A quote from Kipling, with acknowlegment to Mr Crisp who taught the nautical class in Russell-Cotes many years ago, and imparted much to us in addition to poetry. It's a verse useful to others than the Elephant's Child and can be applied to many propositions in life, including the invitation to talk at this gathering. The answers to the 'Why' and 'When' were easy enough: it is a privilege to address this meeting of the Association of those who were members of the Barnardo Sea Schools - Watts Naval Training School founded in 1903, Russell-Cotes Nautical School (of which I was a member from 1942-1946) founded in 1922, and the Parkstone Sea Training School, which combined the other two schools from 1949-1964; it is also a particular honour to do this on the day of the unveiling of the plaque commemorating the members of those schools, many of whom died at sea serving their country in the two World Wars and other conflicts.

The 'Who' was more difficult to answer, particularly when seeking a suitable form of address; 'Ladies and Gentlemen' seemed too formal, and 'Old Comrades' a little nostalgic. Then I thought of the word 'mush' which belonged to that particular language in Barnardos Homes which we had for all sorts of things and people around us - as though maintaining our comradeship with each other against the authorities of our various institutions - and in the nautical schools the language was laced with the terms used on board the ships which we expected to join one day: we walked on the deck, we leaned against the bulkhead, and we spoke of others as 'those mushes' and of newcomers as 'new mush'. So it is that today I address you as 'Mushes, new and old'.

'How' I would present the address was also made easy for me. I was considering the various audio-visual alternatives, from laptop computer presentation to overhead projection of slides with suitable pictures and headlines, when the 'Orders of the Day' came down from the 'Bridge', and I was committed to a short and entertaining talk. The meeting this year, in commemorating past members of the Sea Schools at a time when our commitment to freedom has again been threatened, has sombre overtones, and I must needs combine the traditional levity of these re-unions with the gravity of past and present times.

As to the 'Where', we have to thank Reg Trew, his committee, and The Bournemouth and Poole College for enabling us to meet in this particular building which was the chapel of Russell-Cotes Nautical School, and is now the St Andrew's Hall of the Music School. It is to that chapel of many years ago that I must take us for the 'What' of this talk. Behind our assembled committee members on the left you would see the choir, and Miss Drake seated at the organ. Across from where I stand I have the image of a tall figure with black curly hair and the long lapel of a grey suit stretched across his broad chest as he leans from the pulpit declaring:

"Trust in the Lord with all thy heart,
and lean not under thine own understanding"

Why it is that I have this vivid memory singled out from the many sermons and occasions, such as our solemn confirmations, attended in this chapel, I will return to, but the text itself came to me not infrequently during the following years when I had left Russell-Cotes to take up the studies which led to my qualifying as a doctor and subsequently becoming a surgeon; there were times when I could not fully understand a situation but had to make a choice, and did so in trust. Increasingly, as I undertook the responsibilities of caring for others, my own understanding, based upon study and training, became the determinant of my decisions, and I leaned under it; I could then say with St Paul:

"When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

There are many things which contribute to our own understanding and its replacement of blind trust. As a Barnardo boy sitting in this chapel listening to Miss Drake playing the 'Water Music' for her closing voluntary, and seeing her ample figure swaying side to side of the organ seat, I could trust her, and know that in Arranmore House, up the bank just beyond here, where we knew her quite affectionately as Gussy Duck, she helped our understanding of many things, including the behaviour of troublesome boys, and the news of the war, which we listened to every night before the 'pipe down' bugle call.

Even the Officers, with all their nautical expressions, brought some kind of understanding with them: Stiffy Glazebrook had a blue-eyed twinkle beyond his colourful mess-deck language, and Tubby Arnold had a smile which went further than all the deck-hand training. Most of all, 'Pop' Bailey increased my understanding, for he saw me through to obtaining a place in a public school, and gave himself to the extra tuition I needed to make such a jump. When he said that this was an opportunity I should take, I trusted him, although my heart was set on going to sea.

It is of the role of my friends in the increase of my understanding that I wish particularly to speak. Firstly, I think of that friend who was in Howard House where he became a Leading Seaman, and top of the class in the Elementaries. He was ahead of me, and I worked hard to catch him up. He became a nautical, the top boy in seamanship, and went to sea as a cabin boy on a private yacht, and from there he became an Officer Cadet in the Ellerman Wilson Line and obtained his Mates' Certificates, and finally, his Master Mariner's. After a successful life at sea he had a further career ashore as a Medway Conservancy Traffic Control Officer, during which time he brought up his family, made many friends, and contributed greatly to his local church. We were closely in touch during the days when I was a student at Guy's Hospital, and he maintained a shore base in London; we shared our interest in the Church, and later on, in our family lives. He has remained a friend throughout these years, and has given me an understanding of the life for which we had been trained at Russell-Cotes.

Another friend I had was very different; he came to Russell-Cotes after me, and joined Arranmore House; he brought an impression of a life outside Barnardos, somewhere around London, but had no intention of going to sea so that our nautical life seemed to pass him by. But not the sports and music; he was quick around the football field, and he and I spent hours on the Parade ground here doing complicated gymnastics. Most memorably he got hold of one of the fifes from someone in the band, and we sat against the sloping wall below here while he played tunes he knew. He taught me a little song about a trout swimming in a brook (it was some time later that I recognised it in Schubert's quintet) and other tunes which we played when we both became fifers in the band. Both band and gym team performed at parades, garden fetes, and at shows and concerts given in factories and work-places around here, which added music and colour to our lives. True to his form he left Russell-Cotes at the end of the Elementary stage and went to Goldings to learn a trade. We had been close enough friends to see each other and keep in touch for a year or two before he went his way into a career of engineering which ultimately led to running a business of his own. More importantly, perhaps, he not only played football, table-tennis and golf at a high level, but also his music on both the piano and organ. It was in the music world that he met the girl with the special voice who became his wife, and when we got into contact again in later life it was through the music and sports of our young friendship together that he continued to help my understanding.

A third friend from those Russell-Cotes days was in Johnson House and known only distantly to me at the time; he was somewhat older than I, and the kind of boy whom you respected and would not choose to pick a fight with. When I left to go to my next school he stayed on to become, in his turn, top nautical, and then managed to persuade the Commanding Officer of that time that he would do better in the Royal Navy than in the Merchant Service. He was sent to HMS Ganges, which was an unusual step from Russell-Cotes, and, because we shared a continued affection for both Pop Bailey, our teacher, and Peg Dovey, one of the House Staff, we met occasionally over the next few years while I was a student. Life in the Royal Navy had an excitement about it which I admired, but I was glad when he left it to become a student himself. He caught up with his general education, took a degree in psychology, and then trained as a teacher. Throughout those years his enthusiasms for art, literature and ideas were infectious, and they continued into his career as an educational psychologist and family man. It was always stimulating to meet up with him, and to gain some understanding of the world of education and the interchange of minds.

This quartet of Barnardo boys from Russell-Cotes has come together upon a number of occasions during the last few years when the role of Barnardos in the past and the importance of peoples' roots have come under scrutiny and into public debate. We have had the privilege of discussing with each other our Barnardo past, its effect upon our various lives, and our response to the issues of origins and background. Our understanding has increased, and our endeavours to communicate this in one form or another have extended the depth and nature of our friendship.

Communication and understanding - a lifelong relationship. That memorable picture of Bulldog Rogan across from me proclaiming the need for trust before understanding was a personal communication, reminding me of an earlier one at Euston Hall where we boys from the Garden City at Woodford Bridge, just outside London, were sent for safety. It was not unusual for us to have visiting preachers and missionaries who gave us talks, sometimes with lantern slides. One missionary addressed us and declared that he would reward the boy who spotted what was wrong with the notice he had posted in the corridor. We rushed to see what appeared as "DOMINE DIRIGE NOS" in bold black letters. The Latin was not a matter for our judgement, but the letters had been painted on a sheet of white paper and I noticed a point at which the brush had strayed beyond the outline. This apparently was the mistake, and although I do not remember the prize, or the content of the talk, the assertion of God's direction remained with me, and I belive that old preacher knew something about communication.

The full text which I took from the chapel here was:

"Trust in the Lord with all thy heart,
and lean not under thine own understanding;
in all thy ways acknowledge Him,
and He will direct thy path."

Communication has bred understanding, and that which time and study brought to me has, in due course, been taught to others. I have had recourse to many means of communication, from personal exposition to computerised audiovisual displays, and I continue to explore. Much of a surgeon's skills are conveyed by bedside exchanges and by example in clinical practice, but the need to communicate them in academic teaching and lectures must frequently be met. In the USA a university appointment carried with it the commitment to teaching courses and my endeavours to convey the whole of neurosurgery to medical students in a few short presentations came to the attention of the Audio-visual Department who filmed the lectures and put me on video-tape, after which I was able to give them by merely being in attendance while the machine did the work. On one occasion I was unable be present and I subsequently discovered that this class of students, who had learnt solely from the videos, did particularly well in the examinations!

Back in this country I found myself presenting accounts of our work not only to distinguished audiences at national and international gatherings, which required detailed scientific expositions, but also to meetings, in clubs, pubs and schools, of people who were supporting us by raising funds. For schools I used models and objects which I could hold before the assembled classes, and I did one such presentation of brain surgery to a whole primary school assembly of some three or four hundred young children looking for the topic which they considered to be most worthy of their support - I was in direct competition with St John's Ambulance Brigade and one of the Animal Welfare Organisations, and had dressed for the occasion in a formal grey suit relieved somewhat by a pink shirt and tie. After my talk I was asked if I would answer questions. A whole crowd of children stayed behind to bombard me rather than return to their more onerous classwork and among other questions one youngster asked me what the brain looked like. Somewhat flummuxed, I replied that it was grey but had pink areas where the blood vessels were prominent. A few days later I received a large bunch of letters from the children expressing their thanks, their impressions of the talk, and their decision to make a donation to our work. One youngster wrote that he liked my description of the brain as grey and pink - it was just like the clothes I was wearing!

At Russell-Cotes I learnt not only the value of communication and understanding from the staff responsible for our care and training, and from friends, but also communication by the Morse Code, by semaphore, and by that great International Code of flag Signals used at sea: the Blue Peter flag for P - "return on board, the ship is about to depart" or the Red Burgee for B - "I am taking in or discharging explosives" or the yellow flag for Q - "I am in quarantine" so that the flags, which we learnt to recognise and describe in quaint but precise English language, became in themselves characters with individual connotations. It has been a privilege to learn some of the many forms of communication which have been developed in subsequent years, but while I now value my participation in the World Wide Web through the Internet, I retain my respect for the spoken and written word. Most of all, I recognise that my clear memory of that text communicated to me here in the chapel so many years ago was the result of my need for such comfort and trust when my own understanding was limited.

Meeting our need for understanding with more notable success in communication has been strikingly demonstrated by Barnardos in the last year or two since, in 1995, the plight of rootless adults was given TV publicity, enhanced by the extraordinary combintaion of the organisation's remarkable photographic records and its notorious policy of secrecy. Many of you will know the aftermath of the increased demands of individuals to see their own personal records which has been met with the care and understanding necessary for such potentially devastating frank exchanges with ex-Barnardo children now well into their later lives.

We four friends from Russell-Cotes have responded to this need to examine our roots and have ventured into the communication of our experiences using the Internet, which is a part of the public domain now readily available; it has some advantages over conventional publication, and may prove of value to others as a way of disseminating biographical accounts.

Even now, however, when we reach the limits of our own understanding, Bulldog Rogan's text serves well: a glance at the night sky takes us beyond the ninety-three million miles between us and the sun in our relatively small solar system to the contemplation of other stars and galaxies, and to the limits of our understanding of time and distance; or a deep look within ourselves leads to the consideration of the biochemistry of minute genome particles upon which the fundamentals of life and human behaviour depend; such contemplation should engender trust rather than fear, and, just when we thought our childhood simplicity was outgrown, we can join with St.Paul's qualification of achieved manhood:

"For now we see through a glass darkly: but then face to face:
now I know in part: but then shall I know even as I am known"

"I send them over land and sea,
I send them East and West,
And after they have worked for me
I give them all a rest"