The Other Railway Children - Chapter 4 (extracts) "The Launch"

The launch of the Railway Children charity took place at 12 noon on the 31st May 1995 ‘under the clock’ on Waterloo station concourse. Some 150 relatives, friends, colleagues and potential supporters, and a few members of the travelling public who happened to be passing, gathered before a rostrum that had been set up that morning together with a photo exhibition from the book ‘Children of Bombay’. A few months before the launch I had seen some photos of street children in the Sunday Observer supplement and had found them so appropriate for the charity that I had contacted the photographer, Dario Mitidieri, and the publisher, Dewi Lewis, through the newspaper, and asked if I could use any of the photos as part of the launch publicity. They both responded enthusiastically and offered a dozen stands of some of the most striking photographs to be exhibited on the station concourse for the whole of the following week.

As the crowd gathered I began to realise - perhaps for the first time - the magnitude of what I was undertaking. I was going public and could not turn back now. My stomach churned with nervous excitement. British Rail was in the transitional phase of privatisation and the Chairmen of Railtrack, Bob Horton, and of the residual British Rail organisation, John Welsby, had both promised to support me by being present and speaking at the launch. In the event, after Bob Horton had spoken, Tony Roche, Deputy Chairman of BR, took John Welsby’s place as he had been detained at an urgent meeting at the Ministry of Transport in Marsham Street. Dario Mitidieri spoke briefly about the photographic exhibition and I outlined what had motivated me to found the charity and explained its objectives. Afterwards we had a small reception in the Railtrack offices on the station.

I remained on the concourse at Waterloo with the photo exhibition for the rest of the week, assisted by a few friends and colleagues. It was at times a lonely vigil; I found the rush hours to be particularly unrewarding as commuters passed ‘heads-down’ oblivious to most activity around them. During the middle part of the day, however, some travellers had time to stop and look at the photographs and engage me in conversation.

About the third day, I noticed one particular family who must have spent half an hour staring at the pictures before talking to me. The middle-aged married couple were accompanied by two smartly dressed young girls - probably around 8-10 years of age - of seeming Indian appearance. As the mother and girls continued to look at the photos, the man explained to me that they had read about the launch of the charity and the exhibition in the press and had brought their adopted daughters up from the Wimbledon area specially. Both girls had been born to street children in Bombay and for their first couple of years had survived with their young mothers on the streets of the city. They had then been taken into an orphanage and had been adopted from there by this English couple. The family had stayed in touch with the orphanage and the girls’ school had regular contact with the Indian institution. They had brought the girls to see pictures of the life into which they had been born and from which they’d been rescued.

During the week I’d had a collecting box for donations by the photographs. We did not get many donations - we had as yet no literature or Charity Commission registration, merely Railtrack’s permission to collect on the station. I suppose we must have collected around £200 by the end of the week - I did notice someone trying to squeeze a £20 note into the tin. At the end of the week, as the rush hour calmed down, Dewi Lewis’ staff began to dismantle the exhibition, and I began to collect my things together ready to put in the back of my car. I was naïve - I only left my things for half a minute while I went to open the back of the Estate vehicle. When I came back, the collecting tin had vanished. Not a good omen. I can only hope that it helped some homeless soul living on the streets around Waterloo station. So where should I start, with no money in the bank?

Christian Wolmar, Transport Correspondent of the Independent had attended the launch and the London Evening Standard had covered it also. Some donations began to arrive. This enabled me to sit down with colleagues at the Consortium for Street Children and discuss the possibility of a first project. Nic Fenton, one of the founding members of the CSC and at that time Director of Childhope, advised me of two potential projects in Eastern Europe where street children were living on railway stations - Nic had been one of the colleagues who had encouraged me to develop the ‘early intervention’ focus. He was keen to support local charities in Bucharest, Romania, and in Sofia in Bulgaria, but Childhope at that time did not have the necessary funding available.

The situation at Bucharest main railway station seemed to meet the criteria I had built up - 50 young boys between 10 and 14 years of age were apparently surviving at the station, even descending at night into the sewers there to avoid abuse and violence and also the cold of an Eastern European winter night. A local Romanian charity, ASIS, was trying to help these children and had been offered by the municipality a neglected and empty house on the edge of the city to accommodate them.

Christian persuaded his editor to send him to Bucharest to have a look for himself and he came back with dramatic stories and photos of the boys on the station and the Independent printed a two page article. The donations began to arrive faster. Through Childhope, Railway Children decided to provide this money to decorate and furnish the house and provide the salary of the ASIS staff to look after the boys. Our ability to do this and continue beyond the first year was further helped by the effort of two young men in London Transport’s Planning Department who each undertook a 3,500 mile sponsored cycle ride from London to Istanbul and raised several thousand pounds in sponsored donations. Together with nearly £4,000 from other early donations and a £5,000 grant from a Trust which the Vice-Chairman of Railtrack obtained for us, we were able to start our first project for the young street boys of Bucharest railway station by the Autumn of 1995, six months after the charity was launched.