What it takes
Whenever I read a magazine or newspaper article, or watch a documentary programme, which profiles anyone at the top of a business, professional or a vocation, I am always intrigued to discover exactly what appears to make the subject tick.
(And okay, back in the day this curiosity used to spring from a desire to discover whether there was a common trait or ingredient in those who were successful, and indeed whether I possessed any of it).
Reflecting upon this before coming to my computer this morning, I figured that maybe it’s also why my favourite reading is autobiographies, biographies, diaries and letters (factual stuff) rather than fiction.
Being a stone-cold philistine, by nature I’m more interested in learning stuff that might benefit my existence in a practical sense that – if you take this view – seeking to stretch my sensibilities by exposing myself to the imaginings and creativity of others … and yes, I know that by even stating that, I’m tending to deny that one sensibilities can have any practical application to the way we conduct ourselves (perhaps that’s a debating issue for another day?) but there you go …
Whenever I consider the ‘great’ individuals in any walk of life that I have ever come across personally – and I’d add here the qualification that this has to on the basis of having had the opportunity to have a real conversation with them, rather than just briefly ‘press their flesh’ in a line-up, or at a cocktail party (or similar situation), introduce oneself and exchange a couple of lines of inconsequential patter – I’d guess that a general sense of calmness and inner self-confidence is one of the things that (like with the proverbial stick of Blackpool rock) runs through them.
Regarding ‘calmness’ in this context, I don’t quite mean giving off a general sense of being ‘laid back to the point of horizontal’ – one presumes they could be attaining that by being constantly stoned out of their minds if they wished(!) – but rather that they give off an air of possessing a ‘bank of knowledge’ (gained by what they have already learned or experienced) that gives an impression to others that there is no situation they might come across that they couldn’t cope with.
And by ‘inner self-confidence’ I am not referring to the sort of bombastic “I’m in charge” bragging (these days we might tag it ‘in the style of President Trump’) which broaches neither dissent nor query.
I’m talking more about the sort of individual who is apparently quite content to enter conversation with any prince or a pauper he happens to come across at any time and be genuinely interested in finding out about that other person, not least their opinions and views.
One such was Baron (Lord) Benson, known to our family as ‘Sir Henry’, a senior accountant who in his time was an advisor to the Bank of England and worked on or chaired various Royal Commissions. He was a big man with a reputation of ‘frightening’ grown men with his sheer presence and intellect. Yet, to those who knew him, he was as relaxed and easy-going as the next chap.
At one dinner party I attended, he announced that he was about to make his maiden House of Lords speech and had chosen to speak on a topic of the moment – the impending trial of a German who had allegedly been involved in the Holocaust. In the run-up to this he had mentioned that in 1938 or 1939 – at the age of thirty – he had been at a dinner at the German Embassy also attended by Ribbentrop.
He suddenly turned to me at the table and asked what I thought (as a youngster) of this ‘Holocaust trial’ situation. Taking a deep breath, I decided there was no alternative to being honest and ventured to suggest that my only concern would be – when dealing with events that had occurred thirty or more years previously – whether anybody’s recollections were likely to be ‘sound’ or not, perhaps adversely affected by the passage of time.
There followed a slight pause, during which everybody (most particularly me) waited to discover whether he considered my contribution crass, irrelevant or just facile. But then he responded with “Exactly – and that’s the point I want to make …” and then went on to expand upon his thoughts with considerable effect. Sighs of relief all round were almost audible.
Another with a similar ‘presence’ was the chairman of a leading international business who had been a renowned WW2 fighter pilot, a squadron leader who had flown with Douglas Bader at the age of 21.
Without a shadow of a doubt, he was one of the most laid-back characters I have ever met.
When I once commented as much to our company secretary, he replied “Well, when you think about it, when as a young man you spend four years of your life daily dicing with death – losing your close mates on a weekly basis and so on – whatever crises and situations you have to deal with in your later life, they must appear completely inconsequential in comparison”.
A third individual who left a big impression on me was the newspaper editor/publisher Harold Evans, whom I once interviewed whilst I was a student and he was the highly-regarded editor of The Sunday Times.
I’d been allocated a 45-minute slot on what was a busy day for a national newspaper and yet, when he closed his office door and motioned me to a sofa and chair in front of a coffee table for our chat, he immediately gave me the ‘sense’ that I was the only person that afternoon that he was interested in.
On three occasions he was interrupted by his secretary – on two of them he dismissed the intrusion and on the third he apologised and (in front of me) took a twenty-five minute call from his Washington correspondent Henry Brandon on the subject of some US current affairs story concerning US vice-president Spiro Agnew. At the conclusion of our time together – which lasted the best part of two hours – in thanking him I mentioned that I’d still got a raft of questions I had meant to ask him. He responded “No problem. Send me a list of them and I’ll record my answers on a cassette and send it back to you”.
Which he duly did.
Here’s a link to an interview with a former leader of the Red Arrows RAF display team Ben Murphy conducted by Rachel Hosie that I spotted today upon the website of – THE INDEPENDENT