Helen Fry
A Conversation with Sir Nick Young on his Career with the Red Cross
Helen Fry & Sir Nick Young | In Conversation on his Career with the Red Cross
- So I’m really delighted to welcome back to Lockdown, Sir Nick Young. Welcome back, Sir Nick.
Hello, Helen. Lovely to see you again. And thank you very much for asking me along.
Well, we’re going to talk about your extraordinary career today. I think it is inspirational. You began as a corporate lawyer, as part of the Magic Circle firm of lawyers. And, of course, you gave it all up. You worked for Sue Ryder and Leonard Cheshire. You had a spelt with the Red Cross, then chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Relief, and then again, back with the Red Cross to 2014. So we’re going to discuss some of that today and some of the challenges you face and your memoir, which I highly recommend, which is on your shoulder behind you to our audience. Really, really, I think very moving in places and a deeply humanitarian, I think, story, truly inspirational. And I just want to read just one extract, if I might, at the very beginning of your career, because as you talk about it, you had three children under the age of six, a rather hefty mortgage, and you then felt there was sort of something missing in your life. And you write your, “First attempts were met "with blank rejection. "We’re not looking for any lawyers today, thanks,” in your application to work in the voluntary charitable sector. Or in the case of one recruitment agency, which claims to specialise in the voluntary sector, “Total astonishment that I should even think "of giving up a flourishing career in the law "for such a fanciful whim.” You’ve put, I love this in brackets, but their response, “Oh no, dear boy. "You can’t possibly do that. "We’ll find you a couple of trusteeships, "but you mustn’t give up your legal career.” But you did, didn’t you? And on the spur of the moment, you rang up the Sue Ryder Foundation. Tell us what happened.
Well, yes, I mean, it was a spur of the moment thing. I just really decided that law was not for me and I wanted to be working with people more closely. I felt I was very much a backroom boy as a lawyer doing, well, just helping big companies get bigger really, which wasn’t really where I wanted to be. I did, I phoned up the Sue Ryder Foundation, which was the nearest charity to where we live in Suffolk, and was astonished to be put straight through to Lady Ryder. And she listened to my story and then she said, “Oh, well you better come and see me. "What are you doing tomorrow?” So literally the very next day in the afternoon, I found myself in her tiny little study talking to this tiny little woman with big, big blue eyes. And she talked about her work with the special operations executive during the war when she’d worked at the end of the war, particularly with the survivors of the concentration camps. And she did some amazing work in Poland, particularly, and Germany, with the survivors of the camp helping to resettle and visiting many of them who had actually ended up in prison because they’d, you know, they’d taken revenge in various ways against their, the Nazi, their Nazi captors. And she talked about that and she talked about her Sue Ryder homes all over Eastern Europe and all over the UK. And I just had this extraordinary feeling, Helen, of being picked up and put down in the right place. I just, it just felt right. It was where I felt I wanted to be.
And I remember driving home that evening, there was a big, red sun going down behind one of Suffolk’s many cornfields. And I had to stop the car so strong was this sense of, gosh, this is, you’re meant to be doing this. And then, well, you know, I was a partner in a firm of lawyers, so this was a big decision, mortgages, children, et cetera. And I knew that going to work for Sue Ryder and Leonard Cheshire would mean a big sacrifice in salary and, you know, financial prospects. And so, you know, I hesitated for six months before I took the plunge. Sue Ryder and her husband, Leonard Cheshire, kept phoning me up and saying, “Well, when are you going to come and work for us?” And then eventually it was my wife who completely lost all patience, said, “Oh, for goodness sake, you know you want to do it, "go and do it. "We’ll manage the money somehow. "You know, you may never get another chance to do something "that you really feel so passionately about.” So I have a lot to thank her for and the children and Sue Ryder for giving me my first chance.
So what did you do very broadly before we get onto your Red Cross work? What did you do with Sue Ryder? With the foundation?
I had the title secretary for development, and that meant that my job was setting up new Sue Ryder homes all over the country. I think I set up nine in my time with Sue Ryder. That meant acquiring real, usually really beautiful, stately homes that were falling down. So we acquired them very cheaply. We got grants from English Heritage to do them up, and then we converted them into nursing homes for people with cancer, motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis, that kind of thing. And it was a wonderful job. I mean, I was working with beautiful buildings, local people who wanted to see those buildings well used. And then with wonderful specialists, doctors and nurses looking after all our patients. I mean, it was a dream job, I absolutely loved it.
And you left eventually and you started in 1990, if I’m not correct, for the Red Cross.
[Nick] Yeah.
So this is interesting because that’s how you started your memoir, isn’t it? What did you do? So presumably people just thought you were sat at a desk. But in fact, your work, as you’ll see in the second stage of being with the Red Cross, is when you’re chief executive, certainly not sat at a desk just managing, you know, the sort of decisions. I mean, your career’s extraordinary because it’s spanned some of the worst crises of the 20th century. Have I frozen? I think I might have. I might have to move into another room while you are talking in a moment. I will, so please excuse us, audience. So can you just tell us, you just started and then, of course, there’s the launch of Operation Desert Storm to oust Saddam Hussein. So talk us through that. And while you do, I’m just going to temporarily put my camera on off and I’m going to move near my wifi, nearer. So apologies, everyone. So, Sir Nick, can you tell us a bit about that period?
Yes, I will. So I joined the Red Cross in 1990, as Helen said, as director of UK operations. So I was in charge of all the domestic work of the Red Cross in the UK responding to local emergencies, providing care in the community in various settings, offering first aid services around the country, and also, okay, working with refugees and asylum seekers. And that was my job. But when Operation Desert Storm started, we, I suddenly realised that there were, well, the phone started ringing particularly at night, and we realised there were an awful lot of people in the UK who were very worried about loved ones who were fighting or who were caught up in the conflict in Iraq. And so we were getting calls literally all through the night from people wanting help and comfort and information. They came to the Red Cross ‘cause they thought the Red Cross would be able to tell them more than they could get from the news media. And so we, I very, you know, we literally had to run a around-the-clock helpline. We were drafted in by the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Health to help run the service hospitals. It was expected that there would be hundreds of thousands of casualties in that conflict. And that they would all be coming back to the UK to be looked after in what were at that time still service hospitals. And Red Cross volunteers and nurses were drafted in to help with that response.
It didn’t actually transpire anything like the numbers that were expected, thank goodness. But we were all there. The Red Cross was there and ready to provide its traditional role of support to the military services in time of conflict, particularly under the banner of the Red Cross and providing completely neutral and impartial help. The other just interesting little gloss was that when Saddam Hussein captured a number of British people and held them hostage at strategic locations, in other words, places that he expected the allies would bomb, this was over Christmas time and I was asked if I would please arrange for the families of those prisoners to send comfort packages out to the prisoners that Saddam Hussein was helping. So I delved around in the archives and, of course, found the amazing story of the, something like 20 million parcels that the Red Cross packaged up and sent out to prisoners of war during World War II. And so we literally, we redesigned a modernised Red Cross parcel with gifts and comforts from the families, nourishing food items from the Red Cross. They were then shipped out to Jordan and they were carried across the desert to Baghdad for those people who were being held hostage. So it was an extraordinary sort of going back in time really to the traditional role of the Red Cross in wartime.
And so anything else that specifically stands out from that first period in the Red Cross until 1995? Because I’m going to come on to when you take over the second time. So you might want to mention that with Jeffrey Archer and this scandal with Jeffrey Archer because it was all around.
Okay. If you want to, if you want to. Yeah, no, so it was a difficult time and the Red Cross had rather lost its way, actually, after the war and after particularly the creation of the welfare state, all the hundreds of Red Cross ambulances, Red Cross Nursing homes, the past great chunks of the blood transfusion service, which the Red Cross had been running up until 1948, were taken away. And the organisation rather lost its way in that period after 1948 with the result that by the time I joined in 1990, we had, oh, something like 93 county branches. Each of them registered in its own right as a charity and performing all manner of weird and wonderful services. None of them really core to the Red Cross mission of, you know, providing emergency care. And so I had to embark as the director of UK operations on a major programme of restructuring because this, these 93 county branches were incredibly expensive, incredibly inefficient, and they weren’t really doing what we needed them to do. So we had to embark on a five-year programme of rejigging and restructuring all that, which, of course, was not hugely popular with all the volunteers and many of the staff who had to change their jobs or sad, tragically even lose their jobs. So it was a big project, but a wonderful opportunity to get the chance to modernise a great, great institution, which is, you know, one of, it is still one of the best known and best loved humanitarian organisations in the world. And I really relish that opportunity to really have it get my teeth into a really big project having been working on all these wonderful smaller projects with Sue Ryder.
So I just want to, in the intervening period between that and your second term with the Red Cross as then chief executive, which saw you travel over many parts of the world in many conflicts, extraordinary career, you spent some time with Macmillan Cancer. Do you want to comment on that? Because, I mean, did you not quite feel, you missed the Red Cross, basically, didn’t you? And you made that very clear in your book, you missed the work.
Well, of course, you becoming, people who work for charities will know that you become incredibly personally engaged, personally invested in that organisation. So actually leaving all the charity jobs that I moved on from, it was always like cutting my arm off. It was a terribly difficult decision. And I used to feel terribly guilty about moving on to another organisation. But you know, you kind of know it’s time to do that. Macmillan, I was very lucky to get that job. It’s my first chief executive’s job. And I was lucky also because I took up the post a year, just a year before the 1997 general election at which Tony Blair and the labour government, new labour was elected. And we realised, me and my colleagues at Macmillan, realised just before that election, the Labour Party didn’t really have a strong health strategy. And we knew that cancer care was at a particularly, in a particularly bad state in the UK. At that time, we were talking about the post-code lottery of care. The type of care you got for your cancer depended on where you lived in the country. And we thought that was wrong. So we had a plan for turning that around and we presented it to Chris Smith and Harriet Harman, the Shadow Labour health team. Oh, about a six months or so, nine months or so before the election. And I’ll never forget this moment because we got about halfway through our presentation when Harriet Harman turned to Chris Smith and said, “You know, Chris, "we could make this our main health care strategy "in our manifesto.” And they did. And they kept their word, they stuck to their promise to really transform cancer services. And in the, and they did do that with Macmillan right at the heart of it. And it was an incredibly exciting period to be working. Alan Milburn was the health secretary for most of that time. Very inspiring guy, very energetic guy to work with. And I just loved all that. And, you know, again, had the opportunity to really contribute, not just to the wonderful work that Macmillan and its Macmillan nurses was doing, but to the whole picture of cancer care in the UK.
Really significant. But ultimately, you were back with the Red Cross, weren’t you, in 2001
[Nick] Yeah. for a stint until, you know, to 2014. So you took over again at a really difficult time for the Red Cross. And actually, I will say at this point, we are going to open up for questions for 15 or so minutes of questions towards the end. So do have your questions ready for any aspect of Sir Nick’s work during his career and he’ll be happy to answer those. So yeah, you arrive again, this time as chief executive, where everyone thinks you’re sat behind a desk not doing very much, but by goodness, particularly Christmas times as we’ll come on to in a moment, everything seemed to go wrong at Christmas. But you took over with a deficit of 14 million and a scandal over Jeffrey Archer. So welcome to your new post.
Yeah, it was a bad intro. Yes, I mean, the organisation was in a state financially. Its new computer system had failed. That coincided with a big drop in legacy income. That coincided with the decision to invest a lot in serve, in new activities. And that was just a poisonous brew because the organisation didn’t really know where it was financially. I mean, when I was first interviewed, they thought the deficit might be about two million. And by the time I joined them six months later as chief executive, it had grown to 14 million. And so it was a difficult time. I had to make, I had, we had to restructure completely. I had to make something like 500 people redundant, which was awful. I mean, a terribly painful experience. And yes, coupled with that, literally on my first day, I was summoned to appear on the news at 10 because Jeffrey Archer, the peer, had just been put in prison for perjury in his liable action against the “News of the World.” And he was put in, initially put in Belmarsh Jail, a maximum security prison, and he was due to move on from there to an open prison. But a fellow Tory peer accused him of having stolen or mislaid or mismanaged funds in a Red Cross appeal for the Kurds in Iraq 10 years before. Now every, we all knew everybody that he couldn’t, he, Jeffrey Archer, who had chaired that appeal and he chaired it very, very energetically and we’d raised a great deal of money, getting on for 40, 50 million pounds. And everybody knew that none of that would’ve come directly to Jeffrey Archer or anybody else. It would’ve gone into the Red Cross bank account and then been used for, to meet need in Iraq. But nevertheless, the papers, who all loathed Jeffrey,
[Helen] Yeah. you know, he’d been guilty of perjury in an action against one of their number. They all hated him and they loved this opportunity to pile in. So what really was a non-story became the story of the day for about six months. I was regularly on the “Today” programme and various other news media, but sort of defending the Red Cross, but also, of course, defending Jeffrey Archer, which, you know, at that time wasn’t a terribly comfortable place to be, although he was obviously completely innocent. Two days after that first “Today” interview, the Metropolitan Police turned up on the doorstep and said, “Right, we are going to have to investigate this. "This is a very serious allegation being made "against somebody who is a convicted felon. "We have to investigate it "and while we are investigating it, "Jeffrey Archer is going to be staying in Belmarsh,” which was pretty tough on him.
[Helen] Yeah.
And so, you know, I was, you know, I could see, you could just imagine, you know, what runs through your head is images of policemen in uniform carrying computers out of Red Cross headquarters, you know, turning the organisation upside down. It would’ve been chaos. So I was able to persuade the police to accept that we, the Red Cross, we would do our own forensic investigation using KPMG, big firm of accountants, to do the work. And we would show through that investigation that no money went missing and that Jeffrey Archer couldn’t have possibly stolen any. And I said, “You know,” said to the Metropolitan Police, “would you accept that KPMG investigation "as your investigation?” And thank goodness they said they would. So we then, we then had another six months of this huge investigation, which, you know,
[Helen] Yes. covered the world because lots of other Red Crosses raised money
[Helen] Of course. for this cause. And it was incredibly complicated, but eventually, you know, Anna was satisfied, Jeffrey Archer was exonerated. And we, I was able to get back to the day job. But you can imagine, this was enormously disruptive at a time when I was trying to focus on an organisation that A, was losing money, and B, in which confidence in the management team and the trustees had literally gone through the floor. So I had to put a lot of personal effort into really sort of geeing everybody up and getting everybody facing forwards and feeling optimistic again about the great work that the Red Cross was doing and would continue to do.
So should we talk about that with our first slide? We’ve got two or three slides this evening. And the first one, if we could have that shared on the screen, please. I believe we’re going to see, yes, an image of Baghdad in 2003. So can you tell us about that?
Yeah, so I was flown into Baghdad in 2003, I suppose about two, three months after the allied, the coalition forces had occupied the city. And I was part of a team that was looking at what the Red Cross could do to help with the, you know, the rebuilding of Baghdad and the enormous needs of the citizens there who had been obviously terrorised during the Saddam period, but then who had also, many of them suffered loss, injury, and lost their lives in the allied bombing of the city. The city was a complete wreck. All the power stations had been knocked out. Nobody had any water, nobody had any electricity, conditions were really grim. And, you know, I can vividly remember being just completely, as we went round the city, horrified by the destruction and by the needs of people who were just desperate just for water. I mean, I remember we, the Red Cross had located a number of large plastic blisters full of water at various strategic points around the city. And when we got to one of these in our Red Cross vehicle, it had somehow got punctured and all the water had run out. And I mean, local people were absolutely furious. I mean, they were banging on the vehicle. They were, we were being threatened because they were just so desperate for help after what they had been through. And I mean, I completely understood their feelings, but it was frightening. You know, one always considers oneself, you know, working for an organisation like the Red Cross, you are one of the good guys and suddenly to be seen as, you know, having failed and not doing enough. I think also, to be honest, and you’ll see two Red Cross vehicles in that photo. They are
[Helen] Yeah. Red Cross Toyota Land Cruisers, I think I’m right in saying. And of course, those were very similar vehicles to the vehicles that the coalition forces were using. So we were, in a sense, it was dangerous time for us because we were partly seen as allied to the fighting forces of the coalition. And that put us in a very difficult position. And that those two vehicles there, Red Cross vehicles, they were caught in crossfire after the American occupation. There were rebels still fighting in the city. And I think we lost two or three colleagues in those vehicles. And it was a particularly traumatic and ghastly sight, really, just to think that those people who had been there trying to help ended up losing their lives. And of course, I mean, many, many humanitarian workers die in the course of their duties. It’s sad to say par of the course and often seen as targets by one side or another.
Can we have our next slide, please? And I mentioned at the beginning this, how in your career you’ve covered some of the worst disasters, haven’t you really, and some of the worst conflicts, seen some of the most dangerous parts of the world. But of course, that included the tsunami in Indonesia, didn’t it?
Yes, I mean, tsunami, obviously that struck in on Boxing Day 2004. And oh, I mean, within seconds the phones were ringing off the hook at our offices in London. People wanting to give money, people wanting to get out there and help rebuild. I mean, this is, you know, literally a few hours after the tsunami, there was a real sense globally that this was something really huge. And of course it got bigger as time went on. I mean, the first pictures we saw on our TV screens were of Thailand. But these pictures are Indonesia. This is the province of Banda Aceh on the west, in the west of Indonesia. In fact, this is a little island off the coast of Banda Aceh. And you can see, and Banda Aceh is a big city, almost completely wiped out by the tsunami. All you could see flying over it was a sea of mud, boats washed up on top of buildings, the occasional mosque, because they tended to be built on better foundations. And then as you got closer, people picking about in the wreckage, trying to find something that was recognisable as part of their lives. And this picture, this top picture, as I say, is an island off the coast of Indonesia. And this was a, it had a, this little island community population, I think, of 400 or 500. And that picture you can see is all that was left of their village.
Literally the wave came up, washed across, and took everything with it. And I, we built a lot of houses on that island. We built a lot of houses all over Indonesia, actually, in response to the tsunami. And I particularly remember that visit to that island. I was with Ben Brown from the BBC who wanted to film an interview with the lady you can just see in the distance, who lost her home on that island. And to my surprise and some concern, she agreed to go back with me and Ben Brown and a camera crew to record an interview as she looked for the remains of her house. Well, we were there for an hour, an hour and a half, stumbling around in that mud, as you can see. And this poor woman, Romani was her name, simply, there was no sign of her house. You couldn’t even work out where it had been. And as she was going around, her little son, who was about five, was with her and he kept tugging on her sleeve. And I said to the interpreter, “Look, what’s he asking? "What’s he saying to his mother?” And she said, “Oh, well, he’s saying, "will we find daddy here? "Will we find daddy here?” His father was a fisherman, got completely swept away. And you know, he was just hoping that daddy would somehow emerge on this island. So, I mean, at that point I said to Ben Brown, “Look, I’m sorry Ben, we can’t do this interview.”
[Helen] No.
This is impossible. So I did the interview and we left. And the second picture, the picture bottom right, is the good news of this story because about two and a half years later, I went back to that island to see what we had done. And at the end of my visit, I asked the people who were with me, I said, “Does anybody know a woman called Romani, "who I so remember from my last time here? "Does any, can you find her?” And there was a great sort of rushing around and calling of names and things. And eventually Romani appeared and I, you know, we hugged, and I through an interpreter I said, “Do you know how I glad I was to see her "and how was she and all the rest of it?” And she said, “Oh, well, come with me.” And she took me to that house which we had built for her. And there was her, there’s her son in white on the doorstep. And next to it, as you can see, there’s that little sort of tin shack. And that’s the little shack that we had also built for her so that she could make a living out of selling things, and things she’d made, and things she’d grown to her fellow islanders. So, you know, in a situation like the tsunami, you really, you feel hopeless and helpless 'cause you just feel there’s, I can’t do enough to make this right. It’s just too awful. And yet when you boil it down to a single person like Romani, you can see that we did succeed in transforming her life. We couldn’t bring her husband back, but we did our very best to make sure that she had some sort of future ahead of her for her and her son.
Amazing. Can we have our last slide and then we’ve, chat box, yeah.
[Nick] Oh, well.
I’m not sure how many of our audience would’ve, I’ve never seen this photograph before.
[Nick] No.
So tell us why, it’s a bit fuzzy, tell us why it’s fuzzy.
Well, we wanted the whole world to see this photo, actually. So this was, Prince Charles who was the, our president, very kindly agreed to host a birthday party for the Red Cross and its supporters and volunteers at Buckingham Palace. You know, special garden party for us, which was wonderful. And it so happened that it was Land Rover’s 60th birthday that year. They were big supporters of the Red Cross, and they agreed to give us 60 brand new Land Rovers to celebrate their 60th birthday. I mean, and there are the Land Rovers all drawn up in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace around a piece of carpet in the shape of the Red Cross. And we were, we had, we were very excited that day 'cause we had, we thought we had two iconic photos lined up that would appear on the front page of every newspaper in the country, possibly in the world. One was to be taken from a helicopter flying over that courtyard and capturing this picture of the Red Cross on the Buckingham Palace courtyard formed by the carpet and the Land Rovers. And the second thing we’d organised was for the Red Arrows to fly over Buckingham Palace in the formation of a Red Cross. So, you know, we were incredibly excited about this, but I woke up that morning at half past six and it was pouring with rain and it carried on raining all through that day so that by eight o'clock we were at sourcing, hunt thousands of plastic ponchos so that our guests at the Buckingham Palace wouldn’t get too wet. And any idea of this, these wonderful iconic photos appearing on the front page of the newspapers just dribbled away in the rain, rather like the cupcakes that were rather sadly sitting on tables all around the Buckingham Palace garden. One of those things.
One of those things. Thank you. Yeah, we could we take the PowerPoint down? That would be great. So I want to ask you about a really significant, oh, there are lots of significant moments in your career, but with regard to Israel and the Middle East, because during your time there, there was a concerted effort to have the Magen David Adom, if I pronounced it correctly, the Red Shield, as part of your organisation and also the Palestine Red Crescent Society, the PRCS. And you talk very movingly in your book, I mean, after years and years of very complex negotiations, given the backdrop of the intifada and the difficult political situation, in 2006, it succeeded, didn’t it? In which the Arab worlds agreed that these two organisations could be part of that. And you said that moving moment that actually brought the audience to tears when, because you didn’t know if it was going to go through. But amazing that now that work is being carried through and so many of our audience will be aware of the work of the Red Shield, in particular. So do you want to comment on that period and that work?
Yes, I mean, yes, it’s a complicated story because the two main emblems of the Red Cross, Red Crescent movement are a cross, which is the Swiss flag reversed, actually, and the crescent, and these are not intended to be religious symbols, but inevitably they get interpreted as such. And it was a source of very considerable concern and sadness within the movement that Israel, which has a wonderful Red Cross-type organisation, the Magen David Adom, called the Red Shield of David. They did not feel able to join the movement because they did not want, totally reasonably, did not want to adopt either a cross or a crescent. And within the movement, there was a very strong feeling that this was wrong and that we wanted to see this corrected. The problem is, was, that the Red Cross, Red Crescent emblems are not owned by the Red Cross and the Red Crescent at all. They’re owned by governments, the governments that signed the Geneva Conventions. And so to bring the Magen David Adom, and indeed any or any Red Cross-type organisation that didn’t, couldn’t cite, couldn’t use a Red Cross or a Red Crescent, in order to get them within the fold, we had to persuade governments to accept that. And of course, you know, there has been this tragic historic difficulties, the political difficulties in the Middle East, which were preventing governments agreeing that that should happen.
And within the Red Cross, Red Crescent movement, we decided to make a concerted effort, which had been going on for some years of discussions around how can we turn this around? It became clear that one element of turning it around was for the Palestinian Red Crescent to come into the movement. It was out with the movement because Palestine wasn’t and isn’t a recognised state. So that was part of it. But we also had to get the government to agree to the introduction of a new, completely neutral emblem with no religious or political import at all. The governments had to agree that this could be adopted. We adopted a red diamond and that would then enable Magen David Adom to come in and use the red diamond when it was working overseas. This is a terribly complicated story, Helen, but I think it is an important one to tell because it was a fan-,
[Helen] Yes. I mean, it was a four-day conference of all the governments of the world, and all the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and the Pillar Palestinians, and the Israelis, and Magen David Adom. And it was touch and go, I mean, debates long into the night, many, many objections from, you know, one way or another. And it wasn’t until, I think it was something like four o'clock in the morning when eventually the Red Cross, we, the movement, forced, not a vote, but an acceptance of this resolution by acclaim. In other words, we got all the governments and all the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to clap their hands and acclaim this movement, this, yeah, this resolution. And it was a fantastic moment. I mean, everybody was in tears. We were all, you know, embracing the Israelis and the Magen David Adom are close colleagues. We worked very closely with Magen David Adom. And also our friends in the Palestinian Red Crescent also doing wonderful work in the West Bank and Gaza. And, you know, to see them all, to see our movement now complete after decades of wrangling on this sort of issue was a huge relief and just a very joyous, joyous moment.
Yeah, and I mean, our readers or our audience can read about that in that, your part of the memoir. And I’m just reminding our audience that in about, well, let’s have a look at my watch, in about five minutes we’ll be opening up for questions, you can ask Sir Nick your questions, which I’ll field your way. Thinking of religious symbolism, I’m not sure how many of our audience remember, but those headlines one Christmas.
[Nick] Oh, yes.
[Helen] You know what’s coming, don’t you?
I do.
The Red Cross bans Christmas. Tell us, did the Red Cross ban Christmas?
No, not at all. It was one of those, again, it was a quiet news time, basically, just before Christmas. And in a Red Cross shop, I think somewhere in Kent, a new volunteer was invited by the shop manager to decorate the window for Christmas. And this dear lady brought from home a crib and placed that absolutely right in the centre of the window. It had baby Jesus, the ox and the ass, Mary and Joseph, and all the rest of it. And when the manager got back, I guess from lunch or something, he said, “Oh, look, I’m awfully sorry "Mrs. whatever her name was, "the Red Cross is not a religious organisation. "We can’t possibly have this very Christian emblem "in the shop window. "I’m awfully sorry, we’ll have to remove it. "It’s very kind of you to do it, but it’s, we can’t do it. "The Red Cross is not that, not a religious organisation, "not a Christian organisation. "It’s completely impartial and neutral.” And unfortunately, you know, I think the volunteer, perhaps the manager hadn’t explained it very well. The volunteer got very upset. She went to her local paper and the local paper thought, oh, the “Daily Mail” would love this story. So literally three days before Christmas, I woke up with my press office ringing me up saying, “Nick, you need to go and buy a "Daily Mail.” And there we were front page, six-inch banner headline, “Red Cross Bans Christmas.”
And it was all, it all fed into the sort of political correctness gone mad kind of agenda. And yeah, I was, again, I was dragged out for every, pretty much every news programme, all the newspapers, local radio, all over the country. The story split globally. And it was a very difficult time. It was all over Christmas, there wasn’t anything else for the papers to cover so it kept on coming up, new glosses on the story. And, you know, looking back on it, yeah, I can laugh about it now, but it meant that we lost about four million pounds over a two-month period in people cancelling their donation, their regular donations or legacies that they’d made us because they just couldn’t get their head, you know, what’s wrong with a crib? Why shouldn’t, you know, why should we, why be so politically correct, you know? It was that kind of argument. It was also the first year that I started receiving shoals of Christmas cards from parishes all over Britain wishing me, you know, the blessings of this holy Christmas tide. Yeah, yeah. It was a very, very, it was a very tough time, but looking back it was very moving. In fact, I find it very difficult dealing with the “Daily Mail” because they wouldn’t reply to my letters, they wouldn’t answer the telephone. They wouldn’t engage in a discussion with me so I could explain what the help, what was going on here to them. And it wasn’t until some months later that I was able to get a, what turned out to be a very amicable meeting with a deputy editor. And then the next year I received, there arrived on my desk, oh, a Christmas card that was about half the size of my desk with a, you know, wonderful sort of Christmas crib, one of the holiest Christmas cards you could possibly find signed from the editor and staff of the “Daily Mail.” So there we go.
I hope you’ve kept it, I hope you’ve kept it.
Yeah, it was, it’s a treasured item, actually, yeah.
So I’m about to open up for questions, but from our audience, so please keep the questions coming through the chat. Before I do one final question just now from me, which I think it’s an important one to cover because our audience will be interested. You also oversaw, of course, with the AIDS crisis in South Africa. Do you want to just talk a little bit about that and then we’ll open up?
Yes, I, you know, looking back on my career in the Red Cross, there are so many desperately sad memories. And I think visiting, oh, tiny little hamlets in South Africa where, populated almost entirely by AIDS orphans. In other words, children whose parents had died of the virus. And, you know, they were either being looked after by grandparents, if they were still alive, relatives or friends, or just looking after each other in little gangs and somehow scraping together enough to feed themselves. I mean, yeah, earning money in all sorts of horrible ways, actually. And it was so big. And one just had this sense at that time, this is a long time ago, of course now, had that sense that we were never going to get on top of this terrible disease. And of course, you know, it’s, the whole situation has been transformed now. But yeah, it’s another part of the work of the Red Cross dealing with diseases and epidemics all over the world and disasters and conflict situations. We get all the tough jobs,
[Helen] Yeah. but that’s what the organisation is all about.
Q&A and Comments:
- Well, we have some questions coming in if you are happy to answer. And obviously given the current very difficult situation for a lot of our Jewish audience, and there is a question that’s coming in from Sharon.
Q: “Why haven’t the Red Cross/Crescent "visited Israeli hostages taken by Hamas? "What can we do about this?”
A - Well, you’ll appreciate that I stepped down from the Red Cross 10 years ago now, so I’m not involved day-to-day in the work, but you will understand, I’m sure, Sharon, that in order to get access, one has to have consent. I mean, the Red Cross I know will be deep in discussions and negotiations with Hamas and, indeed, as it has been in all the, in discussion with all the parties to that conflict and every conflict, trying to help them understand what the Red Cross exists to do, that it is there for the victims of conflict, including the hostages currently being held in Gaza and seeking to visit them. But of course, if you don’t get permission to do that, if that’s not allowed by, whether it’s Hamas or whether it’s a government involved in a conflict, then there’s really not very much, if anything, that the Red Cross can do except going back again and again and again and trying to get access. And I’m sure that’s what my colleagues will be trying to do. Because it is the mission of the Red Cross, set out in the Geneva Conventions to do everything it can to ensure that the victims in any conflict, whoever they are, whatever side they’re on, are looked after in accordance with the rules set out in those conventions.
Q - Thank you. Yes, you’ve got another question. Hannah, if it’s possible to delete questions, because I’ve got a funny iPad here, that have been answered that would be helpful. Keep your questions coming. And Barbara wants some clarification because I think she probably didn’t understand, came in a bit later. “I’m not sure,” she said, “is Magen David Adom "part of the Red Cross?”
A - Yes, it’s fully a part of the Red Cross movement and a very well respected, it’s an extremely strong organisation. I visited Magen David Adom in Israel on several occasions. I’ve been out with their ambulances as I happen to be with them in an ambulance when they had to, they were called out on a shout and had to go to a, I think it was a road traffic accident. And very impressive to see them go into operation. It’s a very strong organisation, as I say, very much respected within the Red Cross, Red Crescent movement.
Yeah, I mean it’s amazing achievement, that and it’s with. Okay, so there’s some historical questions, which I’m not sure if we can really take because for either of us to answer, but I’ll read this one from Lynn, which is not a historical question, but a comment, I think. So this will be interesting because it’s to do with POWs in the wartime. And it may be that Lynn heard your last discussion with me on your father escaping with his life, the book in the front. So she says, “My late father was a prisoner of war "for three years during World War II, "captured in north Africa at the Battle of City Reza. "He was a POW in Italy, and later in Germany, "he credited the Red Cross packages "with helping him to stay alive. "He wrote a check on a piece of tissue paper as a donation "to the Red Cross whilst the POW. "The bank in South Africa honoured it.” Oh, this is quite moving actually. “Thank you, Red Cross, for the work you do and did and do.” And her father was part the South African Allied Forces. Oh, how moving is that?
Well, that’s fantastic, Lynn. I feel we must almost be brother and sister. My father was also a POW in Italy, having been captured in Tunisia. And yeah, I mean I think he and all his fellow prisoners said exactly the same thing. Red Cross parcels made all the difference to them in their captivity. And how wonderful it is that your father recognised the value of that Red Cross support and sent them some money on a tissue, on a piece of tissue. I think that’s a great story. And I mean, yeah, I did write a book about my father’s war. It’s up there, “Escaping With His Life,” there, you can see it. And that tells the story of his captivity in Italy. And he spent six months on the run. He escaped and spent six months on the run. And in fact, this is, we are back into the other book, I’m afraid here, Helen, but he was helped in the last stages of his escape by two very brave young Jewish artisans who tragically died in that part of the escape attempt. The boy, Eugenio, age 23 was shot by a German patrol. This was at Anzio. And the girl, Sylvia, tragically died a couple of hours later. She was hit by an American bullet. An American century saw figures moving around in no man’s land at Anzio at a door and opened fire. And that killed Sylvia. But I was, I go to Rome, as it happens, on charity business quite often. When I do, I always visit the grave of these two very brave young people, which is in the Jewish cemetery in Rome. And it’s always, I spend a, usually spend an afternoon there just sitting with them to try and somehow let them know that they are not forgotten. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for those two, no question about it.
It’s such tales of heroism, isn’t it, through the generations. And I’m just checking who’s asking. Yes, Monty’s asking.
[Nick] Yeah, dad?
[Helen] That’s dad, is that dad?
That’s my father there, yep.
So Monty might like to look back over Lockdown University videos are in conversation before about your father in “Escaping With His Life” in which you talk in much more detail, don’t you, about that young Jewish brother and sister who saved your father’s life. Extraordinary.
[Nick] Yeah. And the other thing Lynn might be interested in, if you want to to find out more about your father as a POW, there might be records aren’t there, because you’re having, it’s part of the charitable work you’re doing, you’re having records of the Italian POWs or the British POWs in Italy, allied POWs actually, digitised from an American archive, isn’t it?
Yes, yes. I mean we, so I’m chair of a charity that was set up after the war to say thank you to all the very brave Italians, including those two young Jewish partisans, to say thank you to all those Italians who helped allied escapers, including, I’m guessing, Lynn, possibly your father, too. And one of the things we are doing is trying to make sure that we access all the archives that exist to enable people to track down what happened to their parents in Italy and what happened to the Italian families who helped them. And, you know, if you are interested in exploring the story of your father, I don’t know where he was in prison in Italy, but I, there must be, perhaps if you contact Helen Fry, she can pass you on to me and I’d be very happy to have a discussion and maybe link you in with my other charity, which is called the Monte San Martino Trust, if you want to have a look at that online.
Q - Thank you. Keep your questions coming in. I’ve got a couple more I do want to ask you. I’ve got sheets and sheets of paper here from your memoir, utterly extraordinary memoir. Would you, have you reflected on, what, in your view, would be the most difficult moment in your career? Is there one moment that was the most difficult and then I was going to end on an inspirational moment in your career. So very difficult 'cause reading your memoir, which I should put up here. You know, it covers all of those crises of the 20th century there, the latter half of the 20th century. But is there any one?
A - Yeah, I mean, I think there are so many difficult moments. I mean, every time you go to a conflict or a disaster situation, you meet people, ordinary people who are facing the very worst moment in their lives. They are people who, like us here in wonderful, safe UK, they just want to live their lives with shelter over their heads, the opportunity to educate their children, the decent hospital, decent doctors nearby. And that all gets disrupted in a conflict and in a disaster situation. So always your first sense when you get into one of those situations, and I’ve visit, I’ve been, you know, I spent most of my time in that kind of situation. Your first sense is one of hopelessness. This is too much. How can we possibly make a difference here? How can we ever raise enough money to help all these people? And so that’s a moment of real despair very, very often. And, but then you realise that actually, yes, Red Cross and Save the Children and Oxfam and so many other great organisations are doing their best to help. But actually, it’s the people themselves. It’s the local people themselves who are working together to look after each other, they are the ones who deserve the most praise. Because somehow there’s something about the human spirit that seems to be able to transcend these ghastly, ghastly events. And actually organisations like the Red Cross and Oxfam, the rest, we are the sort of, you know, we are the cavalry that come in two or three days later and try and make a difference. But it all depends on local people and their energy and determination to pull through and help each other.
And so that’s the, that was the sort of the most inspiring side of it I saw. But I think looking, just to answer your question specifically, the worst time of my time in the Red Cross was when a wonderful Red Cross worker called Khalil Dale was captured, taken in Quetta in northwest Pakistan, and he was held by a terrorist group. We spent three months desperately trying to work out who that was, trying to get in touch with him, trying to negotiate for his release. There was no question of the Red Cross paying a ransom. But we wanted to try and help whoever was holding him understand that he was a humanitarian worker, he was there to help people, and that he should never have been taken. And you know, that was a terrible time. It was three months. We had a lot of support from the foreign office and other organisations, but, you know, I had to deal, he was much loved within the Red Cross. And so everybody was on a real down within the organisation. I had to have weekly briefings to let people know what was happening and whether there was any news. His family was spread as it happens all around the world. So I had a team of people constantly on the phone to family, trying to help them and support them, deal with their issues. And it went on and on. And then his headless body was found on the road to the airport at Quetta and he’d been murdered. And I, yeah, I think probably that was, that was one of the worst moments because you just, this was a guy who was giving his life to help people and yeah, that was grim.
Yeah, I think I’ll take one more question. We’ve got a couple, actually, of okay, I’ll put them together. Catherine and Eleanor, one whose father, South African father, was a POW captured in Tobruk. And in all his letters, he was so excited about the booty arriving from the Red Cross. Cigarettes, chocolate, a jersey knitted by, well, with his mum’s strands of ginger hair woven through.
Oh no, how extraordinary. Oh my goodness.
And then Eleanor, my uncle, was taking prisoner of war in Tobruk, held in Italy until it fell to the allies, moved to a camp in Germany,
[Nick] Yeah. and always spoke of how Germans treated them better than the Italians as they completely observed the laws of the Red Cross. He spoke Yiddish and was used as an interpreter. So extraordinary stories there. So the Red Cross, yeah, you know, you go looking back at what the work they did in the Second World War.
Well, and this was the value of, this is why, you know, of course, I so wish we had access to those hostages being held in Gaza because, you know, it is enormous comfort to somebody being held prisoner that when somebody from the Red Cross comes in, says. “Hello,” you know, “what can I do to help?” And is able to arrange, you know, for special supplies for them, maybe some medical assistance, just the comfort of knowing that they’ve been registered, they’re logged, they, it is known that they are there is so beneficial to anybody being held in that kind of situation. And certainly, you know, through the war in many POW camps, prisoners, we are very grateful for that kind of support the Red Cross was able to bring.
Thank you so much. Can I ask you to give us the honour of just giving us some, a few final reflections before we close our session today? How would you sort of like to reflect on maybe the work of the Red Cross or your particular career with them?
Well, I feel I enormously lucky and privileged to have been able to work not just for the Red Cross, but also for Macmillan and for two of the great philanthropists of this, of our time, Sue Ryder and her husband, Leonard Cheshire. You know, they, it was a huge privilege to work for them and those organisations. I felt humbled by my work in every way. Frustrated by it because you never seem to be able to do enough. There were never enough hours in the day. There was never enough money in the bank account. But enormously lucky that I had the chance to make a difference in some people’s lives. Cancer, disaster, conflict, they’re all the worst point in anybody’s life. And to have been given the opportunity to make a difference for some of those people is really a privilege indeed. I look back on my career with great satis-, great, great, well satisfaction, not quite satisfaction 'cause I’m not sure I did ever do do enough, I ever did do enough, but I felt lucky to have been given the chance and very lucky to have been given the chance not to be a lawyer anymore. I must say I never missed my career in the law. Although very help, I was, it was always, I felt that the approach to solving problems I’d learned as a lawyer was an enormous value throughout my life. And I never regretted doing it, but I never regretted leaving it either.
Sir Nick Young, thank you so much for our discussion today. Really inspirational and I do encourage all of you to actually read both of your books if you can manage to get hold of both of those and read them. Thank you so much, Sir Nick.
Thank you, thank you very much, Helen. Thank you, everybody, for listening.