The Other Railway Children

I've completed a 70,000 word non-fiction book on the founding and history of the Railway Children charity which is intended for publication later this year. Here are the first three chapters which describe the events leading up to the founding of the charity.

Chapter 1 The girl at Churchgate station

It all began because of a small girl in Bombay.

I had been a railway manager for nigh on thirty years. After four years as the Chief Operating Manager of British Rail’s largest Region, the London Midland, which stretched from London to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and the Scottish border, I’d been appointed BR’s first overall ‘Reliability & Quality Manager’. And then, after the Clapham Junction train accident at the end of 1988, I’d been asked by the Board Member to whom I reported to chair the small team pulling together the evidence for the subsequent judicial inquiry which took place at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster during the Spring and Summer of 1989. I’d written a number of papers on quality management and after the Inquiry had finished and before the inquiry report was published, I was asked to undertake a three week project for the BR consultancy company, Transmark, to advise the Western Railway of Australia in Perth.

When the assignment was finished, I flew home with Singapore Airlines and spent a couple of days sightseeing in the airline’s home city, and had arranged a second stop-over in the Indian city then still called Bombay, since renamed Mumbai, although many of the locals still refer to it by its former name. My reason for this, apart from the opportunity of seeing fresh places, was to visit a family in Bombay with whom my family had corresponded for a number of years. We’d been sponsoring the education of a girl through a scheme run at that time by ‘Save the Children’ and I’d asked - as my flight was calling at Bombay anyway - if it would be possible to meet her and her family. Arrangements had been made and my plane touched down at midnight on a hot and sultry night in September 1989.

I was not feeling well. I was virtually last off the Jumbo Jet and found myself near the back of the huge queue progressing slowly through the immigration procedures in the arrival hall which at that time was not air conditioned. I was nervous at the prospect of my meeting with the girl’s family wondering how I’d be received, whether we would be able to cope with the languages and make ourselves understood. And not only that, I’d made the mistake the night previously of taking the weekly part of my anti-malaria medication on top of an empty stomach and was now feeling decidedly queasy. When finally I emerged after passing through customs into the main arrival hall, I found myself caught up in the melee of jostling porters all wanting to drag me to their taxi. I was rescued by someone who kindly pointed me in the direction of the pre-paid taxi queue, and sometime after 2 o’clock in the morning I huddled in the back of the bumping vehicle as it rushed through the deserted streets from the airport into the city centre. As I looked out of the taxi window

I realised the streets were not deserted as I‘d first thought. There were bundles of white rolled up alongside the roadway and it dawned on me that these were people, huddled together and sleeping on the pavements. The swaying of the taxi, the heat, the smell of the city’s garbage and my nervousness increased my feeling of nausea and I was relieved to reach my destination hotel on Marine Drive on the shores of the Arabian Sea just after three in the morning.

Despite undressing and dropping straight into bed, my mind was still in a whirl and the discomfort in my system prevented me falling asleep as I lay there and I worried what I had let myself in for. I tossed and turned in the stifling heat for four hours and at seven o’clock, as dawn broke, I could stick it no longer and I got up, dressed and went out onto the promenade to take a few deep breaths of sea air and try to calm myself. I certainly was in no mood to face breakfast and I wondered how to fill in the time before my appointment with the agency used by ‘Save the Children’ for running the sponsorship scheme, which was not until ten o’clock. I consulted my street map and located the area of the city called Colaba where the meeting with my family was to take place. It didn’t look too far on the map and I decided in that moment that I’d use the time to walk across the city rather than wait and take a taxi, as everyone had advised me. I went back to my hotel, changed into fresh clothes, unpacked the gifts my family had assembled for the girl and her two younger brothers, put them into a carrier bag with the map and set off into the now humming city, taking a few more deep breaths of fresh air to steady my nerves.

For a while I made my way southwards along the sea wall and then decided it was time to cut into the city centre as Colaba appeared to be on the other coast of the peninsular on which the city had been built. Immediately I started getting lost as I encountered junctions of roads and lost track of them on my map which clearly did not mark the myriad of small alleyways and criss-crossing back streets I now encountered. After half an hour or so, I stumbled across a large building which turned out, on exploration, to be the terminus of a suburban railway system. As a good railwayman, I thought that I’d at least be able to establish exactly where I was and put my carrier bag down in the crowded concourse of the station and drew out my map to see if I could find it.

I looked up and found myself confronted by a small girl - she couldn’t have been more than six or seven years of age. She was filthy dirty and was bare legged and chested and she looked at me and held out her hand, obviously begging. Now I’d been warned by a number of people not to give money to the many beggars that I’d encounter, otherwise I’d get swamped by the numbers, and in any case I’d no small change - only a wadge of high denomination paper money, still stapled together in packs of a hundred 100 rupee notes - so I waved her away and intended to make a swift departure. As I hesitated the small girl suddenly produced in her other hand a plaited whip she’d been holding behind her back and began solemnly to lash herself across her bare back and shoulders. I stood rooted to the spot, stunned and shaken. The girl stopped, held out her hand and looked me in the face. Her eyes were dead, her mouth drooped, her hair was a tangled mess. She began to whip herself again and I couldn’t take it. I could just not cope emotionally with this girl’s actions, I was feeling fragile anyway, and her predicament finished me off. I picked up my bag and fled.

I stopped in the first shop doorway outside the station and tried to pull myself together. I realised I was shaking and when, finally, I’d stopped trembling and was breathing more easily, I thought, I can’t leave her like that and went back. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do about it, but the girl had disappeared into the rush hour throng. Every minute and a half another twelve coach train disgorged its mass of nearly 6,000 passengers into this five platform terminus and in those few minutes she’d disappeared. I went back to where I thought she’d been, nearly being swept off my feet by the urgent flow of humanity pouring out of the station, but there was no sign of her. It was as if I’d imagined her. But I know I didn’t. If I shut my eyes, I can still, twenty years later, see the eyes of that girl, staring hopelessly at me.

I gave up but as I trudged on past the Flora Fountain and found the teeming Bhagat Singh Marg, walking with increasing urgency down past the entrance to Sassoon Dockyard, my mind was trying to come to terms with what I’d seen. Small children of six years of age do not behave in the way I’d just encountered. Of course, I soon realised that the girl was under instruction from some unscrupulous or desperate adult who was telling her what to do, in order to elicit a generous donation from a gullible tourist like me. She might have been a child whose father or stepfather had hit upon a profitable ruse, more likely that she was a street living child forced to beg by a criminal adult who was exploiting her. If I had given her one of my hundred rupee notes, all it would have done would have been to demonstrate that such manipulation of a young child works; the girl would have got nothing other than a crust at the end of the day and possibly a beating if she had not extracted enough money from her naïve victims.

As this realisation dawned on me, anger took over. I began to notice other children. At each road junction young children dashed out between the hooting cars and red buses to sell trinkets or soiled Indian flags, young women, scarcely more than girls themselves, with a baby at the hip, putting their hands to their mouths miming hunger while tapping on the taxi windows. Later on someone told me that there are an estimated 100,000 street children in the city and environs of Bombay alone - perhaps 90% are from the slums, spending the day on the street scavenging, begging, selling whatever they can find, then returning to one of the sprawling slums that infest the city at Daravi or by the stagnant water and concrete pipes of the Mahim Creek.

As I toiled onwards worrying that I would lose myself again or get caught by another scam, the time ran on and when I eventually got pointed in the right direction by some kind soul, I found my destination was a thirty storey concrete block of flats and my appointment was on the 22nd floor, reached by an ancient tiny lift which took an age to reach the appointed level. The flat door was open and I found the family I was to meet assembled there. The sponsorship programme was administered by an elderly couple, Rusi and Freny Toddywalla, both members of the Theosophical Order of Service on behalf of Save the Children, who at that time had over 700 children on their books receiving a small annual donation towards school fees and medical supplies.

My worries and nerves were soon transformed by the engaging activities of the girl's two year old cousin who broke the ice and the stiff formality of my greeting was soon dissipated. After introductions, tea and biscuits and the inevitable garlanding, I found myself taken under the wing of my ‘adopted’ family and the aunt pressed some notes into the hand of "Clara" and she and her two brothers were given the task over the next two days of taking me sightseeing around the city. I tried to protest that I should pay, but I was their guest and the rules of hospitality required that I should accept their generosity with grace.

I saw, of course, their city. We saw the marble monuments, the grand buildings, the Gateway of India where the city had received King George V in 1911, the Taj Hotel where the two year old insisted on going to the toilet amid the gold-plated taps and marble washbasins. We also saw the slums, the dirt, we travelled on an ancient red double-decker bus, we ate - to my trepidation - at a roadside kiosk, they took me to the Hanging Gardens and drank coconut juice and I saw the children, dirty bright-eyed urchins looking longingly at what I was eating and I wasn’t hungry. My young guides were cross with me when I gave half of my nan bread sandwich away.

With hindsight I now question many aspects of that visit - the way I was allowed to be taken around the city for two days by those three children is now taboo under all the rules of child protection; Save the Children terminated the sponsorship scheme, concerned less the selection of some children in a city of the destitute should cause jealousy and rifts between those who received and those who did not. But the result of that visit was that I and my family formed a lifelong friendship with "Clara" and her family. Some seven years later she was a visitor to my home when she was my eldest daughter’s bridesmaid and we still meet up when I’m a visitor to the city for a different reason.

But the anger of that encounter on Churchgate station remained. I saw reminders of that incident everywhere as we roamed around the city. We were constantly followed by young children begging when they saw a white face entering some parts of the city where tourists do not usually go. We saw haphazard cruelty, anger displayed when children were too demanding, children rejected and neglected, children alone in the gutter. This stayed in my memory. But above all, I could not erase the sight of that child on the station whipping herself, an image now engraved in my brain. And when I got home, laden with gifts from my enlarged family that I’d felt embarrassed to accept, the little girl on Churchgate station wouldn’t go away and my anger grew, it didn’t diminish with time. I tried to tell people what I’d seen, but that bit choked me up. After five weeks, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I knew I had to do something, but what?

Chapter 2 Amnesty International

I’d always intended to join Amnesty International, the human rights organisation, but I’d never got round to it. During my search for information about charities that might help children like those I’d seen in Bombay, I came across a discarded Amnesty application form and decided that this was the jolt I’d needed to fill it up and send it in with an annual subscription fee. On the front page of the form were a series of boxes inviting new members to tick any special interests where they might have some professional or other reason for campaigning on those cases. Because of my encounter in Bombay, I ticked the ‘children’s rights’ box.

Five weeks later I received a phone call from someone in the Amnesty International UK office in Rosebery Avenue, London, advising me of a meeting to be held about children’s rights and inviting me to attend. I was impressed that a large bureaucracy like Amnesty was so ‘on the ball’ in welcoming a new member and noting my interest, and decided, as the meeting was in London, that I could go there after my day’s work finished at the BR office in Euston before travelling back to my home near Crewe.

I was anticipating a public meeting of some sort, and was a little perturbed to find that the meeting was in a small room above the main bar of a public house just opposite the Amnesty office. I entered the room and found about half a dozen people round a table, most looking as bewildered as I felt. A guy called Brian Wood introduced himself as the Amnesty staff member responsible for liaising with a number of specialist networks within Amnesty and then, and only then, did it dawn on me that I had been co-opted - along with three or four other people present - to Amnesty UK’s national network for children’s rights - or the ‘Working Group for Children’ (WGC) as it was then called.

Amnesty had started in the 1960s from the idea of a British lawyer, Peter Benenson. He’d been angered by a press report of two students in Portugal, who’d toasted ‘freedom’ in a local café and had been arrested by the Portuguese dictator’s police and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for propaganda against the state. From the response to his letter to the newspaper, Amnesty had been formed to campaign for ‘prisoners of conscience’, people imprisoned or murdered by the authorities for expressing non-violent views that were deemed unacceptable.

As membership grew and Amnesty extended its mandate to campaign on a range of human rights abuses, a British man named Alan Grounds had persuaded Amnesty to take up cases of children whose rights had been violated by state agencies and he had formed the first ‘Working Group for Children’ in the British Section around 1984. He had gathered a committee of like-minded people around him to identify and publicise cases researched by Amnesty’s International Secretariat and his team had produced regular communications to a number of Amnesty members who had expressed interest in belonging to the ‘WGC’ network. Unfortunately Alan had died suddenly in 1989 and being one of those charismatic characters that are full of action, but rarely write anything down, he’d left a void in the organisation and the WGC committee had not met for more than a year.

Brian Wood had decided to reinvent the WGC committee and had therefore invited a number of potentially useful members with a professional interest in children to become members of the new committee - a social worker, a teacher, a children’s lawyer, the director of a street children charity - and, I gathered, they’d sought to co-opt a businessman and had come across my recently submitted application form and had invited me. I was a little out of my depth - from new member to the national committee for children’s rights in five weeks was somewhat daunting and I wondered whether I could really make any contribution. I was inclined to apologise and suggest that I had insufficient experience of either Amnesty’s practices or children’s rights to be of any use. However, as they talked about some of the children’s cases they were campaigning for, I realised that street children were on their agenda and the plight of the girl in Bombay came back to my consciousness and stopped me leaving the room.

It took me a time to make any contribution. We met monthly and two volunteers would produce a newsletter outlining cases for action by our network members. Amnesty, like most other large organisations - especially my own railway industry - was full of acronyms and it took time for me to really follow how Amnesty chose which violations to prioritise and the processes through which activists operated throughout the organisation. One of the highly motivated members of that committee was a British businessman, Fred Shortland, who was also the English Director of an American charity, Casa Alianza, a branch of Covenant House working with street children in Central American states like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Mexico. His organisation had a legal department in one of the states that was regularly challenging the government and justice departments about the abuses that were perpetrated by the police and vigilante groups condoned by the police, who were regularly beating up, torturing and even murdering the street children, treating them as vermin.

I was impressed and moved by one of Casa Alianza’s managers based in Central America, Bruce Harris, who spoke about the beating and killing of a 13 year old boy, Nahaman, by four policemen in Guatemala City and the efforts being made by Amnesty to bring the police concerned to justice and protect Bruce and the three boy witnesses to the murder. I was horrified by evidence produced by Amnesty that 4,611 street children had been found murdered in Brazil around the time of the Rio 1990 ‘Earth Summit’ when the authorities had ‘cleansed’ the streets of undesirables including street children to avoid criticism of the international media and politicians.

I also met a Catholic priest, Father Shay Cullen, who worked in the Philippines for an organisation called PREDA and who was taking major risks by going under cover and posing as a tourist seeking child prostitutes in the bars of Manila and Olongopo City (near a US naval base), so that he could bring the abusers to justice and rescue the child victims.

From these meetings and experiences I began to get a feel for the extent of the problem of street children in many parts of the world and the rejection that they felt. One of the Amnesty WGC’s main bases for judgement was the 1989 ratified UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, 54 articles of which the first 41 outline the protection, provision and participation rights of children and young people under the age of eighteen. I compared these rights with the violations commonly experienced by street children and found that at least 50% of the articles were regularly flouted by governments and individuals in many parts of the world - the right to life, an identity, education, health care, protection from discrimination, forced labour, physical and sexual abuse, humiliating punishment and the right to support and representation when accused of activities against the law.

Amnesty was at that time campaigning for a number of child rights abuses - in conflict situations and when refugees, children in detention with adults or involved in violations aimed at their parents. However, in the early 1990s most of the cases researched and put through our committee for action by our network were street children from several countries in Central and South America.

Then, in 1992, Amnesty International UK received an invitation from a newly formed organisation called ‘The Consortium for Street Children’ to send a representative to join that group. Without knowing exactly what it involved, I decided to volunteer to be that representative - still guided and motivated by the encounter with the small street child in Bombay.

Chapter 3 The Consortium for Street Children

The Consortium for Street Children is the leading international network organisation for charities working with street children. It now has over 60 member non government organisations (NGOs) working in 130 countries, but in 1992 there were initially around a dozen potential members, all UK based but supporting street children internationally. The decision to bring street children charities together to share their experiences and good practice and to lobby governments on behalf of these vulnerable children was the idea of Nic Fenton, Director of Childhope and Trudy Davies, Research and Liaison Officer to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Population and Development. Baroness Jane Ewart-Biggs, President of UNICEF and widow of the British Ambassador to Ireland who was assassinated by the Provisional IRA in 1976, became the Chair of the Consortium until her death from cancer in October 1992, when she was succeeded by Baroness Sheela Flather.

During 1992 this group met at UNICEF’s London Fields headquarters or in the House of Commons Tearoom, and after Baroness Flather took over, in a committee room in the House of Lords. It was in the latter part of 1992 that I, as the invited member from Amnesty’s Working Group for Children, attended my first meeting of the Consortium, while they were feeling their way and preparing the ground for registration as a UK charity. At one of the first meetings I attended I found that the then Prime Minister, John Major, had taken a personal interest, following a visit during the 1990 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro, where he had visited a street children project run by Aninha Capaldi, Brazilian wife of the songwriter and founder of ‘Traffic’, Jim Capaldi. Aninha and the UK NGO she was associated with, ‘Jubilee Action’ were founder members of the Consortium and the Prime Minister had offered to host a reception at 10 Downing Street for the launch of the organisation. During 1993 several meetings were taken up with the arrangements for the launch as well as the registration of the charity and debate took place about the provision of a press release to accompany the launch.

In the couple of years since the publication of the inquiry report by Mr Justice Hidden on the Clapham Junction train accident and the earlier report on the London Underground fire at Kings Cross, I had been appointed as Head of British Rail’s Safety Policy Unit, a new post to oversee the transformation of BR’s safety management system from a traditional reactive approach to a more proactive system, taking into cognisance developments in the high tech industries and academia. Among the systems I had introduced as a basis for prioritising investment in safety and in remedial action was the technique of risk assessment, which, in conjunction with management consultants Cooper Lybrand and Tony Taig from the nuclear power industry (later adviser to the parliamentary Select Committee on Railways) I had applied comprehensively to British Rail’s engineering and operating activities throughout 1991 and 1992.

It was with this background that I listened to the ongoing debate at the Consortium about how to utilise the opportunities presented by the Downing Street launch and reception, and as the discussion meandered on, I started to doodle a risk assessment of being a street child on the back of an old envelope. When the consensus of the discussion began to emerge around the theme of the causes of children being on the street, I produced my scribbled ‘Fault Tree’ and we began to debate it further and, encouraged by the other members present, I developed a ‘Cause and Consequence Tree’ using the risk assessment techniques of Fault and Event Tree Analysis.

A Fault Tree seeks to trace back and uncover root causes of the main event - in this case the emergence of children onto the street. The oversimplified analysis that I did with the other members present identified three immediate causes for children coming to street life - searching for income and work, escaping from destitute families; running away from physical or sexual abuse; and abandonment, neglect or rejection by the family. In nearly all cases this pointed to a breakdown of the traditional family, in some cases through illness and death from AIDS or from involvement in armed conflict zones, sometimes because of the stresses caused by economic hardship, with a prevalence of parental drug abuse or alcoholism, sometimes the disruption to families caused by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.

I then developed an Event Tree which analysed the consequences and their probability - starting with the immediate needs of a child when first confronted with surviving on the street. The obvious need for food or money with which to buy it; the need for shelter and somewhere safe to sleep; and the need for companionship, usually with other children in the same situation as themselves. The analysis then explored the actions that street children took to meet these needs and the consequent unravelling of their lives as they faced ostracism and rejection by society who often saw their means of survival as anti-social - at best a nuisance, and all too often criminal and fear-provoking.

When I had completed this basic risk assessment, I passed it to each of the members present and asked them to insert their own organisation’s intervention strategy on the appropriate root or branch of the ‘tree’ that I had drafted. Some NGOs present were able to do this easily. Large NGOs like UNICEF and Save the Children did little direct work with children already on the street, but in partnership with many other local NGOs undertook much prevention work in slum and rural communities, especially in the areas of child health and education and emergency care after natural catastrophes. The organisation that I represented, Amnesty International, worked at the opposite end of the spectrum, in tackling the extreme consequences when the street children faced physical abuse, torture and murder because society condoned the often brutal actions of the authorities to rid themselves of these children and the supposed petty crimes they were thought to have committed.

It was harder to pinpoint the focus of some of the other member NGOs. Some ran residential homes for these children, health clinics, drug de-addiction centres. Some ran vocational training schemes for street children to enable them to become self-sufficient. Some worked in slum areas with children who were not attending school but scavenging or begging, and offered informal education and emergency health care.

When I assembled all the responses and looked at the tree I had drawn and the insertions made, I realised that there was a glaring gap. No-one had identified the first few days - or even hours - when a child first came to the street as a crucial intervention opportunity. My risk assessment had pinpointed this particular time in a street child’s career as one of both high risk and great opportunity. My railway safety management role, involving train, passenger, staff and general public safety, required me on many occasions to work closely with the British Transport Police (BTP). In conversations with senior officers I had mentioned my voluntary work with Amnesty International and my interest in street children and they told me of their concern for many British children whom they found on our own railway stations.

I was introduced to two Salvation Army captains - a man and his wife - who, in the company of a BTP officer, would patrol a number of main line railway termini in London every evening looking for lone children at risk. These two stalwarts had been doing this for some ten years, since the early 1980s and they told me that they had picked up 3,600 children under the age of 16 during that period, an average of one every night. The youngest was a girl of six from Crewe whom they’d found sleeping on platform 12 at Euston after sneaking out of her home while her parents thought her banished to her bedroom after some family squabble. Even more alarmingly, these Salvation Army officers told me that a lone child or teenager, at any of the main London stations, or Victoria coach station or a West End amusement arcade, had on average around twenty minutes before they’d be targeted by a pimp, paedophile or drug addict or dealer, appearing to offer help, but in fact ensnaring them into the world of sexual abuse and drug addiction.

In 1992 I’d attended a Railway Safety Conference organised by Tranzrail, the New Zealand privatised railway company, whose Safety Director, Ray Ryan, I’d met earlier at a conference run by the railways of Japan and then the following year in a group of railway safety policy and research specialists I’d brought together for a seminar in the UK. As my flight back from New Zealand came via Singapore and Bombay once again, I’d taken the opportunity for a further visit to my sponsored family in India and this time, because of my earlier experience, I’d been introduced to Father ‘Plassy’ Fonseca, a Jesuit priest working for a street children charity in that city called ‘Snehasadan’. He took me to a small shelter, Amchi Kholi, that the Central Railway of India management had permitted within the huge Victoria Terminus station (now renamed Shivaji Chhatrapati Terminus - CST - where much of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was filmed). While we were talking to a social worker there, a small filthy dirty girl of about eight years of age walked in off a mainline train that had just arrived from Calcutta. The social worker obviously knew her and I was horrified to understand that girls and boys of this age wandered unsupervised around India’s vast railway system, surviving as best they could, moving on when the whim took them, always at risk of abusers and traffickers.

I mentioned to Father Fonseca the situation I’d learned in Britain about the risk to children on London’s stations and the short time before they’d be approached by undesirables. “Oh,” said the Father, “it’s minus two hours here!” He explained that the brothel owners employed women to travel a couple of hours outside Bombay on the routes converging from the north, and then board trains headed for the city, scouring through the train looking for unaccompanied and runaway children whose trust they could obtain. Instead of finding them safe havens in Bombay as they’d promise, they’d sell them on commission to the sex industry - boys and girls of eight, nine, ten years of age even. Father Fonseca’s organisation had social workers on the station to try to intercept such children and offer real safety and rehabilitation in a series of small children’s homes run by foster parents many of whom had been street children themselves.

With this in mind as I assimilated the responses from the Consortium members in the House of Lords Committee room that afternoon, I began to press my colleagues about their focus and the existence of any projects funded by UK charities that targeted early intervention when the children first ran away or were abandoned. We discussed opportunities for such intervention and quickly established that the transport systems were an obvious location. Not only were they the point of entry for many children to the city where their street life began, but they were also places where they could find informal employment or where they could scavenge or beg. They were places of many opportunities and dangers and many children stayed there initially until they found other street children and moved on. Many would stay at the station and join gangs of other children they found there. In India and the countries of Eastern Europe, the railway station was key for early intervention. In most parts of Latin America and Africa, the bus station was a more likely location.

Not only were these places a danger to new children arriving there because of the easy prey the children were for drug dealers, sex exploiters and other criminal gangs, but they were also the locations where there was a short opportunity for people of goodwill to offer a child a positive way out before they became traumatised by their experiences and adapted and often corrupted to street life. Later I was told that if a child was supported within the first month of living on the street, there was an 80% chance of helping that child find a positive outcome to their predicament - reconciliation with their family, or moving to an educational or vocational training programme or as a last resort, a place in a residential home. After six months living on the street that chance had fallen to 20%, as the child became streetwise, found a new family in the ‘gang’, and often by that time had become addicted to some form of inhalant or drug.

Now began a period of contemplation. John Major duly hosted the launch of the Consortium on the 18th November 1993, the Consortium was registered with the Charity Commission and more British non-governmental organisations (NGOs) began to join. I became one of the initial trustees (I did not retire from this until 2008) and I kept talking to colleagues there about the risk assessment I’d undertaken and the need for a focus on early intervention. No-one disagreed, but no organisation had set this focus as their purpose and if any such project took place, it was not part of any overall strategy.

My mind kept coming back to the need for a charity that would seize this opportunity for contacting street children as soon as they came to the street. It was apparent that the railway and bus stations of the world offered a unique opportunity to make this contact, just as the Salvation Army couple had done in England and Snehasadan was doing at one station in India. I began to talk to colleagues I knew in the railway industry. More and more I felt an inner compunction to do something about it myself. The image of the small girl I’d encountered on Churchgate station in 1989 kept coming back to me. But it seemed a huge step to take and I worried about sharing my vision with colleagues in case they ridiculed my ideas as naïve. I started to talk to other members of the Consortium (CSC) and they encouraged me. I saw the link between the opportunity to help these children on the stations and the industry in which I worked.

I took my courage in both hands and began to talk about my ideas to my colleagues at BR’s headquarter offices. My own boss, Board Member David Rayner, was interested and didn’t dismiss it out of hand. He suggested I discuss it with other members of the British Railways Board. Not all were enthusiastic. One drew attention to the enormous task of starting a new charity amid the competition of so many other charitable organisations.

Another Board member put me in touch with a group of railway people in Sheffield who were raising money for children being discovered in deplorable conditions in Romanian orphanages and suggested I met them and perhaps joined my ideas with theirs. I duly met their committee as had been suggested but discovered that their vision did not marry easily with my own and that there was a reluctance to broaden their scope from the Romanian orphans which at that time were receiving a lot of media coverage. Even among people who were keen to help vulnerable children, I found a resistance to the idea of working for street children, as they were already stigmatised in many minds as delinquent children whose plight would not draw public sympathy or entice sufficient funds to develop worthwhile projects.

The railway ran its own charity which had funded two children’s orphanages in Derby and Woking for many years. The Woking home had closed and had been converted into a residential home for elderly railway people as the need for residential institutions for children had diminished. The purpose of these two homes had been to make provision for the orphans of railway workers who had either been killed or had died in service. Some 400 men a year were killed in accidents on the system immediately after the First World War, but thankfully this tragic slaughter had been reduced to around twenty fatalities a year - still a bad industrial record - by the 1980s. This reduction of need and the effect of the 1989 Children’s Act meant that a charity running orphanages in the UK after the 1990s was inappropriate. Many employees of the railway industry had given generously to this charity over the years and I felt that there was an opportunity for railway people to widen their interest and maintain their generosity for vulnerable and destitute children associated with railways internationally as well as on home territory.

Having tested the alternatives suggested and established that I was not conflicting with the railway’s own children’s charity, I continued serious discussions with members of the Consortium for Street Children. One option would have been to merge my ideas with an existing organisation belonging to the CSC, but there was no obvious partner and I was encouraged to found a new charity, given the potential support from the railway industry that I had uncovered. In any case, it was obvious to me and my colleagues at the CSC that I would be reliant on some of them to identify potential project opportunities where the focus of early intervention could be developed with the financial support that I thought I could generate.

And so, throughout the second half of 1993 and 1994 I was putting my thoughts together, and by the beginning of 1995 I had decided to take the plunge and, with the promised backing of the CSC and several colleagues in the railway industry, form a new charity to offer support to children as they first gravitated to the street. I sought advice from the Charity Commission and began to bring together a small committee of colleagues to help me with some of the practicalities. My boss, David Rayner, was generous in support, offering the facilities of the railway administration in the first few months.

I had a name for the charity - in India I had heard these street children on the stations referred to variously as ‘railway’ or ‘platform’ children - so the name of the famous children’s novel and film, ‘The Railway Children’, long out of copyright, seemed entirely appropriate for what I had in mind. I had to check that no other organisation had registered this name and I found it was used by just one small pre-school playgroup in Kent whose premises backed onto a railway line. The Charity Commission foresaw no problem in duplicating a national charity name with that of a very local group, but as a courtesy I contacted the playgroup leader and got ready permission to go ahead with the name, so during the Spring of 1995, the ‘Railway Children’ was born.