If that sounds like a catalogue of failure, perhaps it is. Yet none of these ventures was entirely unsuccessful (although the American one ultimately left us nearly £300,000 out of pocket). It was just that the balance between risk and potential benefit was wrong: too much work was required just to stave off catastrophe, with too little scope for reward if everything went right. In each case (though in different ways), the market was inappropriate: too saturated in Denmark, too inflexible in the Netherlands, too mature in the US. Perhaps we should have worked that out in advance. Yet without those early experiments in overseas expansion we would never have been as well prepared to grow rapidly and effectively when the opportunity to become truly international arose in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, I had, as ever, other things on my mind. Giles was settled in to his subnormality hospital at Borocourt. To say that he was happily settled in would have been stretching even my wishful credulity. Laburnums Ward was a bleak, joyless place. His fellow patients - around a dozen of them - were all teenage boys, with handicaps comparable to Giles’s. I couldn’t confidently say that any of them was less afflicted than he was; and, as tragically happens in such environments, the problems of each added to the pains of all. There was one boy who was always breaking windows; one who ate paint; one who chewed up his and others’ clothes; another who was always trying to play with the fire-extinguisher. Giles himself liked tearing up paper. Another boy was constantly urinating in the wrong places. Several liked to expose themselves, and several were inclined (under certain hard-to-identify provocations) to lash out at their fellow-patients. Put all these challenging behaviour traits in one place, along with a dozen others, and you get something pretty hellish.
It was a locked, prison-like ward, upstairs in a modern building just outside the main Gothic house. You had to ring the bell to get in. Once you were in, you were generally escorted, for your own safety. Everything in the ward was bare. There were no toys, no pictures, just plastic covers over the windows, a few plastic chairs, with bare walls of whitened concrete and a basic dormitory and communal eating area. The kitchen door was locked; the wardrobe door was locked; the toilet doors had no locks; the toilet seats had been removed; one toilet didn’t even have a door. Common prudence demanded such precautions. Yet the combined effect was an environment devoid of stimulation. And mentally handicapped teenagers, like any teenagers, do not respond well to boredom.
There was no way of determining with confidence what Giles felt about being at Borocourt. He had reacted badly to the initial move, but that was to be expected. Subsequently he had quietened down, as he grew used to the new routine. But what was his quality of life? We could only guess. It was hard to imagine, though, from the inarticulate cries that echoed periodically from the ward’s hard walls, that our son was in a very happy place.
He would spend some time most days at an educational facility in the hospital grounds, where they did things like pottery and drawing; this appeared to function reasonably well. The rest of his time was spent in the ward, where the quality of life was determined by whoever was that day’s lowest common denominator among the patients. As the months passed, Giles seemed to grow moodier and more troubled. Perhaps that would have happened anyway, as he passed deeper into adolescence and epilepsy. Or perhaps - as we feared - it was his environment.
To begin with, we would take Giles home with us at weekends. But this proved increasingly difficult as his behaviour grew wilder. Car journeys, in particular, became impossibly dangerous - always assuming that we could coax him into the car in the first place. At one point, when we were about to take him back on a Sunday afternoon, he simply refused, with all the strength and violence at his disposal, to get in the car at all, and I had to get the hospital to send an ambulance to collect him. Eventually it grew clear that we had to find another way of doing things.
This horrified Derek. If we can’t do anything else for him, he argued, at least we can still give him his days out. But the truth was that we couldn’t. If a raging, violent, strapping, 6ft teenager doesn’t want to be in a car, you cannot safely drive him. It’s also fair to assume that the teenager himself isn’t particularly enjoying the journey. Eventually I was reduced to contacting the hospital and imploring them to accept that, irrespective of anything that Derek might tell them to the contrary, we simply weren’t able to look after Giles at weekends any more.
Thereafter, we took to making weekend visits to Giles at Borocourt. He seemed to welcome this, and Derek rapidly agreed that it was an improvement on our kidnap-like weekend car journeys. We would take Giles out for a walk in the hospital grounds, usually stopping for a picnic; sometimes, as he grew comfortable with the routine, we would take him a little further. It seems such a small thing now, in print; yet at the time it felt like a huge achievement, to have found a way of sharing a little happiness between the three of us. Even in winter, when our picnics were as often as not eaten hurriedly while huddled under a heat-reflecting blanket to keep out the rain and the cold, they still felt like a cheering approximation to family life. They were the only scraps of such life that remained to us.
Only one other boy in the ward received family visits. His parents, whom we got to know slightly, wore crash-helmets when they went in to see him. Experience had taught them that it was unsafe not to. The other patients fended for themselves as best they could, buffeted by their various disorders (not all of them related to autism) and befuddled by their various medications. The staff seemed to be doing their best, but there was no sense of visionary zeal - just rather desperate damage limitation.
We agonised constantly about entrusting Giles to Borocourt. We knew that we had no choice but to do so - yet there was something about the place that encouraged dark imaginings. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner had described the building (which has since reverted to its original name, Wyfold Court) as “a nightmare abbey in spirit”, and it was hard to watch its ornate towers receding into the twilight after a weekend visit without entertaining dark fantasies about misery and despair.
It emerged much later that some things about Borocourt had indeed been as bad as fantasy painted them. There were, for example, perfectly sane patients who had been shut up in the main hospital for 40 years or more for no better reason than that they had had an illegitimate child, causing relatives to declare that they were “morally defective”. There were people whose families had abandoned them so totally that there was no record of their next of kin. There was even a woman whose family had put her there on the basis of a close teenage friendship she had formed with a man with the wrong-coloured skin. She remained there for 33 years.
But we had no way of knowing that then, any more than we could have known the very worst of what went on in Laburnums ward. We could only fall back on the few certainties that we had: the fact that we could not keep Giles at home; the fact that we were dependent for his care on the assistance of the state; and the fact that our local health authority had identified Borocourt as the most appropriate - and indeed only - place for Giles to be looked after.
So we struggled on, hoping for the best, wishing that the voices of doubt at the back of our minds would quieten down, and trying to make the most of those short, precious weekend excursions in the hospital grounds.
Meanwhile, there were other troubles to contend with - notably a devastating deterioration in Suzette Harold’s health. This began indistinctly, around 1979, manifesting itself initially as a slight propensity to tiredness and clumsiness. But the symptoms worsened, and, after about a year of mounting physical weakness, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
She bore it bravely, carrying on for the most part as though nothing was wrong. But there was no getting away from it, and it was heart-breaking to see this strong, brilliant, beautiful woman gradually withering under the disease’s relentless attack. One of the cruellest moments came when, after some public function, complaints filtered back to me that Su
zette had been drunk. She hadn’t been - she never drank alcohol - but her illness had made her stagger and slur her words. Thereafter, on my advice, she never went anywhere without a silver-topped stick: not because she usually needed its support but as a kind of public statement that she was, among other things, an invalid.
She carried on working for several years - and the company continued to prosper under her management. But eventually the handicap became insuperable, and she retired on a total disability pension in 1981. It was a tragic end to a brilliant career, and she never quite came to terms with it. I missed her greatly, both as a colleague and, later, as a human being. (She died a dozen years later, her full potential tragically unrealised.)
There then followed an extended period of management turmoil. I briefly resumed day-to-day control of the company myself, appointing another chairman who, for reasons too tiresome to go into here, did not work out and did not last long. I then switched back to being chairman and appointed our most high-powered regional director, Alison Newell, to be managing director in Suzette’s place.
Alison had a huge amount going for her. She had been with F International for more than a decade, including a substantial and successful spell managing our southern division. (We had at that stage in our growth divided our activities regionally. Later, as the UK economy became less localised, we found it less cumbersome to partition our organisation by function rather than geography.) She had recently spent several months in Scotland in preparation for her new role, and had successfully developed a new division for us up there. She was clever and beautiful - clients often seemed to fall in love with her - as well as being energetic and entrepreneurial, with a strong sense of ethics and professionalism and a gift for cost-management that predisposed the organisations she managed towards profitability.
Yet in some hard-to-define sense she was not (in contrast to her predecessor or, for that matter, her successor) the right woman at the right time.
This was probably my fault as well as hers. I was committed in principle to staying in the background and letting the managing director manage, but I’m not sure that I had entirely absorbed the idea at an emotional level. Suzette’s illness had sharpened my sense of life’s transience, and I was full of impatience for many things to be achieved. I wanted the company to become more profitable. I wanted our management structures to grow more solid and mature, so that I could be sure that the business could thrive without me. I also wanted, increasingly, to earn money for myself and my family. And I wanted to push on towards my goal of a staff-owned company.
I tried scrupulously to stay out of Alison’s hair, and indeed eventually relinquished the chairmanship, recruiting Leighton Davies, formerly of Racal Electronics, to take my place in February 1984. (Thereafter I was merely group chief executive.) But she must have sensed my shadow behind her even when I wasn’t there. When I was there, she made it pretty clear - though not out loud - that she didn’t want me around. I found this hurtful but told myself that it was the price that had to be paid for letting go. So I focused on my strategic and international work and left Alison to get on with it. I felt less comfortable about doing so than I had done with Suzette, but I made myself do it - and, as a result, stored up trouble for the future.
There was plenty for me to keep myself busy with, and, in the meantime, sales and profits continued to grow respectably. I was also distracted by my own health. Increasingly, over a period of many months or perhaps even years, I had been weighed down by a sense of exhaustion. My energy and drive had evaporated; even my intellect seemed to be fading. I would be taking part in a technical discussion or committee meeting, and the ideas would start to seem slippery, so that I couldn’t quite get a grip on them. I was overwhelmingly tired all the time and had only to sit down in a quiet place for a minute to feel my eyes closing with sleep.
I put it down to sheer physical tiredness - I was driving about 30,000 miles a year at the time and probably travelling as many again by air - but, given my previous breakdown, I felt more concerned about this than I might otherwise have done. And when I realised that, for the second or third time in a week, I had been too tired in the evening to go upstairs except by crawling on hands and knees, I began to suspect that something more significant was happening.
Then, on a business trip in the US, I mentioned my worries to a trusted colleague, Elizabeth Virgo. She looked at me closely for a minute or two and said: “That’s not exhaustion. That’s what my sister has. You’ve got diabetes.”
Not long afterwards, my doctor confirmed the diagnosis. I began to take the appropriate medication and, bit by bit, my symptoms eased. I was lucky. Had I soldiered on regardless, as instinct told me to, I could have suffered a fatal collapse.
By the time my medication kicked in, my head had cleared sufficiently for me to focus on the problem of Alison. There was no longer any denying that it was a problem - nearly three years into her tenure. The company’s results were healthy, but it was becoming harder to know if the company itself was healthy. We had recently moved into new offices in Berkhamsted, just across the county border in Hertfordshire. (We paid £300,000 for the freehold in 1981 - a spectacularly good investment.) For perhaps the first time, the company had a headquarters worthy of its public image and its human assets. Yet Alison was rarely to be seen there: she had taken to doing more and more of her work from our Horsham office, near her home in West Sussex. My fellow directors and I had no objection in principle to such an arrangement - this was, after all, a company built on flexible working. But the physical detachment, in this case, mirrored an operational detachment. It was not just I who was being frozen out: it was the whole of senior management. Alison was running everything herself, from Horsham, rather as I had once run things: as a one-woman band. Unlike me, however, she didn’t seem to be developing new senior management talent who might lead the company into new territory in future. She was making a good fist of the short-term management of the company, but it simply wasn’t what F International needed at this stage in its development. It needed robust management structures, structures that would facilitate expansion and guarantee its long-term future; not one woman sitting in a private office, spider-like, running everything herself.
When I took Alison to task about this, she brushed my concerns aside. “What are you worried about?” she said. “I’m doing it, aren’t I?” I urged her to appoint a deputy. She refused. “But what if you fell under the proverbial bus?” I asked, more than once. “It would be fine,” she insisted. But it wouldn’t have been.
From Alison’s perspective, I was the one at fault. I was being the over-controlling founder, refusing to accept that the company had moved on. I can see why she felt this, but I think that, if anything, the opposite was true. If I hadn’t been so anxious not to be controlling, I might not have allowed communication between us to deteriorate so badly. As it was, what with my imperfect communication skills and her rather reserved persona, it was becoming almost impossible for us to have a constructive conversation.
But it wasn’t just a question of personality. Other directors made similar representations to Alison: she needed to delegate, she was told; she needed a deputy, she needed to push down responsibility to the regional directors. She stood her ground. Eventually, towards the end of 1984, I took matters into my own hands and, at my instigation, the board told her to add another layer of management (reporting to her) - creating the kind of formal structure that one would find in a public company. This weakened the role of regional managers - which caused some ill-feeling - and brought control of a single, enlarged, nationwide sales force back to head office. Shortly afterwards, Alison handed in her notice, and in due course left.
I have tried to be fair in telling this part of my story. I am sure that Alison would tell it differently. But neither of us would dispute that it was an unhappy time for both of us. There was no question about Alison’s talent: two years later (with another former F I
nternational employee, Ann Budge), she set up her own software consultancy, Newell & Budge, and made a spectacular success of it. But she hadn’t been a perfect match for F International’s needs at the time, and I think we were both relieved - once the bruises had healed - to move on.
From my point of view, there were lessons to be learnt. Most importantly, I had to think more specifically about what kind of leadership and management F International now needed. A decade earlier, Alison might have been an ideal managing director. But the company was now too big for that kind of management. Like a child turning imperceptibly into an adult, F International had become a proper grown-up company, with blue-chip clients and a multi-million-pound turnover. It needed to be run as such.
I also needed to come to terms with the changing relationship between me and my company. The harsh truth was that, if I wanted it to stand on its own two feet, without my constant intervention, I needed to stop thinking of it as my company. Part of my difficulty with Alison had been personal: I hadn’t felt comfortable with someone else - someone I trusted less than Suzette - treating the company as if it were hers. Yet that, in practice, was what letting go was going to feel like. I could make sure the right management structures were in place, try even harder to get the right people in place; but ultimately I had to leave them to make their own decisions and, if necessary, their own mistakes. Inevitably, this would hurt.
I also realised that my vision of a self-sustaining company was closely tied to my vision of a staff-owned company. Having achieved my initial goal of building a successful, sustainable business, I wanted to be sure that, whatever else happened to it in future, it retained its special character as a flexible, ethical, female-friendly organisation whose staff were listened to and trusted. Transferring ownership to the staff seemed the surest way of achieving this.
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 18