But that, as it turned out, was only part of the story. What began as a simple attempt to increase Giles’s quality of life became, in due course, something much bigger.
The initial catalyst for expansion was our realisation that, once Giles had settled into The Cuddy, his standard of living was almost embarrassingly high - and certainly a lot higher than mine and Derek’s. We laughed at this when it first occurred to us, but before long I had begun to wonder if it wasn’t rather extravagant for so much care and money to be lavished on one young man, no matter how beloved. I have never been comfortable with waste, and have spent much of my life imagining ways of achieving efficiencies. So perhaps it was hardly surprising that, early in the 1990s, I found myself floating the idea that this bungalow and this team could with very little extra investment provide a similar standard of care for two people rather than one. I began to make discreet inquiries as to whether or not there was another disabled young man in the area who might benefit from joining Giles in The Cuddy.
This train of thought was soon joined by another one. After more than five years of caring for Giles in the community, our finances were close to meltdown. (Derek was slower than me to pick up on this problem, which caused us to have several heated arguments. He was never much good with money. We’d been sharing a bank account for well over 20 years before he realised that “O/D” on a bank statement stood for “overdrawn”.) Providing this level of care was cripplingly expensive - more than £90,000 a year, excluding the capital cost of buying The Cuddy - and the proceeds of my share sale had been all but wiped out. This meant that the cost was increasingly being met from my own £100,000-a-year salary - after I had paid nearly half of it to the state in tax. This was terrifying. I had no objection to spending whatever wealth I had on Giles’s well-being, but expenditure at a rate of nearly £1m of taxed income per decade was simply suicidal, especially since I was approaching retirement age (in 1993). And, in any case, Giles had a statutory entitlement to support from the state.
When we took Giles out of Borocourt in 1987 we were assured - orally - that he would not thereby lose his entitlement to assistance from the state (which had been paying to keep him in Borocourt). But the precise details had been complex, partly because of changes that were then in motion to do with the care of the learning disabled, and partly because of a disagreement between Berkshire and Oxfordshire County Councils as to which of them was responsible for Giles’s case. (Borocourt was right on the border between the two counties, and had been founded jointly by the two councils in 1930; Giles was for some reason deemed to have been admitted from Berkshire but discharged into Oxfordshire.) Our concern back then had simply been to get Giles out of Borocourt as quickly as possible, and we had taken it on trust that the financial details would be sorted out in due course.
It would take several chapters to describe the subsequent saga in detail, but the long and the short of it was that, six years later, despite innumerable letters and meetings, the sorting-out had yet to be completed, and Giles’s care had, in the meantime, been funded almost entirely by us. (A large annual grant from the Independent Living Fund, set up in 1988, had taken up some of the burden. This was much appreciated but nothing like enough to reduce our own contribution to a sustainable level.) So we devoted an increasing amount of time to putting pressure on the relevant authorities to resolve the situation; and, in the course of these indescribably protracted and frustrating negotiations, the idea arose that it might be more cost-effective, in several ways, to make The Cuddy’s activities charitable.
Like many of my ideas, this one took time to gestate. The general concept was that the Cuddy would take in an extra resident or two, so achieving considerable economies of scale with overheads, staff, etc. The Cuddy would at the same time become a charitable concern, whose activities (providing residential care for young men with autism) would be financed both with payments from the relevant local authorities (e.g., Residential Care Allowance) and with top-up payments from a charitable trust that I set up around that time (1993) for that purpose. I could then pay for the Cuddy out of gross rather than net income, and the whole project would become significantly more sustainable - while the extra resident or residents might see their quality of life improve dramatically.
It turned out to be a lot more complicated than that. I won’t go into all the regulatory and procedural details. But one point that soon became clear was that we would need two extra residents, not one, before we could be considered for charitable status. There was no question of rushing the process of finding new residents whose needs matched what the Cuddy and its staff could offer, and so in the short term we contented ourselves with step one in the process: finding one extra resident and seeing where that led to.
Some months later, Giles was introduced to his new housemate. James Beville was a wild, slightly elfin teenager who liked to run around the garden emitting inarticulate shrieks of what sounded like joy. His schooldays so far had, by the sound of things, been extremely difficult, for him and his parents, for much the same reasons that Giles’s had been; and it was wonderful to feel that we could put the fruits of our painful journey to good use beyond our own family. Giles himself, though initially disconcerted when this new companion appeared in his life, would ultimately respond positively to the experience of sharing his world with another difficult and unpredictable young man.
The only people who never learnt to accept the new arrival were the neighbours, who unleashed a series of petty and, to my mind, disgraceful complaints. I think it might have been the rough language of some of the carers that disturbed them as much as the “shame” of having such young men in the neighbourhood. I replied politely to their complaints, seething with inner contempt. There were also two little girls living nearby, who used to mock James. We hoped he did not notice overmuch.
Generally, though, the Cuddy and its residents thrived. Giles, in particular, became unrecognisable as the distressed young man we had liberated from Borocourt. You would never have imagined that he was anything but handicapped; but the aura of wild, frustrated rage had dissipated, and he began to seem less like a threatening monster and more like a charming innocent. The outbursts and tantrums never stopped, but they became almost rare, and we learnt to recognise in their place that peculiar hum, or “severation”, by which people with autism often indicate contentment.
Phil Bunce moved on after a few years, and so, much later, did Paul Moran. But Giles was able to form attachments to several of those who came after, as he matured into his thirties in the 1990s: Stephen and Carol Bradley, who began to manage The Cuddy as if it were a proper care-home business ; David Williams, who succeeded them in 1994; and staff such as Martin Beek, Mary-Jane Sheridan (on whom Giles clearly had a romantic crush), Carol Kelly, Jane Henderson and many others - all employed with the proceeds of FI Group’s success. There were several non-speaking roles, too, played by the carers’ pets, including a succession of dogs - Tess, Rusty, Amy, Eric, Sasha - who helped Giles to overcome completely the fear of dogs that he had developed during his Borocourt years, and, most notably, Daisy the Cat, whose saintly patience even extended to allowing Giles to trim her whiskers with scissors. (Daisy initially arrived with her mother, the princess-like Woolly, who found the household a little too lively for her tastes and before long took herself elsewhere.)
As time passed, the range of stimulation to which Giles could safely be exposed grew broader. He went on day-trips - shopping in Oxford or Reading, for example - and, eventually, on longer breaks: to Norfolk, to Bognor Regis, to Somerset, to Ireland, even to Disneyland in Paris. He remained suspicious of the unusual, with volatile emotions and a short attention span, and he needed even closer supervision than usual when he was on his travels. But there was no doubt that, on balance, sustained, supervised exposure to suitable new experiences improved his quality of life significantly. He became, in a sense, a changed person. After five years or so in The Cuddy he was doi
ng things of his own accord that would have been unthinkable when he was in Borocourt. He would come out and greet us when we arrived to see him. He liked to get involved in unpacking the shopping. Sometimes, without prompting, he would help to wash up or lay the table; he would also choose to initiate a range of constructive activities, from painting to gardening to hitting tennis balls (which he liked to do with Derek). He enjoyed doing jigsaws, too, and learnt to complete them without looking at the pictures.
He would also - up to a point - speak. It is hard to know to what extent this was a development on his part or on that of his family and carers. Perhaps it was partly that we had learnt to understand his vocalisations better; but I have no doubt that it was also a question of his becoming more interested in the possibilities of communication. I don’t suppose a stranger would have been able to interpret many of the sounds, but for those who knew him Giles’s vocabulary would ultimately grow to include: “bee”, “bunny”, “butter”, “button”, “cake”, “cat”, “chips”, “Daddy”, “Daisy”, “duck”, “fan”, “Giles”, “hen”, “home”, “hello”, “mate”, “mind”, “more”, “orange”, “owl”, “pain”, “Paul”, “pie”, “pin”, “tea”, “toast”, “toilet”, “tired”, “vet”, “what”, “you”. It wasn’t much, for a grown man who was 24 when he came out of Borocourt and about 30 when that list of words was noted down. But it represented several huge strides out of the darkness that had engulfed his life during his years in the asylum.
It was much the same with my plans to make the Cuddy a charitable concern. Progress was slow but, over time, unmistakable. I endowed my new charitable trust (mentioned on the previous page) with cash and FI shares that I would otherwise have used for looking after Giles. My (justified) hope was that, by the time the shares came to be sold, they would be worth considerably more. The staff decided on the trust’s name: The Kingwood Trust - after the area in which the Cuddy was situated. It was registered as a charity in 1994.
The management of the Cuddy became more professional and, as a result, more confident. Eventually, as my wealth from FI Group increased, we found ourselves able to expand. In 1994 we acquired a second home, White Barn, in Reading, which we developed to provide supervised accommodation for (eventually) three more handicapped young people. When the first of these moved in, our care provision activities became charitable. A third property, Conchiglia (near Abingdon), followed some months later.
Somehow, without my ever quite noticing the point of transition, my vague thought that there might be a more efficient way of organising and funding the Cuddy had turned into a solid, well-run enterprise that was changing several lives for the better and would soon be capable of running itself without much supervision - or even involvement - from me.
I am getting ahead of myself here, condensing years of sometimes fraught evolution into a few quick pages. There are other strands of my story to tie up before we go any further.
For the time being the point to note is simply this: almost without noticing it, I had taken the first step on what would turn out to be a thrilling new adventure - taking the wealth I had built up over the previous 30 years or so and using it to do good in the world.
For the first time in years - the first time since I had given up my leading role at FI Group - I felt as though I had important work to do: work at which I was skilled, the prospect of which filled me with excitement.
19: Steve Who?
THE KINGWOOD TRUST was born at a time when my career at FI Group was dying. The two processes were not connected, but the timing was convenient. I was due to reach retirement age in 1993. I had generally assumed that I would carry on with the company rather longer than that, but, the way things worked out, I was glad for the exit route that retirement provided.
It was not that there was anything dramatically wrong with my final years with FI Group: it was just that they felt somehow unsatisfactory. The little cottage enterprise I had founded in 1962 had become an unqualified triumph, providing work for around 1,000 people (by the early 1990s) and making well over £1m of profit every year. Yet it all seemed strangely hollow. Our personal lifestyle had barely changed, except in so far as we had been able to channel our wealth into Giles’s care. We had no mansion, no fast car, no yacht - and, indeed, I don’t think Derek would ever have allowed us to indulge in such gratuitous consumption. I’m glad of this, in retrospect, although I suspect that, without Derek’s steadying influence, I might, as my wealth continued to grow, have acquired more of a taste for luxury and extravagance. But the odd thing back then was that, without such superficial trappings of success, it sometimes felt as though I had nothing to show for all those decades of struggle - as if I had simply imagined the whole thing.
It certainly felt like that sometimes when I went into work. FI Group was Hilary’s company now, enjoying the spectacular success that, it seemed, Hilary had brought to it unaided. Or rather - because I have only to write that sentence to realise how embittered it sounds - the company was driving itself forward partly through Hilary’s clear-sighted strategic vision and partly under its own steam. From 1991 onwards, hundreds of newly empowered shareholder executives were striving with every ounce of their energy and intelligence to improve their company’s performance; and, in a thousand different ways, they were succeeding. Even Hilary had only a limited influence on this extraordinary collective drive. As for me: what I said and did was irrelevant. I was part of the company’s history. What excited people was the company’s future.
Voting at one of our Annual General Meetings. Chief Executive Hilary Cropper is on my right. Sir Peter Thompson (invited for his success in taking the National Freight Corporation into co-ownership) in the chair.
I don’t think I was entirely useless. I gave Hilary advice when she asked for it (rarely) and provided her with introductions to valuable contacts (on which she seemed keener). I suggested and sometimes oversaw specific projects, found new market openings and, occasionally, gave a helping hand to new talent - although I began to wonder, later on, how helpful an ambitious young person at FI Group would find it to be seen as my protégé. I don’t think anyone could dispute that I earned my salary.
But it was painfully obvious, all the time, that I was not indispensable. I still had an office and a seat on the board as Founder Director, but no one saw any need to consult me about anything beyond what the formalities required, and Hilary made little attempt to disguise the fact that she didn’t really care what I thought about her plans for the company.
In the outside world, I still seemed to be the “go to” person for any kind of advice, analysis or commentary on matters relating to IT, flexible working or the changing nature of the modern workplace. (Perhaps Hilary felt pangs of jealousy about this, just as I felt pangs about her successes within the company.) My public fame was nourished both by FI Group’s visible success and by the increasing number of public roles that I found myself performing. In 1989 and 1990 I was the first female president of the British Computer Society (which had finally achieved chartered status in 1984). In 1992 I was Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, which I had helped to set up in 1986 and which had just become the City of London’s 100th livery company (attaining chartered status in 2010). I was also a trustee of Help the Aged, a Council member of the Industrial Society and Patron since 1987 of the Disablement Income Group.
Such activities nurtured my growing sense that pro bono activities could be as rewarding as profit-driven ones. They also gave me a prominence that led to a growing number of media appearances; to a series of honours - I was appointed a chartered engineer in 1990, while in November 1991 I became the first woman to win the British Institute of Management’s Gold Medal for “outstanding achievement” (with particular reference to FI Group’s pioneering of the “distributed office”); and to a number of non-executive directorships - for example, at AEA Technology (formerly the UK Atomic En
ergy Authority) from 1992 to 2000; and with Tandem Computers, in the US, from 1992 to1997. I was even honoured, in 1995, with election to the US National Women’s Hall of Fame; and with a Presidential Pin, awarded by former president Ronald Reagan, for “services to Anglo-American relations”.
All this helped to shore up my fragile self-belief. Inside FI Group, however, it was almost as if I had never contributed to the company’s success at all. Never mind the decades of sacrifice and drive, carving out market share through low profit-margins and building our reputation as a market-leading brand. I represented our humble origins and, as such, was little better than an embarrassment. Bit by bit I came to acknowledge that I wasn’t wanted.
I was particularly hurt in 1991, when I was quietly informed - by Peter Thompson, the chairman I had brought in to oversee our share offer to staff - that the board wanted me to take early retirement. Their proposal was that I would remain on the board but would lose my executive role. I found this very upsetting and pointed out indignantly that I was more than earning my keep with all the business leads I was bringing in. Peter’s response (and I appreciate that he was acting as a conduit for other people’s views) was that they could get someone else to do all that for much less money. But the real reason was plainly that Hilary, in particular, would simply prefer it if I wasn’t around.
It looks trivial and mundane in cold print. But back then I felt bitterly betrayed - like King Lear when, having given his kingdom to his two oldest daughters, he discovers to his horror and naïve surprise that they no longer treat him like a king. No doubt I was being oversensitive, but I felt absolutely rejected by my company - by people who I had always imagined had cause to feel grateful to me. This rejection seemed simultaneously hurtful and preposterous. This company that I had nurtured from infancy and nursed through countless crises and given to the people who now ran it - how could it imagine that it could ever exist without me? It was like a child rejecting its parent. (Had this perhaps been how my mother had felt, 50 years earlier, when I had insisted that I would rather live with Auntie?)
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 23