Leonard Cheshire speech at St Bede’s School, Christchurch
Title
Leonard Cheshire speech at St Bede’s School, Christchurch
Description
Starts by talking about the fact that his generation had rejected war, but governments made mistakes, so they were thrown into world war. Retells of event after the war that prompted him to work with the disabled. Told of spread of his organisation in Britain internationally and describes many examples of their work. Concludes by giving audience advice for the future. Submitted with caption 'Leonard Cheshire presentation at St Bedes School, Canberra. Leonard talks about his RAF war career and subsequent humanitarian work. He talks about Raphael and their work helping people with leprosy'.
Creator
Date
1974-11-06
Coverage
Language
Type
Format
Audio recording 00:23:38
Publisher
Rights
This content is property of the Leonard Cheshire Archive which has kindly granted the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive a royalty-free permission to publish it. Please note that it was digitised by a third-party which used technical specifications that may differ from those used by International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. It has been published here ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre.
Identifier
SCheshireGL72021v20026-0001, SCheshireGL72021v20026-0001-Transcript
Transcription
Leonard Cheshire Resonate Project
Recording Title: Leonard Cheshire speech at St Bede’s School, Christchurch. 6.11.74
Duration: 23:40
Transcription Date: 08/07/20
Archive Number: AV-S_521
Start of Transcription:
00:00 Leonard Cheshire: November 6th, Christchurch talk to St Bede’s School.
00:06: Applause
00:15 LC: Father Rector, Sir Harvey Brown and members of the school. Well first thank you ever so much for inviting me to come to your school and thank you Harvey for the warmth of your welcome. I might add that there are quite a number of other things he could have said that would have given a different picture, but he was selective, so thank you Harvey.
00:47 LC: Harvey did mention the fact that I started off in the War, and I am not going to talk about the War unless after I finish talking there are any questions you wish to ask, in that case I should be happy to try and answer. I would like say this however, that I belong to a generation like yours that rejected war as a way of solving disputes between nations. We wanted to think that we could grow up and lead our lives in peace. But governments and others made their mistakes and in consequence of that we were thrown into a world war. Anybody who has been through it knew how crucial it was for the human race that such a thing would never happen again. But the question one has to ask one’s self is what do we do as individuals to see that this isn’t going to happen. Merely to say that we don’t want war doesn’t really get us very far. It is a little bit like saying, we don’t want to be disabled, or we don’t want cancer. Nobody wants war, but what is necessary is to remove the causes of war. I think that this was the question that exercised my mind at the end of the war and left me unable to answer it. I was lost. And as you heard, I came across an old man dying of cancer in hospital, in Britain, which was then a welfare state and claimed that it would do everything that was needed for us when we were in that kind of trouble. But the hospital could not keep him for the reason that there was nothing more they could do for him. And they needed his bed for others whom they could treat. And so, I got led as it were into a strange unknown world to me, the world of the disabled. At first it began in Britain, and I found gradually more and more disabled people who did not have the right place to go to and as best I could I was helping provide a home for them. And from there I got invited to go to India and so gradually over these 26 years, our work has spread through different countries. And in particular perhaps has taken me into the Third World, the poor world, and enabled me to see at first hand something of the life that they lead, the problems that they face and in particular I think the way that they overcome as individuals, both problems. And for a little while it’s about that that I would like to talk.
04:18 LC: First I would like to say a few words about the disabled in general, but then I would like to come briefly to the Third World. The disabled I am talking about are mainly the young, men and women in their early 20s sometimes their teens or perhaps their 30s who for one reason or another have become disabled, paralysed. It could happen very easily to anybody at any moment, in a motor car accident, even on the rugby field, it can happen diving into a pool if you misjudged the depth, hit your head on the bottom break your neck, you become paralysed. And there are many many people like that in every country. And we must not think that merely because a country is fairly wealthy and has good medical facilities, that people who are disabled like this have the opportunity they need, they don’t. It’s a new world, it’s a world in which we are still learning. The problem is this, that if you take somebody who becomes disabled like this, they’ve had all the treatment it is possible to give them but now there is nothing more to be done. So, all their life they are going to remain either in a wheelchair, or sometimes worse, or perhaps with just limited mobility. But in their heart, they are still young and normal, they are not disabled either in heart or in mind. And so, they have all the hopes and ambitions of youth, in particular they want to lead a normal life, probably to marry. They want to feel that their life is going to be useful, that they have something to give. They want independence, to go the way you want to go. Not to have to go the way that others push you. To give an example, we have one boy who started life fit and strong and well, and then he had an accident and he became what is called a quadriplegic. That’s to say he could move neither his legs nor his arms and he has come into one of our homes in South London. He’s teamed up with two other members of the home and organised a typing pool and they take in typing on a commercial basis, they do copy typing and they have to maintain commercial standards and they get paid more or less commercial rates. But now Norman who is the typist can’t move his hands or his feet and so the only way that he can type is by blowing down a tube and he has an electronic box which converts the blow according to its frequency into the operation of a keyboard. It’s on the basis of a morse code. For instance, short long for those of you who know morse (doesn’t work), short long blow is A, long short is N. So, Norman sits there blowing away with a high-pitched peep that sort of indicates what he is doing, and he can type. And the letter that he types is as good as any stenographer. Now he is an example of that great desire in the heart of all disabled people to have a purpose to their life. But they can’t unless somebody gives it to them. Now I have come to think that this is basically our job, we as ordinary people. The Doctors have done what they can, the nurses have done what they can to get him better, and now there is no more to be done. So, from now onwards it’s a question of rebuilding what is in effect a broken life. So, we in our small field are providing a home which is quite small, twenty to thirty at the most, with a variety of disabilities, run by local people so that it fits naturally into its own community. The local people find the money. In Britain we have 60 homes, we are building 4 or 5 new ones a year, we have to raise virtually 2 million dollars a year to run and develop those homes and all this is done, raised locally by quite ordinary events, the events that you will know. Walkathons, garden fetes, dances, coffee mornings, all sorts of things. We don’t believe in organising fundraising centrally; in other words, we don’t believe in spending money in order to raise money.
10:00 LC: Outside Britain we have another 70 homes or so in a number of countries and these too are locally financed and run. Even in the middle you may have forgotten this, but in 1968 and 69, there was a civil war in Nigeria. You may remember Biafra. In Nigeria we have 5 homes, and 2 of these were overrun by the fighting and driven back into the heartland of besieged Biafra as it was then called. But the committees, and the little local staff managed to keep the disabled, in this case they were children not grown-ups, safe and have kept them safe until today when an entirely new very fine home is being built. It is often said that the poor countries don’t do much for themselves, but it’s not my experience, this isn’t true. They don’t do it of course in our way, they do it their way. And in life it’s very easy to think that my way is the right way for you and for everybody else, but it isn’t. As one grows up one learns that everybody will do things in a different way. What is important I find is that we have faith in other people, that we trust them to do something. When you come to a country like India which is where we have 18 homes and where in addition to those 18 homes we have 1 much larger than the others which is not locally financed but finds all its money, now, as from this year, solely from New Zealand and Australia. It’s our little contribution to try and help India and its many problems. When you go to India and you see the enormous numbers of the poor and the hungry, men, women and children who live on the streets or who live perhaps in empty gas pipes you know these huge pipes, or sewage pipes, whatever they are that lie on the side of the road waiting to be put in the ground, they will take one of those and use it as a house. When you look at all this you wonder, well what is the solution. Now, to begin with when you first go there, I will never forget the moment that I first walked into a leprosy colony. This was at the outskirts of quite a big town in Northern India, it was in a quarry, a disused quarry. The town had been wanting to help these leprosy patients for a long time, Rotary had had a number of meetings over many years discussing what can we do for them. Everybody wanted to build them a nice village forty miles out of the town where they wouldn’t be in the way, where you wouldn’t see them. But of course, the leprosy sufferers, we don’t call them lepers now, we are asked not to call them lepers because when you say leper, you appear to be, it’s a critical thing it carries a stigma. So, we’re asked not to use the word leper, a leper in people’s minds is somebody you don’t touch. Whereas in fact leprosy is very difficult to catch, you can work most of your life amongst leprosy sufferers and not catch it. The leprosy sufferers did not want to be pushed out, they wanted to be part and parcel of the community, they wanted to be normal just as Norman and all the other disabled want to be normal. So, they wouldn’t accept this isolated village and they were given this little settlement in this quarry, on the outskirts of the city, with the city refuse dump just at the far end, an open drain running through it, you can imagine how horrible it was. Their huts were made of mud and the rooves were made of bits of tin- they’d taken milk powder tins, empty and beaten them out and made their roof tiles. Well, you went down in there and you suddenly discovered how proud they were of their little huts. Everything was scrupulously clean. They looked happy, in spite of their deformities. They brought out a rickety old chair and they wiped it with a handkerchief cleaned it and said, ‘Please sit down’. They brought a garland of flowers and put it round your neck. They made you very humble. It made you see face to face how the human spirit can triumph over adversity. And when you see pictures on television of drought, or of floods or of just disaster, you can if you like let your eyes rest on the poverty and the water and the mud and the thin emaciated bodies. Or you can look deeper and you can see how there are individuals like you and me who have retained their dignity, who can still make the most of their circumstances, who basically are not complaining.
16:05 LC: Now this is an extraordinary example and I think we need it, because we know in our own lives, or you will know when you leave school and go into life, how easily we get upset by the smallest things. How we are always reaching out for more, we are not quite satisfied with what we’ve got. But here are people, fellow members of the one human family who have next to nothing, and yet they’re so normal. They’ve retained a sense of humour and dignity. But now we say, what can we do with this enormous problem. If we send them money, perhaps only half of it will get there we don’t know. What I’ve learnt is this, that it’s no use looking at the whole problem, it’s no use looking at the problem in its totality because it puts us off, we say I’m powerless. What we need to do is to look at what I can do, now each of us can do something. Each of us wants to do something, and I would say particularly amongst the young generation, you, schools, universities, there is an idealism a feeling that we are vitally concerned with this problem that didn’t exist when I was in your place at school, we didn’t know, it wasn’t part of our (as I remember it) education at all. But today it is, what I’d like to say is this, it’s no use hoping that one can achieve too much, the moment one does that one gets disillusioned and one gives it up. Each of us is human, even if we devote our whole lives to it, we are not really going to achieve much, but we are going to achieve something. And so, let us set our sights on what we can achieve. Then again, for most of us our work must lie somewhere in the world, and it’s no use thinking that any one job in itself is better than another. It may be that my life lies amongst the disabled and I spend my time doing that, you can’t say that that’s any better in itself then somebody who goes into technology, or into teaching or whatever you like. Were it not for technology Norman couldn’t have typed? He couldn’t earn his living; he couldn’t feel I’m like everybody else. Were it not for the aircraft industry I couldn’t go around the world visiting the different homes and doing whatever little I can? So, all of us are involved and basically, it’s hard work. We have the humdrum business of day to day work, that is the way to succeed. I know from the air force that if you wanted to get to the top of your job, you had to practice and practice. Part of my work was very low flying at night. Well now in order to succeed in that you had to do it day after day til it became second nature. If we had a weekend off, and we were on operations the Monday night we reckoned we had to get to two hours low flying on the Monday morning in order to get back what we lost those two days off. And this is true in life, whoever wants to get to the top, whatever field it is has got to do his basic work and really live his job.
20:00 LC: But over and above that, each of us has a duty to help not only those in trouble around us in our own community but the poor and the underprivileged further afield. If you ask how did we do it, there are of course hundreds of ways. I can just tell you one way which concerns us. In this centre in India that I talked of a different one which depends upon help from Australia and New Zealand, Raphael it’s called, we have 320 people in need. A leprosy colony, 110 leprosy sufferers, 80 mentally defective children, a home for destitute children, a hospital, and a TB unit. Now to keep those 310 people costs us 4500 dollars a month, that is 15 dollars per person per month. That’s for everything, his food, his medicines, treatment, if he’s a child his education, by Western standards not very much. We raise the money principally by what we call adoptions, that is to say we find a group of people, a club, sometimes a school, who will adopt one of them. One of the leprosy patients, shall we say Dilip, and the school or the club will get a photograph and a life history and letters every six months about him, so there is a personal link between those who sponsor and the child or whoever it is. And I’ve just come from India, and I can picture now as I stand before you those 320 people and I know that they would not have had a home, they would not have the opportunity of a new life but for those in New Zealand and Australia who have been good enough to sponsor them. And that has made a little bridge a little link between Raphael in the foothills of the Himalayas and Australia and New Zealand. I know it’s a tiny link and when compared with the need for linking together in unity and peace all the nations of the world it’s nothing. But at least it’s a beginning, and so what I want to say to you as I finish is just this. Never be put off from doing something because it seems too little, it’s precisely the little things doing them well, that count, not the big things. The big things in life don’t often come our way, and I don’t think they’re so important. It’s the little things that seem so inadequate, that do them. And I would like to thank you for having me here today and I must also as I am with you, say that more than half our help that we get throughout the world comes from schools and universities. And the interest and the concern that I find amongst the young in the needs of the underprivileged I think offers one of the greatest hopes for the future. So, to all of you my warmest wishes and thank you very much.
23:35: Speech ends
23:36: Applause
23:40: End of recording
End of Transcription
Recording Title: Leonard Cheshire speech at St Bede’s School, Christchurch. 6.11.74
Duration: 23:40
Transcription Date: 08/07/20
Archive Number: AV-S_521
Start of Transcription:
00:00 Leonard Cheshire: November 6th, Christchurch talk to St Bede’s School.
00:06: Applause
00:15 LC: Father Rector, Sir Harvey Brown and members of the school. Well first thank you ever so much for inviting me to come to your school and thank you Harvey for the warmth of your welcome. I might add that there are quite a number of other things he could have said that would have given a different picture, but he was selective, so thank you Harvey.
00:47 LC: Harvey did mention the fact that I started off in the War, and I am not going to talk about the War unless after I finish talking there are any questions you wish to ask, in that case I should be happy to try and answer. I would like say this however, that I belong to a generation like yours that rejected war as a way of solving disputes between nations. We wanted to think that we could grow up and lead our lives in peace. But governments and others made their mistakes and in consequence of that we were thrown into a world war. Anybody who has been through it knew how crucial it was for the human race that such a thing would never happen again. But the question one has to ask one’s self is what do we do as individuals to see that this isn’t going to happen. Merely to say that we don’t want war doesn’t really get us very far. It is a little bit like saying, we don’t want to be disabled, or we don’t want cancer. Nobody wants war, but what is necessary is to remove the causes of war. I think that this was the question that exercised my mind at the end of the war and left me unable to answer it. I was lost. And as you heard, I came across an old man dying of cancer in hospital, in Britain, which was then a welfare state and claimed that it would do everything that was needed for us when we were in that kind of trouble. But the hospital could not keep him for the reason that there was nothing more they could do for him. And they needed his bed for others whom they could treat. And so, I got led as it were into a strange unknown world to me, the world of the disabled. At first it began in Britain, and I found gradually more and more disabled people who did not have the right place to go to and as best I could I was helping provide a home for them. And from there I got invited to go to India and so gradually over these 26 years, our work has spread through different countries. And in particular perhaps has taken me into the Third World, the poor world, and enabled me to see at first hand something of the life that they lead, the problems that they face and in particular I think the way that they overcome as individuals, both problems. And for a little while it’s about that that I would like to talk.
04:18 LC: First I would like to say a few words about the disabled in general, but then I would like to come briefly to the Third World. The disabled I am talking about are mainly the young, men and women in their early 20s sometimes their teens or perhaps their 30s who for one reason or another have become disabled, paralysed. It could happen very easily to anybody at any moment, in a motor car accident, even on the rugby field, it can happen diving into a pool if you misjudged the depth, hit your head on the bottom break your neck, you become paralysed. And there are many many people like that in every country. And we must not think that merely because a country is fairly wealthy and has good medical facilities, that people who are disabled like this have the opportunity they need, they don’t. It’s a new world, it’s a world in which we are still learning. The problem is this, that if you take somebody who becomes disabled like this, they’ve had all the treatment it is possible to give them but now there is nothing more to be done. So, all their life they are going to remain either in a wheelchair, or sometimes worse, or perhaps with just limited mobility. But in their heart, they are still young and normal, they are not disabled either in heart or in mind. And so, they have all the hopes and ambitions of youth, in particular they want to lead a normal life, probably to marry. They want to feel that their life is going to be useful, that they have something to give. They want independence, to go the way you want to go. Not to have to go the way that others push you. To give an example, we have one boy who started life fit and strong and well, and then he had an accident and he became what is called a quadriplegic. That’s to say he could move neither his legs nor his arms and he has come into one of our homes in South London. He’s teamed up with two other members of the home and organised a typing pool and they take in typing on a commercial basis, they do copy typing and they have to maintain commercial standards and they get paid more or less commercial rates. But now Norman who is the typist can’t move his hands or his feet and so the only way that he can type is by blowing down a tube and he has an electronic box which converts the blow according to its frequency into the operation of a keyboard. It’s on the basis of a morse code. For instance, short long for those of you who know morse (doesn’t work), short long blow is A, long short is N. So, Norman sits there blowing away with a high-pitched peep that sort of indicates what he is doing, and he can type. And the letter that he types is as good as any stenographer. Now he is an example of that great desire in the heart of all disabled people to have a purpose to their life. But they can’t unless somebody gives it to them. Now I have come to think that this is basically our job, we as ordinary people. The Doctors have done what they can, the nurses have done what they can to get him better, and now there is no more to be done. So, from now onwards it’s a question of rebuilding what is in effect a broken life. So, we in our small field are providing a home which is quite small, twenty to thirty at the most, with a variety of disabilities, run by local people so that it fits naturally into its own community. The local people find the money. In Britain we have 60 homes, we are building 4 or 5 new ones a year, we have to raise virtually 2 million dollars a year to run and develop those homes and all this is done, raised locally by quite ordinary events, the events that you will know. Walkathons, garden fetes, dances, coffee mornings, all sorts of things. We don’t believe in organising fundraising centrally; in other words, we don’t believe in spending money in order to raise money.
10:00 LC: Outside Britain we have another 70 homes or so in a number of countries and these too are locally financed and run. Even in the middle you may have forgotten this, but in 1968 and 69, there was a civil war in Nigeria. You may remember Biafra. In Nigeria we have 5 homes, and 2 of these were overrun by the fighting and driven back into the heartland of besieged Biafra as it was then called. But the committees, and the little local staff managed to keep the disabled, in this case they were children not grown-ups, safe and have kept them safe until today when an entirely new very fine home is being built. It is often said that the poor countries don’t do much for themselves, but it’s not my experience, this isn’t true. They don’t do it of course in our way, they do it their way. And in life it’s very easy to think that my way is the right way for you and for everybody else, but it isn’t. As one grows up one learns that everybody will do things in a different way. What is important I find is that we have faith in other people, that we trust them to do something. When you come to a country like India which is where we have 18 homes and where in addition to those 18 homes we have 1 much larger than the others which is not locally financed but finds all its money, now, as from this year, solely from New Zealand and Australia. It’s our little contribution to try and help India and its many problems. When you go to India and you see the enormous numbers of the poor and the hungry, men, women and children who live on the streets or who live perhaps in empty gas pipes you know these huge pipes, or sewage pipes, whatever they are that lie on the side of the road waiting to be put in the ground, they will take one of those and use it as a house. When you look at all this you wonder, well what is the solution. Now, to begin with when you first go there, I will never forget the moment that I first walked into a leprosy colony. This was at the outskirts of quite a big town in Northern India, it was in a quarry, a disused quarry. The town had been wanting to help these leprosy patients for a long time, Rotary had had a number of meetings over many years discussing what can we do for them. Everybody wanted to build them a nice village forty miles out of the town where they wouldn’t be in the way, where you wouldn’t see them. But of course, the leprosy sufferers, we don’t call them lepers now, we are asked not to call them lepers because when you say leper, you appear to be, it’s a critical thing it carries a stigma. So, we’re asked not to use the word leper, a leper in people’s minds is somebody you don’t touch. Whereas in fact leprosy is very difficult to catch, you can work most of your life amongst leprosy sufferers and not catch it. The leprosy sufferers did not want to be pushed out, they wanted to be part and parcel of the community, they wanted to be normal just as Norman and all the other disabled want to be normal. So, they wouldn’t accept this isolated village and they were given this little settlement in this quarry, on the outskirts of the city, with the city refuse dump just at the far end, an open drain running through it, you can imagine how horrible it was. Their huts were made of mud and the rooves were made of bits of tin- they’d taken milk powder tins, empty and beaten them out and made their roof tiles. Well, you went down in there and you suddenly discovered how proud they were of their little huts. Everything was scrupulously clean. They looked happy, in spite of their deformities. They brought out a rickety old chair and they wiped it with a handkerchief cleaned it and said, ‘Please sit down’. They brought a garland of flowers and put it round your neck. They made you very humble. It made you see face to face how the human spirit can triumph over adversity. And when you see pictures on television of drought, or of floods or of just disaster, you can if you like let your eyes rest on the poverty and the water and the mud and the thin emaciated bodies. Or you can look deeper and you can see how there are individuals like you and me who have retained their dignity, who can still make the most of their circumstances, who basically are not complaining.
16:05 LC: Now this is an extraordinary example and I think we need it, because we know in our own lives, or you will know when you leave school and go into life, how easily we get upset by the smallest things. How we are always reaching out for more, we are not quite satisfied with what we’ve got. But here are people, fellow members of the one human family who have next to nothing, and yet they’re so normal. They’ve retained a sense of humour and dignity. But now we say, what can we do with this enormous problem. If we send them money, perhaps only half of it will get there we don’t know. What I’ve learnt is this, that it’s no use looking at the whole problem, it’s no use looking at the problem in its totality because it puts us off, we say I’m powerless. What we need to do is to look at what I can do, now each of us can do something. Each of us wants to do something, and I would say particularly amongst the young generation, you, schools, universities, there is an idealism a feeling that we are vitally concerned with this problem that didn’t exist when I was in your place at school, we didn’t know, it wasn’t part of our (as I remember it) education at all. But today it is, what I’d like to say is this, it’s no use hoping that one can achieve too much, the moment one does that one gets disillusioned and one gives it up. Each of us is human, even if we devote our whole lives to it, we are not really going to achieve much, but we are going to achieve something. And so, let us set our sights on what we can achieve. Then again, for most of us our work must lie somewhere in the world, and it’s no use thinking that any one job in itself is better than another. It may be that my life lies amongst the disabled and I spend my time doing that, you can’t say that that’s any better in itself then somebody who goes into technology, or into teaching or whatever you like. Were it not for technology Norman couldn’t have typed? He couldn’t earn his living; he couldn’t feel I’m like everybody else. Were it not for the aircraft industry I couldn’t go around the world visiting the different homes and doing whatever little I can? So, all of us are involved and basically, it’s hard work. We have the humdrum business of day to day work, that is the way to succeed. I know from the air force that if you wanted to get to the top of your job, you had to practice and practice. Part of my work was very low flying at night. Well now in order to succeed in that you had to do it day after day til it became second nature. If we had a weekend off, and we were on operations the Monday night we reckoned we had to get to two hours low flying on the Monday morning in order to get back what we lost those two days off. And this is true in life, whoever wants to get to the top, whatever field it is has got to do his basic work and really live his job.
20:00 LC: But over and above that, each of us has a duty to help not only those in trouble around us in our own community but the poor and the underprivileged further afield. If you ask how did we do it, there are of course hundreds of ways. I can just tell you one way which concerns us. In this centre in India that I talked of a different one which depends upon help from Australia and New Zealand, Raphael it’s called, we have 320 people in need. A leprosy colony, 110 leprosy sufferers, 80 mentally defective children, a home for destitute children, a hospital, and a TB unit. Now to keep those 310 people costs us 4500 dollars a month, that is 15 dollars per person per month. That’s for everything, his food, his medicines, treatment, if he’s a child his education, by Western standards not very much. We raise the money principally by what we call adoptions, that is to say we find a group of people, a club, sometimes a school, who will adopt one of them. One of the leprosy patients, shall we say Dilip, and the school or the club will get a photograph and a life history and letters every six months about him, so there is a personal link between those who sponsor and the child or whoever it is. And I’ve just come from India, and I can picture now as I stand before you those 320 people and I know that they would not have had a home, they would not have the opportunity of a new life but for those in New Zealand and Australia who have been good enough to sponsor them. And that has made a little bridge a little link between Raphael in the foothills of the Himalayas and Australia and New Zealand. I know it’s a tiny link and when compared with the need for linking together in unity and peace all the nations of the world it’s nothing. But at least it’s a beginning, and so what I want to say to you as I finish is just this. Never be put off from doing something because it seems too little, it’s precisely the little things doing them well, that count, not the big things. The big things in life don’t often come our way, and I don’t think they’re so important. It’s the little things that seem so inadequate, that do them. And I would like to thank you for having me here today and I must also as I am with you, say that more than half our help that we get throughout the world comes from schools and universities. And the interest and the concern that I find amongst the young in the needs of the underprivileged I think offers one of the greatest hopes for the future. So, to all of you my warmest wishes and thank you very much.
23:35: Speech ends
23:36: Applause
23:40: End of recording
End of Transcription
Collection
Citation
G L Cheshire, “Leonard Cheshire speech at St Bede’s School, Christchurch,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed June 16, 2025, https://ibccdigitalarchive.omeka.net/collections/document/40189.