that the screams were screams of physical and spiritual agony. I took a more matter-of-fact approach: to me, these were physical symptoms of a physical problem and, in that sense, less distressing than Giles’s underlying autism. But the fact remained that the condition had to be dealt with, and that this new propensity to seizures made Giles even more of a hazard to himself and to others than he had been before. With medication, the seizures became relatively infrequent - perhaps half a dozen a year. But the threat of them was constant, and it was not a threat to be taken lightly. I still feel numb at the thought of some of his more disastrous seizures, such as the one that he had in a swimming-pool, or the one where he fell and smashed his head on the radiator.

  It is hard to convey to anyone who has not experienced it how harrowing it is to deal with such problems. Your emotional involvement with your child remains as intense as ever - yet you also begin to see him as, in some sense, the enemy. What horror will he come up with next? What disaster will he inflict on you, or himself, next?

  In some ways, Giles’s seizures could feel like a relief. They would generally follow a period of several days in which he had been growing steadily more troubled and, as a result, more violent. When the convulsions came - assuming that you could see him through them without injury - they would usually be followed by a day or more of very subdued behaviour. I don’t think he was happy during these quiet spells, but at least he wasn’t dangerous.

  Giles steadied up at The Walnuts weekly boarding school and we went through a couple of very good years.

  Of course, you don’t really wish the misery of a seizure on your child. But there were certainly times when, cowering in a corner with my elbows over my head as he rained blows down on me, I would think: if he’s going to have a seizure, I hope it comes soon.

  It was easier for Derek than for me to deal with the violent side of Giles’s autism; but it was easier for me than for him to work from home. So, even when my company’s future was hanging in the balance, I spent most of my working days from May 1974 onwards at home with Giles. I tried repeatedly to get help, and every now
and then I would find a day care centre that would share the burden for a while. But no one seemed to have a long-term answer to the question of how to look after a big, strong, violent boy who had no notion that there were agendas in the world other than his own.

  I suppose those brief episodes of succour explain why I was able to keep steering F International through its troubles while all this was going on. There were a few particularly stable months, when I used to drive Giles to The Manor hospital in Aylesbury, where a lovely Jamaican-born nurse called Blossom would care for him for a large chunk of the day and even, occasionally, overnight. But then that, like everything else, came to an end, for bureaucratic reasons which I now forget, and the whole desperate search for help began again.

  As anyone with a vulnerable child will know, there is a great deal of theoretical support available from state agencies, but getting practical access to it usually means negotiating an administrative maze that can reduce even the most switched-on citizen to despair. (I suspect my mother experienced something comparable trying to organise our escape from Nazi Vienna.) The greater the child’s needs - and children don’t come much more expensive to look after than a profoundly learning-disabled autistic boy - the greater the number of bureaucratic hoops that have to be jumped through. For parents who are often already close to breaking-point, the difficulties can sometimes seem insuperable.