But I did draw one immediate spiritual conclusion from Giles’s death that has remained an article of faith for me ever since. After all that suffering there had to be something I could do to redress the balance. And if there was any meaning to be found in what had happened, it was surely to be found by my throwing myself into the struggle against autism to a degree that I had never imagined before. That way, at least, I might make some kind of sense of Giles’s life and death.
It was hard, at first, to translate this conviction into practical deeds. Everything seemed so hopeless, it was hard to muster the energy to do anything. Gradually, however, the demands of existing projects began to prod me back into action.
My first major engagement, less than six weeks after the funeral, was a big lunch at the Mercers’ Hall in the City of London, celebrating my £5m gift to the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, which had been officially announced just a few days before Giles’s death. Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut, was guest of honour. In normal circumstances, I would have been thrilled to meet him. As it was, I was mainly concerned to get through the day without losing my composure. I more or less managed it.
Thereafter, the challenges of Prior’s Court reasserted themselves with a vengeance, clamouring for my attention. Robert Hubbard took up his position as Principal at the beginning of 1999 and, not unnaturally, was eager to speed up the recruitment of pupils and staff. Architects and builders were already worrying about completing the renovation works on time and on budget. It was all very well for me to have lost my enthusiasm for everything, but the project remained real. I had to find a way of making it work.
The crisis that really galvanised me back into action was a breakdown in our relationship with the Higashi Hope Foundation. I will not try to apportion blame for this; indeed, I am not even sure that I have ever properly understood what went wrong. But the central fact was simple enough: the deal had fallen through. And the resulting problem was stark: here we were, eight months before our projected opening date, with a huge question-mark over our ability to use the teaching system that was the project’s raison-d’être.
I may momentarily have felt tempted to use this as a pretext for abandoning the whole idea. If so, the temptation was rapidly drowned by the enthusiasm of my colleagues, especially Robert, who had already run two specialist schools for autistic children (in Cambridgeshire) and was now simmering with enthusiasm at the prospect of creating such a school from scratch. As he saw it, the collapse of our arrangement for acting as a licensed Higashi franchise was an opportunity rather than a problem. After all, he argued, it was not as if there was nothing at all of value in the way the British educational system currently approached children with learning difficulties. Similarly, it would be dogmatic to insist that the Higashi system was perfect. What we really needed - and what we were now free to create - was an approach that combined the core ideas of Higashi (structure, high staff-to-pupil ratios, use of physical exercise as a behaviour-management tool) with the best aspects of British methodology. Robert could hardly wait to start recruiting and training staff with such an approach in mind. We tried to hire a former Higashi employee as a trainer, but this soon fell through too, and we all became progressively committed to what is now known as Prior Methodology - an eclectic, dynamic approach that is plainly Higashi-inspired but, at the same time, is very much a bespoke system in its own right, adhering to the best UK educational practices.
The challenge of getting the physical fabric of the school ready in time was as urgent as ever. The builders were now in situ, and the scaffolding was going up around the building, but the list of things to be done seemed to lengthen by the day. Parts of the property had simply fallen into disrepair. One wing - added in the 1960s - eventually had to be pulled down; asbestos was found under the dining-room floor; part of the roof was leaking; there were major problems with the drains; and so on. We also needed, among other things, to replace the steep main staircase with a wide, shallow one; to shut off another staircase altogether; to replace narrow, sharp stairway corners - which can result in anxiety and bad reactions to surprises - with broad, curving ones where children can see what is coming well in advance; to add or reposition windows and doors to meet child protection requirements; to install fire escapes that our pupils might reasonably be expected to use safely; to install a sensory swimming-pool in one half of the ugly modern sports hall; and to incorporate enormous amounts of storage space.
It didn’t help that the building was listed. Every significant alteration had to be approved, and even ostensibly simple matters such as knocking down a derelict (and hazardous) glasshouse proved unexpectedly problematic. (The glasshouse turned out to be listed too: “the best ‘Messenger’ glasshouse I’ve ever seen”, according to the National Trust-recommended specialist who eventually restored it for us.)
I could spend several chapters describing the obstacles and pitfalls we encountered in the course of the renovation, from structural and safety issues to heritage-related bureaucracy, building regulations and boundary issues to unwanted resident wildlife (including rooks, doves, hornets, moles and rabbits). Kate Luker eventually identified well over 1,000 snags that the builders had to be asked to deal with. Predictably, costs soared - the project, including start-up losses, would eventually cost the Shirley Foundation nearly £30m - but, none the less, it was happening, and Kate managed to keep the works more or less on schedule.
For me, the sheer volume of things to be done helped to fill the vacuum that Giles’s death had left in my life. It was therapeutic to spend weekends - which for as long as I could remember had revolved around Giles - getting my hands dirty and my brow sweaty performing manual tasks in the house or, more often, the grounds. I don’t suppose this labour made a great deal of difference in the overall scheme of things, but it was soothing to tire oneself out in practical challenges, knowing that, in this at least, determination and persistence would eventually achieve the desired goal. It also provided opportunities for starting to rebuild my fragile relationship with Derek, who occasionally joined in. I particularly remember three dusty, dangerous weekends when we painstakingly pruned a mess of overgrown arched pear-trees (complete with hornets’ nest), which, like much of the garden, were protected by a heritage listing. The practical need for teamwork forced us to rediscover an element of mutual trust, and the shared frustrations and satisfactions reminded us that we might have something in common beyond our tragic experience as parents. (We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when, a year later, some professional gardeners, ignorant of the listing, simply uprooted the trees in question.)
And so life went on, and the months raced by, and before we knew it was late August, and the builders had finished, leaving our purchasing manager, Keith Hall, just three weeks in which to install all the furniture and equipment the school needed before our scheduled opening date of 13 September. The property now included a new two-storey residential building, capable of housing 60 students, with the bedrooms planned to afford the privacy required under the Childrens’ Act. There was a small covered swimming pool, a renovated gym, and some new landscaped formal courtyards. The clocks in the two clock towers had been mended, and we had obtained an official charter and coat of arms, including the motto: “To learn to be” - which seemed to me to sum up what our pupils might hope to get out of Prior’s Court.
We had at this stage only two pupils signed up, which was discouraging, especially since we had 28 staff. But Robert was confident that demand would pick up, and the opening went ahead, in a low-key way, on 13 September 1999. Eight months later, we held a more public event, when the school was officially opened by the Princess Royal, and already the number of pupils had increased to nine.
My main memories of that royal opening, I should add, are of torrential rain and of my unwise insistence that the princess should be served biscuits made by the children themselves. (I realised at the last minute that the batch they had prepa
red was too burnt and disgusting to be fit for consumption by any human being, let alone a princess, and we opened a shop-bought packet instead.) I also remember looking around me, at the animated pupils and the beautiful, friendly surroundings and the confident, motivated staff and knowing beyond doubt that Prior’s Court would be a success.
So it proved. Like FI Group and Kingwood before it, Prior’s Court rapidly acquired a life and momentum of its own. I was much quicker this time to accept that it could and should proceed without me. I have no educational expertise; Robert Hubbard and his staff had plenty. Under Robert’s leadership, with intelligent management from the Prior’s Court Foundation (now chaired by Sir Derek Hornby), the school achieved its target of financial independence by 2002, and I retired from the Foundation, as planned, in 2003. Since 2004, the school has had about 60 pupils, aged between five and 19, looked after by 360 staff. A Young Adult Centre opened in 2011.
The school’s stated goals - to build communication, to reduce challenging behaviours, to develop appropriate sleeping, eating and toileting patterns and to equip students with a “toolbox” of transferable life skills (along with some appropriately modified knowledge of the National Curriculum) - are achieved with impressive regularity. Some pupils are able to move on after four or five years to local units (e.g., local authority schools or care provision); while the general aim is for students who stay till age 19 - especially those who started early - to find paid employment afterwards. (In the Young Adult Centre, students stay until 25.) It is, in short, a thriving organisation, with a worldwide reputation as a model of good practice in the care and education of children with autism.
I am immensely proud of this success story, yet my role in it has for many years been purely symbolic. I am Founding Patron, and that is all. But I love to visit the school and to see the pupils’ progress. It reminds me that it is possible, through the good will of many people, to make a difference in the world; and perhaps in some way it reminds me of Giles and the life he might have had.
And there is one particular aspect of life at Prior’s Court that remains my personal contribution: a collection of more than 300 works of contemporary art, scattered strategically around the house and grounds.
I acquired most of this collection - which includes paintings, sculptures and a variety of applied arts - between 1999 and 2002 (although I am still adding to it), and have loaned it to the school on a semi-permanent basis. (The original idea was to give it, but the responsibility of ownership would, it seems, have created too many headaches for the management.) The idea is for the art to meet the spiritual needs of pupils and staff, and to provide extra channels of communication for and between both.
I believe that art is not just decorative - and, sometimes, educational - but has enormous therapeutic value, especially for autistic children, who learn visually, not aurally. It is a steady, visible, enduring good that enhances the lives of those who come into contact with it; and children, including children with learning difficulties, have as much right to that good as anyone else.
It was my privilege to commission a portrait of Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Internet, for The Royal Society.
I have, subsequently, made other artistic gifts. For example, I recently commissioned portraits of Tim Berners-Lee and Stephen Hawking for the Royal Society; and I have given a sculpture of Hawking, by Milein Cosman, to University College, Oxford (where the great physicist studied as an undergraduate); and a painting of HRH The Duke of Edinburgh (in 2012) for the Prince Philip House HQ of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of which I am a Fellow. But the art that means most to me is in the Prior’s Court collection. Many of the artists chosen are my own personal favourites, but it is the artworks’ collective relationship with the school - the way they imbue the whole environment with humanity, warmth and depth and create a sense of shared wonder between pupils and staff - that makes them magical. If the atmosphere of the school has some kind of “healing” effect, I am sure that the art has something to do with it.
The main linking idea is that the works should be inspirational, hopeful, developmental, calm and serene rather than stimulating or challenging. The palettes tend towards the quiet and pastel; the shapes are generally abstract; and materials and structures are selected on the basis that anything that can get broken will get broken. Artists are grouped to suggest different moods in different places, helping to give shape, focus and meaning to a landscape that might otherwise seem frighteningly vast. The art also helps pupils to find their way around, and gives them the confidence to explore.
I find it fascinating to see how, over and over again, across the years, these artworks can reach out to pupils, creating the human connections that are the essence of what the school is trying to achieve. Generally the tactile pieces are the most popular. The dog by Elizabeth Frink gets a lot of pats, while a water sculpture is arguably our most successful commission of all (not least with the local pigeons).
But pupil reactions can never be predicted. One very quiet John Miller painting appealed to one child to the point of obsession. He liked it so much that he kept licking it. Before long there was spittle all over it, and we had to move it higher up the wall. There was also a wooden bench (not strictly speaking an artwork) that proved so popular that someone kept biting chunks out of it. That one had to be removed altogether.
I am sure that there are people who see the Prior’s Court art collection as an indulgence, but I have no doubt that it is integral to the school’s most important characteristic: the simple fact that it is a cheerful, friendly, unthreatening place. The world tends to feel benign when you are at Prior’s Court. Children feel safe there, and parents feel comfortable about letting them go there.
This last point is important. There are few things more pitiful than the sight of the parent or parents of a child with autism, handing them over to the care of a residential institution for the first time. Almost invariably, such parents will be tormented by guilt. They will feel that they have failed their child by not being able to care for him or her at home; feel that they are putting their own sanity before their child’s; and fear that their child will be left feeling lonely, frightened, confused and abandoned when they drive away.
From time to time I see such parents, and, when I can, try to reassure them. I tell them, in all honesty and with total conviction, that Prior’s Court is the school to which I would have been only too happy to entrust my own autistic son’s physical, intellectual and spiritual development - if only such a school had existed at the time. I explain that I understand all too well the agony that a parent feels on entrusting such a child to an institution of any kind - but that half a lifetime of bitter experience has taught me beyond doubt that to leave a child with autism in a sympathetic specialist school whose regime may loosen the condition’s grip on that child is the most loving thing that any parent could do for them.
And sometimes, after such an encounter, I am reminded of another parent who performed a similarly counter-instinctive act more than 70 years ago, sending her children away into the unknown from Nazi Vienna in order to give them a chance of life. And I wonder if, on balance, I may perhaps have been over-harsh in my judgement of my mother.
23: Fighting Back
PRIOR’S COURT was one of my proudest achievements - a source of even more satisfaction than being appointed a Dame at the beginning of 2000; or, for that matter, the Beacon Fellowship Prize that I was awarded (“for starting innovative charities in the fields of autism and IT”) in 2003. But by the time I stood down from the Prior’s Court Foundation, in 2003, the school was just one item in an increasingly complex portfolio of charitable activity that was occupying my time.
I received my dameship from HRH The Prince of Wales in 2000 (my OBE in 1980 was presented by HM Queen Elizabeth II).
There were several reasons for this, of which perhaps the most pressing was the curious fact that, at precisely t
he time that I was pouring money into the development of the school and other causes, I was growing rapidly and spectacularly richer.
This was not the result of any new initiative on my part. Rather, it was caused by the continuing success of FI Group, in which I retained a shareholding of 5.1 per cent. I had had little to do with the company since its 1996 flotation, but it had flourished without me. It had also grown spectacularly, helped both by Hilary’s dynamic leadership and by a continuing culture of staff ownership. Some 30 per cent of the company was directly or indirectly owned by the staff (compared with 25 per cent when I retired in 1993) - which was all the more impressive given that the original shareholding had been diluted by a series of major acquisitions. These included: IIS Infotech Limited, an Indian computer services company based in New Delhi, bought for £26m in 1997; OSI, a London based project management and IT consultancy group, bought for £100m in 1999; Druid, a Reading-based software consultancy, bought for £725m in 2000; and Synergy International Consulting, bought for £14m in 2001.
This breakneck expansion had, on the whole, worked well for the company. Taking over IIS Infotech allowed FI Group to offer the kind of managed, high-quality outsourcing to India that I had first envisaged 20 years earlier; OSI added further depth to the company’s already impressive client base, bringing with it such prime customers as American Express, Prudential and Orange; Druid was more controversial but did at least turn a rival into a subsidiary, as well as making the group’s gender balance more even, since Druid had a very male culture. (One analyst described the takeover as “like Bath rugby club merging with Cheltenham Ladies’ College lacrosse team”, which led to various jokes about which company was which.)
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 27