;The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 15 / 2

The Railway Children (cont’d)

We moved office to Breeden House in Crewe in 1998 and appointed our first two part time staff – Administrator Julia Worthington and Fundraiser Katie Mason. With office backing in the UK, I was able to spend more time abroad with our partners and went with Stan Judd to India that year for a pretty intensive tour of duty. By this time we’d linked with a remarkable charismatic Catholic nurse from Cork, Edith Wilkins, whom we’d first met as the Urban Director of CINI Asha’s street children programme in Calcutta. Through ‘Save the Children’ we’d worked with one of her projects supporting the children of sex workers at Sealdah station and Rambagan red light district.

She’d introduced us to another local NGO, SEED in Howrah, who’d found thirty young girls aged between 4 and 13 who’d been living rough on Howrah’s crowded and chaotic platforms, all of them the victims of sexual abuse or rape. SEED had hired two social workers as ‘Aunties’ for these girls and a local school allowed us to use one of their classrooms and kitchen overnight as an emergency night shelter.

During the opening ceremony, while a number of local dignitaries made long speeches in Bengali, a small girl of seven crawled from the ranks of bored looking children on the front bench and plonked herself on my lap and promptly fell asleep. I learned that this was ‘Babli’ as she was known, who survived by fetching and carrying water for the local slum community eight hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year for the princely sum of one rupee a day on which she had had to survive (remember the example given in the previous chapter of the risk to children carrying water quoted by an Indian safety scientist at the Budapest Safety Science Conference?). Ten years later I received an e-mail from Babli ‘thanking me for giving her a childhood back’. This is more than reward enough.

I think it was during this visit that Stan and I visited a slum community at one of the Calcutta suburban stations, Tollygunge, where our partner had set up an informal school. The night after our visit, someone upset a stove and the flames spread throughout the entire community destroying all the makeshift homes and killing one of the children we’d seen the previous day. Typically no fire engines or ambulances turned up to an illegal settlement and Edith galvanised us and a couple of her visitors from Cork to act as the emergency medical team to treat dozens of people with burns who waited patiently in a long queue to have their wounds examined and treated.

The trouble was that we had no medical supplies so we all pooled whatever cash we had and a volunteer doctor and I walked a mile to the nearest chemist’s shop and bought as much relevant first aid equipment and ointments as we could afford and the chemist had in stock. The only building left standing after the fire was the straw and bamboo school we had built which the community had managed to save as their priority and we set up our ‘surgery’ there.

One of Edith’s volunteers was also a nurse, so the doctor examined each patient and diagnosed what treatment was appropriate, Edith and her friend bathed and bandaged and I acted as medical auxiliary cutting bandages, finding plasters, looking for the right medicine and antiseptic bottles and pain relieving tablets, trying to respond to and interpret the cacophony of Bengali, Hindi and Irish voices. After four hours in the heat and dirt squatting on the charred earth we came to the last patient in the queue. No-one complained or screamed. A few children whimpered when the antiseptic ointment stung their open burns. Just as we were finishing, a local politician turned up with a TV crew to try to take the credit for what we were doing. The crowd sent him packing and two children took Edith gently by the arm and escorted her and us reverently through the still smouldering wreckage. It still chokes me up to think of it.

During the same visit I started to try to influence the Indian railway authorities to co-operate with our efforts to help the street children on their stations. I had met the General Manager of the Central Railway, Mr Balakesari, at VT station in Bombay previously and he had since been promoted to Member, Staff, of the Indian Railways Board and Ministry – his responsibilities included control of one branch of the railway police – the Railway Protection Force (RPF). As a retired senior manager of British Rail, I could use my former contacts to gain access as BR used to run senior management courses for Indian railway officers and I had been involved to deliver safety management training as mentioned in a previous chapter.

I was concerned to push for two main areas of support – the allocation of space on key stations which partners could use for emergency shelter and the co-operation of the railway police to work with our partners to rescue rather than beat up or throw the children off the stations. This was a gradual process – slowly some of our partners had built good relationships with the local Divisional Railway Managers or District Officers of the RPF, but these were personal and I wanted it systematised to withstand the changes of personnel every two years or so.

In the same period I’d acquired other responsibilities. I’d become a trustee of the Methodist Relief and Development Fund which collected about £1 million a year from churches for its humanitarian work overseas and I was asked to make a monitoring visit to a project in the foothill of the Himalayas while I was in India for Railway Children purposes. Deforestation of the 8,000 feet slopes above the Nainital valley area was threatening to bring major problems destroying the local ways of life, causing landslides and flash floods and I visited a programme of tree planting and environmental education in the little schools in the tribal village areas.

At the end of a several days visit, I was taken to a viewpoint to see the high Himalayas – unfortunately there had been a thunderstorm the night before and everything was covered in a thick mist. One of the local volunteers told me anyway that she’d been there for two months and hadn’t seen the Himalayas yet through the haze. It seemed pretty hopeless but as we stared the mist dramatically lifted and the range emerged in front of my eyes, the huge bulk of Nanga Parbat right opposite. Then after drinking it in for twenty awe inspiring minutes, as I turned to go, the mist dropped down again and the mountains disappeared…

I was also busy at Amnesty International. I was still a member of the Children’s Human Rights Committee and we had persuaded the UK Section’s AGM to mount a UK campaign for Children’s Rights, specifically for children caught up in conflict situations including child soldiers, street children and girls subject to female genital mutilation (fgm). Half way through preparation for the campaign, the Amnesty staff curtailed our ambitions on the basis that they had insufficient resources to support us and restricted our initiative to campaigning for the end of forced child recruitment into government and rebel armies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Chairman and Secretary of the network resigned in protest and I had to choose whether to stay or go as well. I concluded that half a loaf was better than none and I’d stay to fight another day.

As a result I found myself Chairman of the AIUK network by default and – as my committee had virtually disappeared through resignations and ill health – I was appointed as Children’s Rights Advisor to Amnesty International UK to input children’s rights concerns into country and theme campaigns and to communicate cases for action to the network of supporters by internet. Eventually as Amnesty overhauled its website, and I obtained new volunteer support – young members who were more internet-literate than me – our network grew to over 8,000 members willing to act on Amnesty cases involving human rights abuse and violations of children and young people.

Meanwhile Railway Children was beginning to grow beyond my capability to manage it on a voluntary basis. We advertised for a Chief Executive and in 2001 appointed Terina Keene, who had been Financial Director of ‘Climb’, an NGO supporting children suffering from rare metabolic diseases and their families. Terina had interrupted her employment, spending two years in the USA as her husband was working in Houston, and was looking for employment on her return. In fact she’d been appointed to a good job in IT, but opted to come to us even though we could not afford such a high salary as her other offer. A year later during a visit to India I realised I needed help there also and with the assistance of a former UNICEF officer based in Mumbai, Gopal Dutia, who later became a Railway Children trustee, I appointed two Indian Programme Officers – Mrinalini Rao for the West and North and Mohan Rao (no relation) for the East and South of India.

Support in the UK, especially in the railway industry, was growing very fast. In June 2000 I was invited to address the ASLEF annual conference in Southport by Mick Rix, their General Secretary. In August EWS invited me to name an electric locomotive, 90031, ‘The Railway Children Partnership’, at the Old Oak Common Open Day, the Railway Ball had a separate Ball Committee drawn from companies associated with the railway industry, and Select Service Partners (SSP) – the food shop franchise holders at main stations – took us as their key partner setting up collecting boxes at all their outlets which by 2010 raised a significant sum every month for the charity.

Then HSBC Rail, one of the three rolling stock leasing companies, offered Railway Children a number of redundant nameplates from diesel and electric locomotives and the auction, held at the London Zoo auditorium and run free for us by Ian Wright’s Sheffield Railwayana company, raised as much as £80,000, to everyone’s surprise. Further events for the railway industry followed and especially popular was the ‘3 Peaks by Train’ challenge which was suggested by Robin Gisby of Network Rail and costs born by his company, Virgin Trains and EWS initially with many other rail connected companies getting involved and fifty teams of four participants.

The growth of income to nearing £1 million early in the new century encouraged us to widen our horizons and the Board allowed pilot study projects in Latin America – partnering Casa Alianza in Guatemala as well as our continuing programme with Juconi in Mexico. We also had had a couple of projects in Russia partnering two relatively small UK based Christian charities – ‘Love Russia’ which supported state run emergency shelters in Moscow and ARC which funded a project for street children in far off Chita in Siberia on the Trans Siberian Railway. There children sheltered in minus 40 degree temperatures in the heating pipes under the station and other public buildings and ARC funded with us a charity called ‘Helping Hands’ run by the local Pentecostal Church of Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church had reacted negatively to this initiative which they saw as competition, but surprisingly the state authorities rejected their complaint with the advice that when that church was prepared to undertake such humanitarian work, their complaint would be given more credence!

More recently we explored with Love Russia the situation on Moscow’s railway stations, hearing the railway police say that over 500 children a month were migrating through the six key stations, especially Kurski station where trains were arriving from Kursk, the south east Urals and the former USSR central Asian republics. We needed a Russian based NGO partner to make progress on these stations and formed a partnership with ‘NAN’ (No to Alcohol and Narcotics) led by Oleg Zykov, a former member of Putin’s Human Rights Commission representing youth issues. The action research undertaken went well identifying the issues and raising the possibility of training state appointed social workers by NAN as outreach to the children there instead of the railway police, but I regret to say that the recommendations got bogged down in the State’s bureaucracy between Ministries and Putin’s scepticism and increased scrutiny of foreign funded NGOs and any further development is in abeyance until NAN indicates that a positive way ahead has been sanctioned.

In 2002 Railway Children received a £600,000 grant from Comic Relief to be spread over five years and two years later the BBC filming for Sport Relief of partnered projects in India fronted by comedian Patrick Kielty raised the public awareness of Railway Children. The impact of the BBC film for Comic Relief and the effectiveness of what they saw our partners undertaking caused Comic Relief to talk further to us and encouraged us to seek a larger grant – a full £1 million over 4 years which we applied for in 2004. That year we were selected by the Independent on Sunday as their Christmas Appeal and successfully sought weekly introductions to the appeal from David Dimbleby, Richard Branson, Jon Snow, Jenny Agutter and Mark Tully when we were overtaken – as in the 1997 telethon – by a much bigger event, the Boxing Day South Asian tsunami and the devastation it caused. Three of our Indian partners mounted emergency projects on the Tamil Nadu Coast and the Andaman Islands and we obtained a further £200,000 grant from Comic Relief to support this work.

In January 2002 I was invited by the Director of the Indian Railway Museum to a conference in Ghum just a few miles from Darjeeling to join the railway authorities and UNESCO to discuss the development of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway in the light of it being named a UNESCO World Heritage site. UNESCO was keen to ensure that the local population benefited from any investment and development and I was asked to contribute ideas on how local school and slum children might participate and gain commitment to the project.

I tried to involve one of our partners in New Jalpaiguri and Siliguri at the bottom of the railway, but the major issues concerned the investment necessary from Indian Railways and the fact that the railway was subject every year to significant disruption and damage during the monsoon season. I used the opportunity to see some of Edith Wilkins’ work in the area, although we did not now partner her NGO, and saw the desperate situation of the drug and HIV affected slum dwellers at the Truck Stand in Siliguri. I later learned that she had focused in particular on protecting and rehabilitating trafficked and sexually abused girls in Darjeeling, a role that must have put her at risk from those whose activities she was challenging.

The work in India continued to grow. We conducted situational analyses at some of India’s largest stations and identified that somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 new children were arriving on the stations there every year, with 20 or 30 a day at stations like Howrah, New Delhi or Mumbai CST (the former Victoria Terminus). Of those on the station at any one time, one would find new arrivals; youths who’d been present for years and had their gangs, territory, income generating activities (legal and illegal); children of street living families around the station, usually scavenging or begging; and children from the slums in the suburbs who travelled in daily looking for opportunities to augment their family’s income.

We also identified that most children in these big stations in mega cities were migrating from the northern states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and our second Comic Relief grant in consequence was designed to start new partnerships in cities like Lucknow, Samastipur, Patna and large towns like Malda and Asansol on the line from Calcutta to New Jalpaiguri and North Bengal. In this way we would be contacting children earlier and closer to the community they’d left and efforts to reintegrate them with their families and communities again would be more likely to succeed. By the mid decade we had an outreach presence at 45 stations in 14 states working through more than 20 Indian partners. In 2011 after joint working by the station staff, the railway police and our local partner organisation, Lucknow station was actually officially designated a ‘Child Friendly Station’. In 2012 plans were near completion for Sealdah station in Calcutta to receive the same accolade.

In June 2005 the charity celebrated its 10th anniversary with a reception on the terrace of the House of Commons facilitated for us by Nantwich MP and Chair of the Select Committee on Railways, Gwyneth Dunwoody. Moreover she had twisted the arm of the Minister of Railways, Derek Twigg, to attend and make a welcoming speech to a good crowd of supporters and other NGO partners and colleagues including two former Chairmen of British Rail, Sir Bob Reid and John Welsby. Gwyneth had been a big supporter of the charity – in fact she agreed with me on one occasion despite her steadfast opposition to the privatisation of the railways, that the privatised industry’s ability and willingness to support the charity was the one and only advantage she could see as the nationalised industry could not have used taxpayers’ money to donate to a charity. Her view was that that the breaking up of the industry into myriad competing companies was a rotten way of running a national railway system but ‘jolly good for supporting a relevant charity’!

We ’d also moved twice from our early days in the Crewe Health Shield office and Breeden House, first to Scope House, the Crewe Borough Council’s office for developing businesses, then, when we outgrew that, to our current office at the Commons in the centre of Sandbach, about four miles from Crewe. Our income had now grown to well over £2 million a year and needed the support of a dozen programme officers, fundraisers, accountants and administrators, although we managed to keep our admin costs below 5% and our fundraising costs to under 20% establishing a ratio of at least £4 raised for every £1 spent raising it. Our India staff had grown too to support the much larger activities and number of partners with our first Programme Officer becoming the India Programme Director with a modest office in Andheri in northern Mumbai.

The pilot projects we’d carried out in East Africa – in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe – were now established by the Board as the next overseas area for development as we considered that our India model and experience was more relevant there than in Eastern Europe or Latin America. As a result of this decision our East Africa Programme Officer, Pete Kent set up and registered the charity in Tanzania and recruited staff in Nairobi and Mwanza to develop our work in East Africa. There are partner projects in Kenya and Tanzania and in the latter country we are working with the Consortium for Street Children to assist the Tanzanian government develop a ‘National Plan for Street Children’.

The work in the UK did not go unnoticed – on the contrary, it was becoming of great significance. We had carried out a joint project with the Children’s Society to research the needs of Roma children living in the UK and particularly many who were found begging and hanging around London Undergrounds trains and stations. We were impressed with one of their key experts on child runaways, Andy McCullough, and we appointed him as Railway Children’s UK Policy & Strategy Officer to develop our UK work and increase our influence with government on this issue. He quickly helped us develop partnerships with nine NGOs in England and Scotland and formed the Coalition of UK Runaways, a group of 35 UK NGOs, mostly working at grass roots level, in order to get the voices of these organisations on the needs of runaways and children living on UK streets to government.

He supported Helen Southworth, MP for Warrington South, to set up a new All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on English Runaways and encouraged us to recruit an experienced researcher – Emilie Smeaton of the Children’s Society and York University – to undertake an in-depth qualitative research into the lives of 103 ‘detached’ children – children who under the age of 16 had spent more than a month living on Britain’s streets. The report ‘Off the Radar’ detailing their stories with recommendations for government, communities and NGOs was published in November 2009.

Partly as a result of this work and a commendation from the Consortium for Street Children, the insurance giant, Aviva, decided to partner Railway Children in campaigning and providing services for UK runaways and children at risk of taking to the street, developing with us a support to schools who identify children showing signs of vulnerability; delivery of materials and school presentations warning children about the dangers of running away and help they can turn to; and tackling government on the desperate shortage of short term emergency refuge accommodation for the most at risk children – in 2010 Railway Children funded the remaining five such bed places in the UK in Sheffield and Glasgow.

Looking back over the last fifteen years it is interesting to consider the factors which have contributed to the growth and success of the charity. Clearly identifying the real need and the lack of focus from other voluntary organisations on early intervention for the increasing number of street children was vital. Having a niche market of donors from a relevant industry – rail – was also crucial, allowing awareness of the charity to build quickly with the support and push from senior managers in the industry several of whom became trustees. 50% of the estimated £20 million raised since the founding of the charity has come from individuals, companies and events within the UK railway industry.

Networking with other street children charities through the Consortium for Street Children was important too, as it meant we had experienced personnel to share ideas with and test our concepts, learning fast as we went. I believe too that the managerial experience we were able to bring to bear on the development of the charity was vital. Many charities have developed expertise in fundraising but often fall short of professionalism in other aspects of their activities. We identified our vision and stuck to it, staying focused. We put as much effort into refining our objectives, ensuring what we did was effective, paying attention to the quality and motivation of our staff.

We selected a Chief Executive who shared our vision and supported her as the charity grew rapidly with top management training at Ashridge – expensive but a valuable investment. We used risk assessment techniques to identify our role and normal business practices in setting up the robust procedures, financial and management accounting systems, most of which we’d learned during our apprenticeship for this in the management of British Rail. We were one of the first UK charities to use the ‘Balanced Scorecard’ technique for identifying and defining strategic objectives and measures of effectiveness, receiving free advice and support in its implementation by the Harvard originated Palladium consultancy company.

We said we were a learning organisation and meant it, prepared to accept that things don’t always work but learning from setbacks and the experiences of others. As a result we are trusted by donors such as Comic Relief and are introduced to such corporate partners as Aviva, whom we had to convince of our effectiveness against strong competition from better known and larger organisations.

For the future, I hope to see the charity become supported by railwaymen and women and their companies the world over and all railways safeguarding and caring for the abandoned and destitute children found on their own platforms. Having reached my 70th birthday five years ago, I decided it was time to hand over the reins to another Chair. I therefore retired at the end of 2010 and our trustees selected a successor, Haydn Abbott, former Managing Director of the Angel Trains rolling stock leasing company and sponsor for many years of elements in the annual Railway Ball. But I still take an interest as volunteer, speaker, adviser and Ambassador, as I want to hand on a growing organisation that can make a real positive difference to some of the most vulnerable children in the world. One day perhaps thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of children like Babli can say ‘Thank you for giving me my childhood back.’