Losing My Virginity

by Richard Branson

  There was no doubt about the importance of his achievement. For Steve it was a world record but, as importantly for a major international airline, we had proved the point that you could build a light, highly efficient aircraft with no metal in its fuselage or wings and achieve sustained high-altitude flight. The Global Flyer used less fuel per hour than an American four-wheel-drive truck. If the lessons of this flight could be transferred to civil aviation and become integral to the cultures of Boeing and Airbus, commercial flying could finally become the most environmentally friendly way to carry large numbers of people around the planet.

  The future of the airline industry around the world also took a leap into the dark in January of 2005 on a cold clear winter’s morning in Toulouse. It takes something really special to bring a British prime minister and a French president together in the same place since relations between the two countries haven’t exactly been their best once the war on terrorism began. But, that morning, I was privileged to stand and watch Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac open the doors on the most amazing aircraft I’d ever seen in my life. It was the huge Airbus A380, and it is a monster. My mind slipped to the movie I had watched only two days earlier called The Aviator, which was about the life story of American businessman Howard Hughes. This Airbus was the first plane built that made his giant ‘Spruce Goose’ flying boat of 1946 look small. In the A380, Airbus had built the world’s largest-ever aircraft capable of carrying over 800 people, although Virgin loyalists will be pleased to hear that our version will only carry 550 – so there will finally be room for the double beds, gymnasium and casino that I have long wanted to put on long-haul flights. Unlike Howard Hughes, who never really had a market for his white elephant, I looked at the Airbus A380 with confidence. Knowing the history of the dirty tricks affair, readers will not be surprised to learn that most of these giant A380s are going to end up at Heathrow where, in 2005, BA still controlled nearly 50 per cent of the landing slots, and where anyone who has had to sit stacked up waiting to land will know just how precious they are.

  In the summer of 2004, I also brought myself one step closer to my dream of using the strength of the brand and our people to change the world for the better by launching a new part of the group called Virgin Unite. This new organisation was built by Virgin staff around the world and will be a vehicle to pull us all together, hopefully to make a difference with some of the tougher social challenges facing us. Holly volunteered to spend whatever time she had during her final year at medical school to help out with sexual health issues facing young people in the UK – right back to where I started some forty years ago when I opened the Student Help Centre, which I’m happy to say is still providing free counselling on Portobello Road in West London.

  The run-up to the war and its aftermath did not hold back the Branson household. Holly had sailed through her A-levels and fulfilled her (almost) life-long ambition to go to university to study medicine. She celebrated her twenty-first birthday and our son Sam his eighteenth. Though Sam perhaps hasn’t got the same sense of purpose at school as Holly had, he certainly knows how to party, and (perhaps taking after his father here) knows how to enjoy life to its full.

  Joan and I were incredibly proud of how well Holly was getting on in her medical degree so we decided to throw a big party for her twenty-first. The weather was beautiful in Kidlington in Oxfordshire that cold November night and Holly looked lovely in her white evening gown. Joan and I had to pinch ourselves thinking back to the little baby girl who we had brought back to our London houseboat in the Regent’s Canal back in 1984. It was not many months later when Sam had his 18th, which was a considerably more ‘laddish’ affair in the Roof Gardens in Kensington. To say that his friends’ speeches were risqué would be the understatement of the year. On this occasion Joan and I had to put our fingers in our ears, rather than pinch ourselves.

  Our day in Toulouse with the Airbus A380 has since brought my mind back time and time again to Howard Hughes and that film and has made me realise just how slim the line is between genius and insanity and between determination and stubbornness. Yet again, I thank my lucky stars to have had the stability of a family around me during all the years of turmoil that Virgin has had to navigate without the balance sheet of a multinational corporation or the luxury of a cosy state monopoly. Poor old Howard Hughes didn’t really have anyone he could turn to for honest advice or the friends and family whose wit, charm and wisdom can so often help all of us in life to keep our feet on the ground while we look at the stars.

  I have also taken a conscious decision to spend more time with my parents, in particular my father, Ted, who is the eldest. Though they are both well into their eighties, they are still on and off aeroplanes, travelling around the world. They have enormous affection for Africa, as do I, and in 1999 we bought a beautiful game reserve called Ulusaba in South Africa, where we’ve built a lovely house up on the hill looking over the jungle. We run this as a business, but make sure that we all find the time to go and visit it ourselves. These are the times that you remember and cherish. Over the previous decades, I had more and more come to appreciate Ted’s wisdom. One example had been his very wise counsel about the war in Iraq, which he had also been vehemently against, but on which he had also reinforced my own views – that, once the shooting started, we had to stand by and support the many brave young men and women from all the allied countries who were ‘following orders’ in Iraq.

  By the spring of 2004, Ted had fully recovered from a complex hip replacement operation a few years earlier and I took a short sabbatical from the world of Virgin to go camping with him in the Serengeti. It is an awesome place where you can really feel that nature is still in charge of her destiny. Having been there, I can fully understand why so many anthropologists believe the region is where man originated as a species. We spent ten days following the wildebeest migration and the predation of the lions upon their herds. For those of you who have not spent ten days in a tent with your father – if you are fortunate enough to be in a position to do so – I can thoroughly recommend it in every way. I think we developed an even better understanding of each other as we talked long into the evening.

  More than anything, I marvelled at the sense of humour of a man who had seen it all! One fantastic example of this was early one morning on his birthday; we’d all just woken up and were quite grumpy after a night in the tent but Dad was beaming. We were all intrigued until he said: ‘If I was Catholic I’d be doing penance today. I had the most wonderful dream. It involved a girl.’

  ‘Did you misbehave with her?’ I asked.

  Quick as a flash Dad replied: ‘I don’t know what you mean. Well I behaved. She was outrageously naughty!’ And this from a man in his eighties!

  There are many influences on my life that affect the way I feel about things. Ulusaba is one of them. Ulusaba means ‘Place of little fear’ because it’s a kind of rock citadel or watchtower rising out of the jungle where the original warriors who lived there could make a stand when attacked by their enemies. To me, it is a place of great peace where I can sit around a campfire at night with my friends and family and listen to stories and make plans – just like the people of this ancient landscape have always done.

  I spend a lot of time in Africa and have been fortunate enough to get out into the jungle. I think there is nothing more beautiful in the world than being out there and seeing the early morning sunrise. The air feels cleaner than anywhere else in the world and you’re completely in touch with nature. I remember one dawn when I was down in the river bed at Ulusaba and for a long time watched two three-month-old lion cubs playing with their enormous mother. When she got tired of them she picked them up in her teeth and went back into the thicket again. I marvelled at how gentle she could be. We continued on foot and soon saw the dominant leopard which has been in our game reserve for such a long time we’ve given her a name – Makwele. She was also playing with her young cubs as they ran up trees together, fell out of them and chased each ot
her in circles. Their agility, grace and playfulness were astonishing.

  The first time I went to Ulusaba was when I was in South Africa to open a Virgin Atlantic route to Cape Town in 1999. At the time, I was looking for somewhere very special in the bush and I was directed to the Sabi-Sand region. As we drove, massive rocks emerged dramatically from the bush, pushed out by some ancient convulsion of the earth. Having chosen the area, we asked Mark Netherwood, a friend who used to run Necker Island, to work with us to create something dramatic and beautiful yet unspoilt out of the jungle. There’s nothing quite like Ulusaba in Africa. Rock Lodge is high on a rocky ridge with spectacular views of the jungle and game, while down in the river bed is Safari Lodge, which has a wonderful Robinson Crusoe walkway through the trees to a dam where hippos and crocodiles wallow. There is so much game in this region of Africa; you’re almost guaranteed to see most species without going very far. You can get up early in the morning or in the evening and go for a drive or even walk (with a guide!), and you’ll always find things to see and marvel at.

  As I write this, I can see giraffes walking by and elephants in the distance. I have a particular affection for the elephants because they are so intelligent and playful. The young ones are just like children or teenagers. They love a tree called the marula, which bears a small red fruit that elephants find irresistible. Just this morning, I spent hours watching a young bull elephant shaking the tree to get at the fruit. They were falling like sweeties, just ready to be hoovered up. But at the point at which he got a carpet of them ready to eat, his brother came along and tried to sneak in. They ended up having the most almighty fight. The first young bull seemed to roar, ‘How dare you take my sweeties!’ – just like any human being. Elephants will never damage their sweet shop – the marula tree – but their numbers are growing and they do great damage to other trees. People want to have the elephants culled. We have tried to come up with an idea to help the elephants in order to avoid culling and I noticed that nobody has actually replanted trees in the jungle. So, partly with our global warming hats on, partly to avoid the need to cull elephants and partly to create jobs for Africans, we’re setting up tree nurseries and will work hard at getting trees replanted in the jungle. Many will be trampled or eaten by the elephants or giraffes, but some will survive.

  For the past forty years I have worked hard at developing Virgin as a major global business. On the way, along with some great successes, there have been many challenges, tempered by fun, and for a long time it seemed enough. But, while I had always been aware of the need to be socially responsible, perhaps I am growing older and wiser because, gradually, I feel I should do much more, on a far wider scale, to help people. Setting up Virgin Unite was part of the process of my development as a social entrepreneur. One of my first trips with Virgin Unite was to South Africa with Brad Pitt. With HIV/AIDS at the top of our agenda, we took Brad to visit some of the ‘hospitals’ in different townships and in very rural areas. When we arrived at one hospital we saw that the walls were plastered with posters of competing undertakers. Inside, I was shocked when I saw hundreds of people who seemed to be almost resigning themselves to dying from HIV/AIDS. People were waiting in the corridors for the beds of the dozens who had died the night before – it was like a conveyer belt of death. There seemed no end to the suffering because even the hospital workers appeared to accept the outcome as an inevitable part of ‘Africa’.

  The figures, which have been published for some years, but often ignored, have always seemed too big to be comprehensible, which I think makes a lot of people switch off. It is too much to accept when you read that 15,000 people are dying every single day from HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. If this were happening in the UK or the US, we wouldn’t allow it.

  I was outraged by this ridiculous situation. These diseases are treatable, yet they aren’t being treated. Africa seemed to have so many insurmountable issues – how could they be turned around at a greater speed? We were rather subdued when I took Brad to meet with Nelson Mandela at his home to discuss the 46664 AIDS campaign, in which Mandela used his prison number to call on South Africans not to allow AIDS patients to be reduced to statistics. It is easy to ignore statistics because you can get information fatigue when too many figures are thrown at you. A lighter moment was when I introduced Brad to Mandela by saying, ‘Brad Pitt’s in film,’ and Mandela turned to Brad and said, with a twinkle, ‘Oh, what kind of film do you do?’

  Then, while Brad was posing next to Nelson Mandela for a picture, dressed in a 46664 T-shirt, someone said, sotto voce, how lucky the former president was because so many young ladies would give their eye teeth to be sitting where he was. Deliberately misunderstanding, Brad grinned and replied, ‘So many young men as well!’

  Later that day, we took Brad to meet Taddy Bletcher, a man who single-handedly started up CIDA, Africa’s first free university, in downtown Johannesburg. Taddy had started with nothing, but got the idea that, if he could be given an empty building and if he could keep the costs down by asking the students to run the school and do all the cooking, the cleaning and the administration, and if he could get businesses to lend their top staff to come and do the lecturing, then he could offer students a fully accredited business degree at almost no cost. Most Africans had never had the chance to have this kind of education because they are all from very poor rural areas or townships. Poor children from the townships or rural communities have never stood a chance to get their feet on the first rung of the ladder, but 1,600 students a year are now being educated through CIDA to degree standard for under $300 for the full course, including books and accommodation. I appreciated what Taddy was doing and we soon started working in partnership with CIDA, Love Life and Life College, three small social entrepreneur organisations, to build a graduate programme called Women on the Move. This helps young women with peer education and mentoring. Once they are educated, they go back into their communities and find thirty other young people who they then have to mentor and educate. In this way, we have started to build an army of people across South Africa who are being educated. Part of the rationale behind it is that they will spread a serious message of health education, much needed in Africa.

  Many things had collided and come together during that trip to make me want to put more effort into working towards change, but it was the visits to the hospitals and overcrowded orphanages that had the most impact on me. I decided then to devote a more significant part of my time – about 50 per cent – to social and environmental issues. I felt I had come a long way in my personal journey to Africa in the five years since I had found Ulusaba.

  My African journey had been one of many miles and many experiences. Death has always been a part of the landscape, and, while animals might stalk and kill each other in the jungle, there is no reason why so many Africans should die of preventable diseases.

  Some opportunities to help come out of nowhere. I was returning from Africa on Virgin Atlantic one day and, as always, I strolled around, chatting to passengers. A lovely lady sitting in economy class met my eye, and smiled. She invited me to sit next to her for a moment. Her name, she told me, was Marianne Haslegrave, and she was the Director of the Commonwealth Medical Trust. Little fazes me, but even I didn’t expect to be discussing fistulas with her.

  She spoke to me about fistula, which was the first time I’d even heard of it. Fistula happens, she told me, when very young girls – often as young as twelve and thirteen, as is the custom in some areas of countries such as Nigeria and Somalia – struggle to give birth without any assistance. A tear in the vagina wall – called a fistula – leads to permanent incontinence; consequently, these young women are divorced by their husbands and shunned by their families. Thanks to good maternity care, the last case of fistula in the US was in 1890, but it is still a common problem in Africa.

  Marianne has devoted her life to trying to help these girls. I knew I had to do something and asked Jean Oelwang, who runs Virgin Unite, t
o look into it. Jean went to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to see how we could help. This coincided neatly with Natalie Imbruglia, who is a good friend, coming to me and saying she wanted to do something to help young women. I invited her and Jean to lunch and Natalie agreed to champion a campaign to promote the repairing of fistulas because no one else of her stature was behind the issue.

  We took her out almost immediately to Ethiopia and Nigeria so she could see the problems for herself. At the same time, I put some money in and through the wonderful work and dedication of the team at the UNFPA, we did a fistula fortnight in Nigeria, where, over a two-week period, 500 young women were repaired and we upgraded the hospitals. Since then, Natalie has worked tirelessly for her adopted project and I am proud of the way in which she rallied round when she was needed. The fact that she is a young, beautiful woman with an enormous talent who is willing to help such an unfashionable issue makes her a great role model. She also uses her music to promote fistula awareness and fundraising – and this gave us an idea to launch the Music Movement, which is a community of musicians willing and able to get involved with tough social issues. Natalie told me that seeing the young women first hand was one of the saddest journeys she’s been on. It is the worst thing that can happen to them – many of them are just little girls, living as outcasts, shunned by the community. Some of them have lived in a hut at the back of their family house for twenty years or more. It is outrageous that this still happens when the problem can be repaired so easily. It could be avoided with more birth control and fewer girls marrying so young, but it is difficult for us to impose our views on other cultures – but at least we are allowed in to help make things better and to provide education and help improve the health infrastructure.