I mentioned in a previous post that there are shining examples of people who were in some way an outsider or 'excluded' at critical points in their lives, but instead of then joining groups trying to destroy society, have achieved great success. Two profiles from Saturday 13th January's Financial Times caught my eye:
Andrew Adonis, now Lord Adonis, schools minister:
The son of a Greek Cypriot former waiter and postman, he was put into voluntary care by his father after his mother walked out. He lived in a council children's home until he was 11. His lucky break came when the local authority paid for him to go to an Oxfordshire boarding school. It was this experience that sparked his "obsession with education as a life transformer". He subsequently earned a place at Keble College, Oxford, where he read history. After completing a PhD on the British aristocracy of the late 19th century, he spent three years as an Oxford don before joining the Financial Times as a reporter.
Stuart Rose, Marks & Spencer Chief Executive
By his own admission, he was a drifter in his youth. He grew up in Tanzania, where his father worked for the Colonial Office. His mother wanted him to become a doctor but he was not naturally academic. He worked at the BBC for a bit and then landed a place on the M&S trainee programme when he was 23. He says it was his mother Margaret's suicide just a year later that helped focus his mind. "My mother was fiercely ambitious for me and she taught me, if nothing else, one thing: she taught me to value myself and my philosophy."
But his rise to the top was not as linear as Sir Terry's, whose card was marked at a very early age. Mr Rose, who quit M&S just before he hit 40, having decided that he was not going to get into the senior ranks, followed a more haphazard route. He did stints in the Burton Group, Arcadia, Argos and Booker before his homecoming.
"I was never a favoured son of the business," says Mr Rose, looking back on his days under Lord Sieff, chairman from 1972 to 1984. "I was never one of those people. I sat on the edge of the plate. People couldn't decide if I was half-genius or half-mad."
One general point I see links these two - both Adonis and Rose seemed to have gained strength rather than resentment from early experiences of being an outsider which has helped them in later years to weather general disapprobation or rejection or charges of eccentricity or betrayal. Maybe one could even say that they gained the strength or bloody mindedness to do the things which caused them to attract disapprobation or rejection.
The more specific point I take from the Adonis background, which is one that I have made many times when discussing with people about whether Oxbridge is still deliberately biased towards private school candidates is that often potential state school candidates don't even apply to Oxbridge, because they cannot imagine themselves going there, but often all it takes is one tenuous moment of contact - a visit to an Oxford or Cambridge college and meeting people there, a solitary teacher at the school who went to Oxbridge and believes in you, or, as it would seem in Adonis' case, actually living near Oxford.
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