Conversation with Dame Stephanie Shirley CH
By Rory Coonan, Dame Stephanie Shirley
The philanthropy of Dame Stephanie (‘Steve’) Shirley CH is well described in her first book, Let it Go. Published by Penguin books, this memoir (now in its second edition [2013]) begins in 1939 with a perilous journey across Europe from Nazi-occupied Vienna. She was five years old. Her sister Renate, aged nine, was with her. Their father was Jewish. The Geheime Staatspolizei (known as the ‘Gestapo’) had been to the family house. The unaccompanied children arrived in London on one of the last Kindertransport (‘child transport’) trains *. It was 8 weeks before the start of the second world war. The children were met at Liverpool Street station by a kindly couple. They had paid £50 to guarantee the refugees would not burden the British state. Exhausted, and with no English, the sisters were taken to the Midlands. There they began a new life with “Auntie” and “Uncle”. They witnessed the devastating effects of the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Dame Stephanie’s aptitude for mathematics at her Roman Catholic school was crowned by success in the post-war science of computer programming. In the 1960s, signing her letters ‘Steve’ because men did not take a woman in business seriously, she created an all-female freelance organisation. This grew rapidly. Her young software company wrote computer programs for Concorde, the ill-fated supersonic Anglo-French passenger jet. The Financial Times reported that at its peak in 2000, the software business she started from her dining-room table with £6 was worth £2.6 billion (£4.5 billion in today’s money.) ** Its flotation on the stock market (with male and female employees – a single-sex company had become unlawful) led to significant financial rewards. These made her for a time one of the richest women in the country. Yet in parallel with this stellar business career, she and her husband cared devotedly for their severely autistic son Giles, who was born in 1963. Giles died from a seizure in 1998. The experience of parenting an autistic son, including the many battles with officialdom to create the best quality of life for him, had profound effects on both husband and wife. For Dame Stephanie, these included an episode of mental collapse. Despite or perhaps because of such trauma, she has funded major philanthropic initiatives for autism with sums exceeding £60 million. They include the charity Autistica (www.autistica.org.uk), Prior’s Court school for young people with autism and complex needs (www.priorscourt.co.uk) and the major care provider Autism at Kingwood (www.kingwood.org.uk). [In a reflection of her interest in computing, she was also the founding donor of the Internet Institute at Oxford University (www.oii.ox.ac.uk).] Now 87 years old, and a Companion of Honour to the Queen, Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley remains as determined as ever to transform the lives of those with autism. I spoke to her on a Zoom call and asked how she had fared during the past year. She said: “When lockdown began, I said to myself, I must make good use of the time. I’m always looking for new things to do, so I produced my second book, So To Speak as an anthology of some 30 of my speeches from the past forty years.” *** Demonstrating her flair for contemporary visual art, the striking book cover is by Deep (www.deep.co.uk), designers whose clients includes classic British brands Morgan Cars, Heals and the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, in London. For Dame Stephanie, her Britishness (“I always become very emotional at the sight of the white cliffs of Dover”), is all the stronger for her origins as a refugee. Britain saved her life. She has given a great deal back. But it was not always easy. She does not flinch from the difficulties. Describing the many battles to care for her son, who had no speech (“Imagine, I was never called ‘mummy’, not once”), she is disarmingly frank: “I kept things so separate, that some people did not even know I had a husband!” “When Giles was in hospital ‘asylum’ [the term then in use], I used to spend Sundays there but would then be incapable of work on Monday. Very few people knew about Giles – I tried to keep business and home life separate. We then switched to Saturdays. Sometimes we would take Giles out and we enjoyed snatches of family life together. The more senior I got in the business, the more I needed to have some sort of façade. No way was I going to say, ‘I’ve had a hell of a weekend’, or ‘I had to call an ambulance last night.’ I kept things so separate, that some people did not even know I had a husband! Although I was a woman in a man’s world, throughout I was delivering work of the right quality. Most people don’t like hearing about how awful it was…but it was awful.” Nowadays, placing ‘life’ and ‘work’ in sealed compartments would be regarded by some as artificial and by others as undesirable. But times were different then – unimaginably so. In Britain in the early 1960s thousands of people remained incarcerated in mental hospitals, largely untouched by reforms which had created the national health service (NHS) in 1947. Among them were many with learning disabilities and autism who were not ill. They had little prospect of leading a different life. There were few opportunities of release into what would now be described as ‘the community’. (Sixty years ago, the word ‘community’ denoted something exclusive or closed-off, rather than inclusive.) Such was the background to Dame Stephanie’s continuing fight to develop knowledge and understanding of autism against all obstacles. Her work finds a striking parallel in the life of the actor-manager Brian (later Lord) Rix [1924-2016], chairman (from 1988) of the learning disability charity Mencap, whose eldest daughter Shelley was born in 1951 with Down’s syndrome. Dame Stephanie has constantly attempted new things and been willing to fail (“You only learn through your failures…you have to make mistakes”). Her striving to achieve acceptance for those with autism in the community (in the modern sense of the term) appears undimmed. Her TED Talk has attracted over 2 million views. Her efforts have blended business expertise with deep personal knowledge of how parents of children with autism navigate (or fail to navigate) entrenched bureaucratic rules to deliver better care and greater independence. To civil servants, she can talk the language of savings and economy; to business people she deploys the vocabulary of investment and philanthropy. “Personally, I have never had a problem with profit-driven enterprises”, she says, “Otherwise, how are organisations going to become sustainable?” “The timing of her latest charitable initiatives is as impeccable and judicious as Dame Steve is herself.” With admirable symmetry, Dame Steve has recently brought together the two central strands in her adult life: autism and computing. She has funded an autism apprenticeship at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. (Her boss at the General Post Office research department after the war was the engineer Tommy Flowers. Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. It was used to decipher German codes at Bletchley Park.) At a time when the current Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has praised its own staff with neurodiverse conditions, including Asperger’s Syndrome, the timing of this latest initiative appears every bit as impeccable and judicious as is Dame Steve herself. For the musical South Pacific Oscar Hammerstein wrote “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” but there really is no-one like this Dame. __________________________________________________________________________________ *The story of the Kindertransport [1938-40], is recorded in the UK National Archives: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/kindertransport/ ** Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/f8a48686-c32e-11e4-9c27-00144feab7de *** Dame Steve’s books are available at www.steveshirley.com. Proceeds go to Autistica | Conversation with Dame Stephanie Shirley CH
By Rory Coonan, Dame Stephanie Shirley
The philanthropy of Dame Stephanie (‘Steve’) Shirley CH is well described in her first book, Let it Go. Published by Penguin books, this memoir (now in its second edition [2013]) begins in 1939 with a perilous journey across Europe from Nazi-occupied Vienna. She was five years old. Her sister Renate, aged nine, was with her. Their father was Jewish. The Geheime Staatspolizei (known as the ‘Gestapo’) had been to the family house. The unaccompanied children arrived in London on one of the last Kindertransport (‘child transport’) trains *. It was 8 weeks before the start of the second world war. The children were met at Liverpool Street station by a kindly couple. They had paid £50 to guarantee the refugees would not burden the British state. Exhausted, and with no English, the sisters were taken to the Midlands. There they began a new life with “Auntie” and “Uncle”. They witnessed the devastating effects of the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Dame Stephanie’s aptitude for mathematics at her Roman Catholic school was crowned by success in the post-war science of computer programming. In the 1960s, signing her letters ‘Steve’ because men did not take a woman in business seriously, she created an all-female freelance organisation. This grew rapidly. Her young software company wrote computer programs for Concorde, the ill-fated supersonic Anglo-French passenger jet. The Financial Times reported that at its peak in 2000, the software business she started from her dining-room table with £6 was worth £2.6 billion (£4.5 billion in today’s money.) ** Its flotation on the stock market (with male and female employees – a single-sex company had become unlawful) led to significant financial rewards. These made her for a time one of the richest women in the country. Yet in parallel with this stellar business career, she and her husband cared devotedly for their severely autistic son Giles, who was born in 1963. Giles died from a seizure in 1998. The experience of parenting an autistic son, including the many battles with officialdom to create the best quality of life for him, had profound effects on both husband and wife. For Dame Stephanie, these included an episode of mental collapse. Despite or perhaps because of such trauma, she has funded major philanthropic initiatives for autism with sums exceeding £60 million. They include the charity Autistica (www.autistica.org.uk), Prior’s Court school for young people with autism and complex needs (www.priorscourt.co.uk) and the major care provider Autism at Kingwood (www.kingwood.org.uk). [In a reflection of her interest in computing, she was also the founding donor of the Internet Institute at Oxford University (www.oii.ox.ac.uk).] Now 87 years old, and a Companion of Honour to the Queen, Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley remains as determined as ever to transform the lives of those with autism. I spoke to her on a Zoom call and asked how she had fared during the past year. She said: “When lockdown began, I said to myself, I must make good use of the time. I’m always looking for new things to do, so I produced my second book, So To Speak as an anthology of some 30 of my speeches from the past forty years.” *** Demonstrating her flair for contemporary visual art, the striking book cover is by Deep (www.deep.co.uk), designers whose clients includes classic British brands Morgan Cars, Heals and the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, in London. For Dame Stephanie, her Britishness (“I always become very emotional at the sight of the white cliffs of Dover”), is all the stronger for her origins as a refugee. Britain saved her life. She has given a great deal back. But it was not always easy. She does not flinch from the difficulties. Describing the many battles to care for her son, who had no speech (“Imagine, I was never called ‘mummy’, not once”), she is disarmingly frank: “I kept things so separate, that some people did not even know I had a husband!” “When Giles was in hospital ‘asylum’ [the term then in use], I used to spend Sundays there but would then be incapable of work on Monday. Very few people knew about Giles – I tried to keep business and home life separate. We then switched to Saturdays. Sometimes we would take Giles out and we enjoyed snatches of family life together. The more senior I got in the business, the more I needed to have some sort of façade. No way was I going to say, ‘I’ve had a hell of a weekend’, or ‘I had to call an ambulance last night.’ I kept things so separate, that some people did not even know I had a husband! Although I was a woman in a man’s world, throughout I was delivering work of the right quality. Most people don’t like hearing about how awful it was…but it was awful.” Nowadays, placing ‘life’ and ‘work’ in sealed compartments would be regarded by some as artificial and by others as undesirable. But times were different then – unimaginably so. In Britain in the early 1960s thousands of people remained incarcerated in mental hospitals, largely untouched by reforms which had created the national health service (NHS) in 1947. Among them were many with learning disabilities and autism who were not ill. They had little prospect of leading a different life. There were few opportunities of release into what would now be described as ‘the community’. (Sixty years ago, the word ‘community’ denoted something exclusive or closed-off, rather than inclusive.) Such was the background to Dame Stephanie’s continuing fight to develop knowledge and understanding of autism against all obstacles. Her work finds a striking parallel in the life of the actor-manager Brian (later Lord) Rix [1924-2016], chairman (from 1988) of the learning disability charity Mencap, whose eldest daughter Shelley was born in 1951 with Down’s syndrome. Dame Stephanie has constantly attempted new things and been willing to fail (“You only learn through your failures…you have to make mistakes”). Her striving to achieve acceptance for those with autism in the community (in the modern sense of the term) appears undimmed. Her TED Talk has attracted over 2 million views. Her efforts have blended business expertise with deep personal knowledge of how parents of children with autism navigate (or fail to navigate) entrenched bureaucratic rules to deliver better care and greater independence. To civil servants, she can talk the language of savings and economy; to business people she deploys the vocabulary of investment and philanthropy. “Personally, I have never had a problem with profit-driven enterprises”, she says, “Otherwise, how are organisations going to become sustainable?” “The timing of her latest charitable initiatives is as impeccable and judicious as Dame Steve is herself.” With admirable symmetry, Dame Steve has recently brought together the two central strands in her adult life: autism and computing. She has funded an autism apprenticeship at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. (Her boss at the General Post Office research department after the war was the engineer Tommy Flowers. Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. It was used to decipher German codes at Bletchley Park.) At a time when the current Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has praised its own staff with neurodiverse conditions, including Asperger’s Syndrome, the timing of this latest initiative appears every bit as impeccable and judicious as is Dame Steve herself. For the musical South Pacific Oscar Hammerstein wrote “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” but there really is no-one like this Dame. __________________________________________________________________________________ *The story of the Kindertransport [1938-40], is recorded in the UK National Archives: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/kindertransport/ ** Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/f8a48686-c32e-11e4-9c27-00144feab7de *** Dame Steve’s books are available at www.steveshirley.com. Proceeds go to Autistica | Conversation with Dame Stephanie Shirley CH
By Rory Coonan, Dame Stephanie Shirley
The philanthropy of Dame Stephanie (‘Steve’) Shirley CH is well described in her first book, Let it Go. Published by Penguin books, this memoir (now in its second edition [2013]) begins in 1939 with a perilous journey across Europe from Nazi-occupied Vienna. She was five years old. Her sister Renate, aged nine, was with her. Their father was Jewish. The Geheime Staatspolizei (known as the ‘Gestapo’) had been to the family house. The unaccompanied children arrived in London on one of the last Kindertransport (‘child transport’) trains *. It was 8 weeks before the start of the second world war. The children were met at Liverpool Street station by a kindly couple. They had paid £50 to guarantee the refugees would not burden the British state. Exhausted, and with no English, the sisters were taken to the Midlands. There they began a new life with “Auntie” and “Uncle”. They witnessed the devastating effects of the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Dame Stephanie’s aptitude for mathematics at her Roman Catholic school was crowned by success in the post-war science of computer programming. In the 1960s, signing her letters ‘Steve’ because men did not take a woman in business seriously, she created an all-female freelance organisation. This grew rapidly. Her young software company wrote computer programs for Concorde, the ill-fated supersonic Anglo-French passenger jet. The Financial Times reported that at its peak in 2000, the software business she started from her dining-room table with £6 was worth £2.6 billion (£4.5 billion in today’s money.) ** Its flotation on the stock market (with male and female employees – a single-sex company had become unlawful) led to significant financial rewards. These made her for a time one of the richest women in the country. Yet in parallel with this stellar business career, she and her husband cared devotedly for their severely autistic son Giles, who was born in 1963. Giles died from a seizure in 1998. The experience of parenting an autistic son, including the many battles with officialdom to create the best quality of life for him, had profound effects on both husband and wife. For Dame Stephanie, these included an episode of mental collapse. Despite or perhaps because of such trauma, she has funded major philanthropic initiatives for autism with sums exceeding £60 million. They include the charity Autistica (www.autistica.org.uk), Prior’s Court school for young people with autism and complex needs (www.priorscourt.co.uk) and the major care provider Autism at Kingwood (www.kingwood.org.uk). [In a reflection of her interest in computing, she was also the founding donor of the Internet Institute at Oxford University (www.oii.ox.ac.uk).] Now 87 years old, and a Companion of Honour to the Queen, Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley remains as determined as ever to transform the lives of those with autism. I spoke to her on a Zoom call and asked how she had fared during the past year. She said: “When lockdown began, I said to myself, I must make good use of the time. I’m always looking for new things to do, so I produced my second book, So To Speak as an anthology of some 30 of my speeches from the past forty years.” *** Demonstrating her flair for contemporary visual art, the striking book cover is by Deep (www.deep.co.uk), designers whose clients includes classic British brands Morgan Cars, Heals and the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, in London. For Dame Stephanie, her Britishness (“I always become very emotional at the sight of the white cliffs of Dover”), is all the stronger for her origins as a refugee. Britain saved her life. She has given a great deal back. But it was not always easy. She does not flinch from the difficulties. Describing the many battles to care for her son, who had no speech (“Imagine, I was never called ‘mummy’, not once”), she is disarmingly frank: “I kept things so separate, that some people did not even know I had a husband!” “When Giles was in hospital ‘asylum’ [the term then in use], I used to spend Sundays there but would then be incapable of work on Monday. Very few people knew about Giles – I tried to keep business and home life separate. We then switched to Saturdays. Sometimes we would take Giles out and we enjoyed snatches of family life together. The more senior I got in the business, the more I needed to have some sort of façade. No way was I going to say, ‘I’ve had a hell of a weekend’, or ‘I had to call an ambulance last night.’ I kept things so separate, that some people did not even know I had a husband! Although I was a woman in a man’s world, throughout I was delivering work of the right quality. Most people don’t like hearing about how awful it was…but it was awful.” Nowadays, placing ‘life’ and ‘work’ in sealed compartments would be regarded by some as artificial and by others as undesirable. But times were different then – unimaginably so. In Britain in the early 1960s thousands of people remained incarcerated in mental hospitals, largely untouched by reforms which had created the national health service (NHS) in 1947. Among them were many with learning disabilities and autism who were not ill. They had little prospect of leading a different life. There were few opportunities of release into what would now be described as ‘the community’. (Sixty years ago, the word ‘community’ denoted something exclusive or closed-off, rather than inclusive.) Such was the background to Dame Stephanie’s continuing fight to develop knowledge and understanding of autism against all obstacles. Her work finds a striking parallel in the life of the actor-manager Brian (later Lord) Rix [1924-2016], chairman (from 1988) of the learning disability charity Mencap, whose eldest daughter Shelley was born in 1951 with Down’s syndrome. Dame Stephanie has constantly attempted new things and been willing to fail (“You only learn through your failures…you have to make mistakes”). Her striving to achieve acceptance for those with autism in the community (in the modern sense of the term) appears undimmed. Her TED Talk has attracted over 2 million views. Her efforts have blended business expertise with deep personal knowledge of how parents of children with autism navigate (or fail to navigate) entrenched bureaucratic rules to deliver better care and greater independence. To civil servants, she can talk the language of savings and economy; to business people she deploys the vocabulary of investment and philanthropy. “Personally, I have never had a problem with profit-driven enterprises”, she says, “Otherwise, how are organisations going to become sustainable?” “The timing of her latest charitable initiatives is as impeccable and judicious as Dame Steve is herself.” With admirable symmetry, Dame Steve has recently brought together the two central strands in her adult life: autism and computing. She has funded an autism apprenticeship at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. (Her boss at the General Post Office research department after the war was the engineer Tommy Flowers. Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. It was used to decipher German codes at Bletchley Park.) At a time when the current Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has praised its own staff with neurodiverse conditions, including Asperger’s Syndrome, the timing of this latest initiative appears every bit as impeccable and judicious as is Dame Steve herself. For the musical South Pacific Oscar Hammerstein wrote “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” but there really is no-one like this Dame. __________________________________________________________________________________ *The story of the Kindertransport [1938-40], is recorded in the UK National Archives: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/kindertransport/ ** Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/f8a48686-c32e-11e4-9c27-00144feab7de *** Dame Steve’s books are available at www.steveshirley.com. Proceeds go to Autistica |
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