This assembly is about charity – and, in particular, one charity which I have grown to love – but, with luck, it will also get you thinking. My own link to this charity started 17 years ago, a few years before I had even heard of it. In 2005, I took a school cricket tour to India. I don’t know how many of you have ever been to India, but it is the sort of place that cannot possibly leave you unaffected, whatever that effect might be. From the minute we got off the plane in Chennai and made our way to our rickety, creaking minibus to take us to the hotel at 2 o’clock in the morning, we were hit by an extraordinary sensory overload. Even at that time of the night, the sights and sounds are almost indescribable. The streets are clogged with cars, rickshaws, bikes, trucks and carts of all descriptions, all honking their horns, all with no apparent rules of the road. The first roundabout we came to was littered with cows, enjoying their sacred status, but I soon realised animals were everywhere else on the road, too, lining up alongside the traffic, vehicles of all types swerving unpredictably to miss them. People were everywhere – walking on the road, sleeping on pavements, calling, bartering, cajoling, with or without somewhere to go. The noise was one long, incessant hum; the colour, even at night, was magnificent. I came away from India feeling that it was the only place I had ever visited where you could sit on a street corner for a whole week and not get bored. In short, I absolutely loved it. The trip provoked in me a lifelong interest, and although I have not been back (yet, I hasten to add!), I have read a lot about India via the likes of E.M. Forster, William Dalrymple, Rohinton Mistry, but also about my own grandfather’s time there during and before the war as part of the Royal Artillery, learning (to my joy) that he even played a few games of first-class cricket back in the 1930s for Uttar Pradesh in the Ranji Trophy.
Two years after I came home from that trip, and unbeknown to me, a 16-year-old boy in the boarding house I ran at Tonbridge School, Freddie, started to collect old rugby boots and other sports kit to send out to a relatively new and small charity in India called the ‘Hope Foundation’. He was quite inspirational, and he managed to advertise his aim widely and to get boys from the whole school to donate, before packaging these things up and sending them off to Kolkata. There were, from memory, at least 100 pairs of old rugby boots and lots of other old kit. I looked up this charity at the time, enjoyed reading about it, but thought no more of it, other than to give Freddie a pat on the back and say well done. However, about six years ago, I spotted that name again here at Bedford School. The Hope Foundation, which to my surprise, has a Bedford branch, had put on a film in the Quarry Theatre to raise money; I made the effort, this time, to get in touch – and since then, it has become my favourite charity. It is a small charity, set up by the most amazing Irish lady in 1999, who is still at the heart of everything they do, with the aim of taking street children off the streets of Kolkata, where they are in grave danger of abuse, as well as malnutrition, disease and so on, and giving them what they need to be able to access what we would see as a normal life – shelter, an education, healthcare and the skills required to earn a living for themselves. To that end, they have set up boarding houses, schools and even their own hospital to cater for the children they support, many of whom spend their days on enormous mountains of rubbish, sifting through to find anything they can of value, so that they can help their families. Hope’s vision is “a world where it should never hurt to be a child” and this is a little snapshot of what they do.
So, there are three things I would like you to take away from this talk (aside from gratitude for the education we all enjoy). The first is simply the knowledge that the Hope Foundation exists – and please watch out for it when we raise money as a school, as you will see it comes up on home clothes days, and various other times. It is only a small charity – it raises about £200,000 per year from between 100-200 donors, so far as I can make out, so you can make a genuine difference to it, unlike some of the major charities. Secondly, that all of you have interests, and there is a good chance that there is a charity that fits that interest which you could support. Do please consider doing that. Thirdly, and perhaps more urgently, that one 16-year-old boy can set off a chain of unpredictable events which then snowball; if Freddie had not been determined to do something back in 2008, then I would not have made a phone call in 2016, and we would not be supporting Hope as a school now, and I would not be telling you about it. We had a particularly powerful recent example of this, of course, with Benji Ingram-Moore letting a few people know that his grandfather, Captain Tom, was going to walk up and down the driveway a few times. The rest is history!
Some of you will remember Mrs Medley, who was in charge of our charities here at school, inspirational in her focus on helping others who needed it, and who died of cancer four years ago today. Therefore, on the anniversary of her death, my hope is that you feel empowered to do something, no matter how big or small, to support a charity. And if you can make that a lifelong support, then you will most certainly be able to make a significant difference to people’s lives.