The Other Railway Children "Some personal reflections"

In the first chapter of this book I described the event on Churchgate station in Mumbai that acted as catalyst eventually - five years later - to the founding of the Railway Children charity. Had this experience come ‘out of the blue’? It may depend on whether you believe in ‘guidance’ or ‘fate’ or just luck or coincidence. I had been an orthodox traditional Christian for as long as I could remember. My parents were staunch members of the Methodist Church – as were both sets of grandparents – and much of my early life had been spent in East Molesey Methodist Church in Surrey where my paternal grandparents were Sunday School teachers and my father was Circuit Steward and Treasurer. By the time I was 18, I was a Sunday School teacher myself and Secretary of the Woking Church Youth Club. I was attracted to the radical thinking of Bishop John Robinson of Woolwich expressed in his controversial book ‘Honest to God’ in the 1960s and had always rejected the literal or fundamentalist Christian viewpoint - my own church denomination had never adopted that theology.

In the 1970s and early 80s I found my liberal views often at odds with the increasing number of ‘charismatic’ Christians in my local church, now in High Wycombe, and felt myself to be drifting from the church, when I read a fascinating and very radical little book called ‘Mr God, this is Anna speaking’ which prompted me strongly to stop engaging in theological argument and get on with life working to the humanitarian and compassionate demands of the person of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. Because of a number of positions I held within the church, especially in youth work, I had been afraid to speak out fearing to undermine what I was doing, but I was feeling a bit of a hypocrite.

I’d been reading the book I’ve just mentioned on the platform at Maidenhead while waiting for my train one morning and just got to the bit where the six year old precocious Anna talks to her mentor about the importance of ‘not being afraid’ to take risks in life when my train drew in, not the expected diesel multiple unit suburban train, but a long distance commuter train headed by a class ‘50’ diesel electric locomotive, named of all things ‘Dreadnought’! Seven years later, still convinced in my mind that I needed to get more involved in something, but not quite sure what, I’m confronted by that small girl on Churchgate station. If challenged for my ‘Christian’ story, I’ll admit to being ‘converted’ by two six year olds and a railway engine! And I’m sure it led, in a very roundabout way, to that moment of the charity launch on Waterloo station concourse when I’d at last ‘stuck my head above the parapet’ and taken the risk of failure or of being considered naïve or eccentric.

Looking back now, I realise how much my experience had prepared me for what I had taken on. During some thirty five years of working within British Rail I’d had considerable direct line management experience, but also, unusually, a very varied career that had included long spells of advisory work - initially on productivity, then later on quality and safety. As well as learning much about management theory and practice, I’d acquired a wide range of contacts throughout the railway industry. In my quality management work I’d worked alongside senior management at the Board and on all five railway regional organisations. Later as part of the task of implementing a proactive safety management system, I’d been directly involved in the training of over 800 top managers in the railway during a three day residential course and whilst my memory for names is not that great, as I was one of the main speakers on the course everyone knew me. When it came later to promoting the fledgling charity, the fact that I was known to so many when I began to publicise what I was attempting and seek support, and had a degree of credibility, helped enormously.

I’d had a grounding in the techniques of ‘Total Quality Management’ (TQM) and Risk Assessment, both of which I used to identify and apply to the scenes I confronted in Bombay in 1989, as I thought about that searing experience over the following years. I’d had the experience of initiating major change back in 1978 when I’d been asked to create an internal consultancy organisation for British Rail on the lines of that I’d developed on the Western Region, then I’d been the BR’s first Quality & Reliability Manager and had had to create that role from scratch.

Again, after the Clapham Junction train accident and judicial inquiry, I’d been required to develop and implement a change in the whole culture of how British Rail managed safety. Obviously I couldn’t have done these things without the support of the Board and many colleagues, but having been so involved in the successful innovations and seen significant changes come about as a result, I had a certain amount of experience and confidence in my ability to innovate something and make it happen. But these things were achieved within a large organisation with colleague relationships and trust built up over many years - a safe environment if you like, one where I did not feel threatened or likely to be seriously opposed or ridiculed in what I was attempting.

In conceiving the idea of the Railway Children I felt on less secure ground. I was a newcomer in the area of the voluntary sector and the issues surrounding street children - among colleagues whose charities had been in existence for many years and among whom I felt very inexperienced and nervous in putting forward my suggestions, finding it inconceivable that they had not already thought of the ideas I was advocating. When I began to realise that perhaps some of my ideas had value, coming as I was from a different culture and seeing things afresh, I found I was being pressured then to act on some of the thoughts I was expressing.

I began to feel nervous about talking about these openly among my railway colleagues, as I was now raising an issue that fell outside the accepted run of business activity - at least it was then, although the development of ‘corporate social responsibility’ is now quite normal in commercial enterprises. I really did feel that people might think I had gone ‘soft in the head’ and wondered if I was still reacting too emotionally to that incident at Churchgate station that still bothered me after over five years.

In the end the words I’d read on Maidenhead station came back to me, and I decided to take the risk and started talking openly to colleagues like Stan Judd and my boss, David Rayner. Once I had done that, I had, so to speak, burned my boats and couldn’t go back without destroying my own confidence and self-belief. The fact that I was not discouraged but given help and advice from some of the most senior managers of British Rail was a huge support.

In the early years of the charity I had to do nearly everything, as I had no full time staff. I did have support from railway colleagues as advisers and later, trustees, but certainly as far as identifying projects to fund and values and policies to espouse, I was very much on my own until around the Millennium when I appointed the first two Programme Officers in India and Terina Keene as Chief Executive in the UK. Once they were established and taking more and more weight of the charity on their shoulders, I had to learn what I could delegate and to differentiate between strategic and operational activity - in other words to act as Chair of the Board rather than both that and Chief Executive at the same time - difficult when you have been acting as both for some five years or so.

Especially when I was in India I was tempted to take decisions as I met with the various Directors and senior staff of the partner charities - they were used to dealing with me directly and expected to continue to deal with me rather than a new Indian member of staff. I had to learn to let go and discourage our partners from looking to me all the time for decisions. Mrinalini Rao, who became our Country Director, was very tolerant but had to remind me gently from time to time that I was encroaching on her operational territory by giving me a slight tap on the wrist!

I now find in writing this book that many of my most vivid memories and experiences are from the earlier years of the charity as it was then that I was involved in everything and dealing directly with nearly every issue that raised its head. In the last ten years in particular, the charity has taken on new life as the staff here in the UK and India have initiated so much themselves and now I find myself surprised very often to discover many of the developments that they have initiated within the overall policies and strategies we’ve agreed at the Board.

Sometimes as the founder, one feels a little put out or even hurt - no, that is too strong a word - by this, but I’m determined that I should be able to let go and let others develop and take the charity further beyond what I can imagine. I’ve seen too many charities or clubs held back by the founder sticking around for too long or not allowing others to take over, so that the organisation collapses when the founder is no longer available for whatever reason. This had happened - because of premature death - to Amnesty UK’s ‘Working Group for Children’ in the late 1980s and the activity had ceased for a couple of years before luckily someone inside the Amnesty organisation decided to restart it and got several volunteers including me together.

Having reached my 70th birthday a couple of years ago, I decided it was time to hand over the reins of the Consortium for Street Children to another Chair (I’d been Co-Chair since 1998) in the hope that they could find a more stable financial donor base than I could provide with potentially conflicting loyalties. I expressed the intention of retiring from chairing the Board of Railway Children at the end of 2010 and our trustees have selected a successor, Haydn Abbott, former Managing Director of the Angel Trains rolling stock leasing company and sponsor for many years of elements in the annual Railway Ball. Haydn joined us as a trustee in April 2010 with a view to taking over after the Annual General Meeting in December 2010.

This has given us both time to adapt and me to consider what my role should be after my retirement from the Railway Children Board. I shall remain as a volunteer, an Ambassador maybe, continuing as long as I’m able to give talks and take part in events whenever I’m required and I intend - as long as the new Board is willing - to invite some former trustees and supporters to meet with me, the new Chairman and the Chief Executive, quite informally, two or three times a year to be briefed on the latest developments and to see if and how we can best offer support.