Tag: hero

Heroes – Len Frobisher

I’m chuffed to bits with the way this Heroes series is developing. Today I’m delighted to bring you a tale of someone who knew the value of perseverance, and daring to be different. Len Frobisher. This lovely post is written for you by Anthony Allinson, it  hit me for six and I hope you enjoy it.

Len Frobisher, an unsung and obscure hero from my youth.

In the 80s, when I was a kid in Leeds, I played cricket a lot. In fact, I played a very lot, almost all year round. However, while I was good, I was not great. I won some cups with my team in Leeds and some club prizes for bowling and had a brilliant time.

Like many kids sports clubs it ran entirely on the good will and effort of parents, almost always those of other boys in the team. I was conscious of this even when I was 13, and was generally as grateful then as I am now to those who calmly explain to my son that Hampshire Under 11 (U11) cricket won’t feature the Duckworth Lewis Method in the event of rain, nor will Hawkeye come to the rescue should he be convinced he has been robbed of an LBW.

These people are heroes to me because they do things that they don’t have to, they bear the mutterings and occasional open hostility from parents (my wife took one look at what goes on between parents, coaches and officials in soccer and promptly ceased all soccer activity) and, while their kids benefit, so do many others. That’s the deal and it’s a good one.

There was a problem with my club in Leeds though, and it took a particular hero of mine to resolve it. His name was, Len Frobisher.

The problem was simple. Sons of dad’s who were in the club’s senior teams got in the junior sides regardless, it was a rather unhealthy clique. This is why I opened with my little bit about me. My point being that at U15 I got in the side anyway, I was not great, but I was good enough. However, lots of really promising kids didn’t get a look in, simply because their dads weren’t part of the club set up. Chummy clubby types make my skin crawl; I detest vested interests, cliques and abuse of position. I must confess to a pathetically old case of sour grapes here, because by the time we got to U18 this set up meant that I didn’t always get in the first team either! Perhaps I just wasn’t good enough, but a few others around me definitely were.

Rather than being negative though, I want to thank a hero called Len Frobisher for daring to be different and for creating opportunities. The result was that we won the U18 cup in 1985 and changed the structure of the junior set up completely as a result. Len did four things over several years, in each case quietly and simply exercising his values and just doing things differently to the way they were done in the rest of the club.

1.He ensured those nominated for the winter nets, the ones run by the county to which each club sent 2-3 players, were attended by the kids with potential rather than the usual suspects. I was honoured to be one of those kids, and I picked up the bowling gong for the U15s that year. That’s not really the point but I couldn’t help bringing it up 🙂

2. He decoupled his coaching from his son’s involvement and set up, then single handedly ran a second XI at U18. His son was very good and played in the first XI. This, in case you miss it, was the big gift. The first team had 4 coaches and was in a ready made league. The second XI just had Len, a captain who refused to follow orders (ahem…) and a fixture list cobbled together week by week by Len that took us all over West Yorks.

3. While the second XI was supposed to be just that, several of us also played regularly for the club’s adult teams, including that erratic captain. I suspect there was a lot of politics behind the scenes, but we never saw any of it.

4. He stuck at it, smiled most of the time and just did things differently.

The resulting team was an utterly inseparable group of equals. There is a long and quite unpleasant story I could add about an incident in a nightclub several years later to demonstrate this. Perhaps another time, it really isn’t the point.

It all came good in 1985. Kids club cricket, especially the cup competitions, descend into farce at the end of the season. The cup final is often in the summer holidays when roughly half of both sides are typically on holiday. However, we had 25 regular players thanks to Len. I would love to tell a Hollywood story of how the second XI won the day, but all I can remember is that we made up half the side and that we won the U18 cup for the club.

I then went to University and drifted away for a few years. When I went back, there were U9, U11 and U13 sides and a coaching model organised for the kids and the club, not dads and sons. The club was cleaning up trophies at all levels.

Len did that, he didn’t have to, but he did. It is thirty years ago but he is still a hero to me.

 

Heroes – Julie Knight

I was travelling to London from Birmingham on a London Midland train last Friday afternoon when I came face to face with a thief. As I relaxed on the way home from a brain bustingly motivating meeting with Richard Baker, I became aware that my bag and I were parting company. I stood and turned as the guy sitting behind me on the train released my bag and sat back down in his seat. I didn’t know what to do, it really unnerved me. I just glowered at him and he got up and left the carriage. I sat down, my bag now tightly clasped, and shook. I felt nervous.

The train guard came through shortly after and asked to see my ticket. I blurted out ‘another passenger has just tried to steal my bag!’ The train guard introduced herself as Julie Knight and asked me to explain what happened. I told her and Julie calmly reassured me that the cctv cameras would have picked up the attempted theft. Was the thief still on the train we wondered? I described him and Julie went to make sure he was still aboard the train. He was.

Julie returned and we talked some more when the thief reappeared. He skulked around and Julie smartly turned the conversation to other things. He must have figured something was up because no sooner had the thief left the carriage, he reappeared and sat down right behind me. Julie asked what he was doing. ‘I just want to sit here in first class’ the thief replied. ‘Have you got a first class ticket? Julie asked. It turned out that he had no ticket of any kind.

Julie managed to phone ahead and arranged for the train to be met by security at Northampton. She explained to me that this was her stop too, she was due to board another train heading back north. After we pulled in the doors remained locked and after a bit of Keystone Kops to-ing and fro-ing, Julie and a colleague handed the thief over to the security team at the station. Julie ran back up the platform and hopped back on the train just to double check I was OK, and then ran off, keen to ensure the next train she was working on was not delayed.

The rest of my journey home unfolded uneventfully.

As I reflected on what happened, several things struck me about Julie:

She told me her name – straight away that reassured me

She took the matter seriously – and stayed very calm and relaxed throughout

She was courteous to the thief, to a fault, doing her level best not to arouse any suspicion or adverse reaction in him

She was determined to help apprehend the guy

She came back to see me, to say thanks and goodbye before dashing off to give good service to the passengers on the next train

Julie probably thinks she was just ‘doing my job’, and she would be right. And what a good job that is. It must be tough working on the railways. When things go to plan, i.e. when the trains run to time, well that’s just what we as customers expect. It’s hard to exceed expectations, it’s not like the train can arrive early is it? I imagine it’s a pretty thankless task. Thanks Julie.

I hope the good people at London Midland pick up on this heroic tale.

Heroes – Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is the third in our Heroes series of posts. Our guest author today is Neil Usher, his Twitter bio describes him as part property professional, part performance poet, part parent. What do I think about him? I think Neil is a cutting edge thinker on now and future workplace (he is chairing the afternoon session at Workplace Trends 2011 and participating in Stop Doing Dumb Things 2011), and a great lyricist, for it is he who wrote the words to the chart topping classic tune Human Resource. Take it away Neil:

My hero – Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The ultimate flawed genius who battled through an addiction to gambling, a relentless torment over the existence – or otherwise – of God, a mock execution commuted at the final moment to a stay in a Siberia prison (immortalised in his Memoirs from the House of the Dead), to create some of the most incredible literature of all time including The Brothers Karamazov, The Devils, The Idiot, The Gambler, and Crime and Punishment.

A master of plot, suspense and character, he lived for a time during his most desperate spells of poverty on coffee, writing with pencil stubs by candlelight. He made repeated personal sacrifices in his relentless pursuit of his art, and submitted on many occasions to his own frailty and vulnerability. It was his second wife Anna who rescued him from the eternal cycle of despair into which he could never help falling, and in managing his affairs gave him comparative comfort in his later years.

When he died, his coffin was followed by forty thousand. He has been imitated by many including artists as diverse as Woody Allen whose final scene in Love & Death is comprised of Dostoevsky’s novel titles, and Magazine, whose Song From Under the Floorboards is a lyrical version of the incredible Notes From Underground. The final word – for me – goes to the mischievous cat Behemoth in Bulgakov’s magnificent Master and Margarita who when calling at the Russian ministry of arts and culture announces himself as Dostoevsky. “But Dostoevsky is dead” says the doorman – “I beg to differ” says the cat “Dostoevsky is immortal”.