Читать книгу Dyslexia and ADHD - The Miracle Cure - Wynford Dore - Страница 23

I imagine my life is similar to many of those who grew up in the Welsh valleys in the forties and fifties. My family were very much working-class and my father did a variety of selling jobs and drove around in a little Austin A30 van, which was his mobile office. My mother was a secretary in a local factory and gave birth to me in a cottage a couple of hundred yards from a great castle called Castell Coch. I was born at the southern end of the Taff valley, north of Cardiff, in a beautiful village called Tongwynlais. I lived in a small cottage without electricity. The toilet was 30 yards down the garden and the Western Mail was behind the pipe for toilet paper. It was a simple life without the modern luxuries that today we take for granted. If I wanted a bath, I would have to go three miles to my grandmother’s house in Nantgarw.

From where we lived, the vista was magnificent. You could see across to Radar and the Dolomite mines. You could also see the huge viaduct that spanned the valley, under which a wartime pilot had once flown a spitfire in a bid to show off to his friends. We eventually moved to another house in Tongwynlais, but the view from our new home was no less beautiful. The top end of the garden looked out towards the coast and I would sometimes sit out there for hours trying to catch a glimpse of the sea.

I was extremely happy and proud to be Welsh. As a child, I was able to walk through the woods and along the disused railway line without any fear of danger. My friends and I would often stuff ourselves on the wild strawberries and berries that grew in plentiful supply in the summer. It was a beautiful and tranquil place, and it was a safe and exciting environment in which to grow up.

Yet, despite my fondness for my country, I only ever managed to retain a few words of my native tongue. I learned these in a school play and I remember them until this day: ‘Beth sydd bod hen wraig? Pam ydych chwi crio?’ Roughly translated, this means ‘What’s the matter, old woman? Why are you crying?’ Of course, in those days Welsh was not taught anything like as much as it is today.

In 1959, my parents moved us to Coventry because there was more work there. I was nine at the time and I remember initially hating city life. In Wales, I had been able to go to the top of my garden to get a magnificent view towards the sea. I was fortunate to gain a scholarship to King Henry VIII School on the outskirts of Coventry at the age of 11 and was lucky enough to receive a fantastic education. However, as I went through school, my ambitions for what I wanted to do became more and more vague. I had a notion that I might like to be a management consultant, but hadn’t the faintest idea what that entailed, or how to become one. Although I did reasonably well in my O-levels, by the time I reached my A-levels I had lost all interest in studying and I knew there was no way I was going to get into university.

The only thing I was sure of was that I had an interest for business. When I was 14, I started my first venture in photography with my cousin, Colin Davis. We took pictures of families, weddings and children. Goodness knows why anybody would want to commission a youth to take professional photographs! It was lucky for me that they did as it paid my pocket money handsomely during my school years, so much so that by the age of 17 I was the proud owner of a blue Ford convertible, albeit a slightly rusty one. I was also developing a great fascination for computers, which in those early days of the 1960s they needed to house in huge air-conditioned rooms. This interest eventually led to my first proper job. After a very disappointing set of A-level results, I went to work for Jaguar Cars in Coventry, where I stayed for five years. It was an exciting time to be involved in computing and, as was the case for everyone in this new profession, I got an enormous amount of responsibility thrown at me for my age.

But it was at the age of 23, when I decided to leave Jaguar, that you might say my entrepreneurial spirit truly kicked in. I think I probably am entrepreneurial, although I am still not sure what the word really means. Some people think it is mainly linked with risk-taking. However, I have always taken it to also mean being hungry and driven to develop some product or service that is better than everyone else’s. As both apply to me, I probably would describe myself as an entrepreneur. When I see something that is desperately needed, that everyone is saying cannot be achieved, I get excited. It can take over my life and drive me; it gets me out of bed in the morning with a spring in my step.

When I left Jaguar, I saw an opportunity and a need in fire protection, and suddenly I could think about nothing else. Every waking hour I devoted myself to it; I even dreamed about it. In 1974, there was new legislation having an impact (the 1971 Fire Precautions Act), which made it compulsory for guesthouses and hotels to make many changes to their buildings to satisfy fire safety requirements. I could not see any organisation that was geared up to meet this need and so it seemed very natural to me at the time to start my own business.

There were only two slight problems with my reasoning. First, I was only 24 and I did not have a clue about how to start a business and, second, I knew nothing about fire protection. Nevertheless, I decided it was an opportunity I could not miss and within months I had negotiated some huge contracts for my company. Looking back now, I must admit it seems so strange. I myself would not do business with a wet-behind-the-ears 24-year-old. To put it mildly, I had extremely good fortune and it was not long before I spotted an even more promising opportunity for the fire protection of structural steelwork. At the time, mineral fibre and cement-based products were used and were aesthetically dreadful. I knew that if you could find some hard, decorative way of providing fire protection to steelwork then it would be a major improvement. After researching the issue, I discovered a fire-protective paint that was to transform my business and my life.

Although I did not realise it at the time, I had actually taken on a pioneering role in trying to solve a massive problem that the world had; indeed, a problem that is still evident today. We all watched with horror when the World Trade Center collapsed in 2001. This happened because the steelwork in the building had become so hot that it lost its strength, leading to the collapse of the structure.

These days, many of the world’s biggest structures use the fire-protection technology that my company, Nullifire, was championing 30 years ago. At the time, of course, the Establishment was absolutely against the paradigm shift we were driving, saying things like, ‘it won’t work’, ‘it cannot happen’, ‘there is no legislation to support it’. Goodness knows why, but none of this fazed me. I never really thought about failure, it did not even come on to my radar screen. I guess when you are walking the tightrope everything is fine, providing you do not look down. Indeed, I never looked down, I was not even conscious that there was a down. As far as I was concerned, this was something the world needed, so I was going to give it to them. In the end, the product was a fantastic success and it resulted in architects having the opportunity to design large buildings in a much more attractive way. Most of the recently built sports stadia and airports now use this technology.

One thing I learned from those early days was that it is an awful lot easier to sell a concept if someone has done the legwork before. When you are the first person to come up with an idea, you have to try to educate people about the concept and possibilities. This is a long, slow and hard, but ultimately worthwhile, process. Every day all around us we see this sort of thing happening. A hundred or more years ago, if you had gone to an optician with the concept of laser eye surgery, you would have been laughed out of the building. Today, it is becoming standard practice. In the same way, the structural fire-protection methods I pioneered in the mid-seventies have become standard practice around the world today.

Without a doubt, the work I did in my early career geared me up for what I am doing now; it was a great foundation for me. I have been down this path before and I know that the concepts about learning difficulties our team of experts have been developing will one day become the established view just as the discoveries we made about fire protection did. Indeed, as you will discover in this book, this process is already taking shape.