Appalling treatment of wounded British soldiers in NHS and the inspiring story of Jeremy Clarkson (and wife's) response
From The Sunday Times
December 2, 2007
Clarkson’s hero
How Jeremy Clarkson’s outrage over a wounded soldier led to this year’s Sunday Times Christmas appeal
Margarette Driscoll
Give here: www.justgiving.com/h4h_sundaytimes
Help for Heroes website: www.helpforheroes.org.uk
Here’s Jeremy Clarkson, writing the other week on getting in touch (or not) with his inner woman: “I shave my face, not my legs. I am not interested in cushions or soft furnishings . . . I think you should only use a telephone if you are on a moor, it’s the middle of the night and you are surrounded by wolves. The notion that it can be used ‘for a chat’ is as ridiculous as the notion that cuddling is in some way rewarding.”
You might think that being married to him would present something of a challenge. Followers of his column in News Review are used to his forthright, blokey views on everything from Britishness and the nanny state to binge drinking (it’s good for you). As the presenter of Top Gear, he presides over a cheerful mayhem of explosions, stunts and screaming tyres. But behind the Neanderthal facade there is an inner woman lurking – somewhere.
“He once told me that when we met he found me rather intimidating: I had a GTi, a job and wore red lipstick,” says his wife Francie. “He had just started in television then and was mostly watching Danger-mouse and playing Scrabble with his mates. I was the one who went out to work every day in the power suit.
“He was very sweet, he’d do the shopping and the cooking – he even did some ironing for me. I know it’s not what people expect of Jeremy Clarkson . . .”
That was 1990: neither of them had any idea at the time that Jeremy would one day become a global star. Top Gear is estimated to have more than 350m viewers worldwide and his books seem to have acquired a permanent slot in the bestsellers lists.
The power of his punchy humour was brought home to them in the most unexpected way this time last year, a few months after they had been invited to dinner near their Oxfordshire home and met M a j o r - G e n e r a l Richard Shirreff and his wife Sarah-Jane. Shirreff was about to take command of our troops in Basra.
“The next thing I heard from Richard was a call from Iraq,” says Francie. “One of his soldiers, Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, although not serving in Iraq at the time – actually serving in Afghanistan – had been badly injured. He’d had both his legs blown off, his spine was badly damaged, his arms were badly damaged, he had terrible injuries and he was in a coma in Selly Oak hospital.”
Diane Dernie, Parkinson’s mother, had been at his bedside ever since he had been airlifted to Britain and was reading to him from one of Jeremy’s books when she saw a glimmer of a smile – his first sign of life.
“So Ben’s in a coma, he comes from Doncaster, which is Jeremy’s home town, and Richard says, ‘It’s a big ask, but would you and Jeremy go and see him?’ I remember thinking, ‘Oh gosh, it’s the last thing Jeremy needs’. We get a lot of charity requests and it was a very busy time for Top Gear – but Jeremy said, ‘No, no, I really want to do it’.”
Realising they would also be seeing other wounded soldiers, Francie started ringing round for Top Gear T-shirts, videos and magazines to take along.
What they found at Selly Oak hospital– which is part of the University Hospital Birmingham NHS foundation trust but also houses the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine – was profoundly shocking.
The National Health Service care was extremely good but the soldiers had no dedicated ward. Colleagues were not allowed to visit wearing uniform for fear of upsetting Muslim visitors and staff. Once their emergency treatment ended, even those as badly injured as Parkinson would have to join the NHS waiting list for the physiotherapy they needed, along with everyone else, despite having fought for their country.
“You’re looking at boys who’ll live, with luck, but their lives will never be the same again. Ben is making an amazing recovery but that day, when we first met him, he didn’t know we had met him. And the reality is he’s got no legs and speech is still very difficult for him,” says Francie.
“Diane, his mother, is an amazing woman. She’s never given up hope. She gave up her job instantly and moved to Birmingham to be by his bedside. Ben’s life has been devastated, but so has hers and her family’s. We promised her that one day when he was well enough we’d get him down to Top Gear.”
That same day they met a 19-year-old whose last memory was of mortar fire as he was blown up in Afghanistan – losing the use of one leg and sustaining terrible stomach injuries – and who had woken to find himself in a geriatric ward. He later contracted MRSA.
Another soldier had been hit by a sniper and was paralysed from the neck down. It would be months before he reached the top of the queue for physiotherapy.
On the way home Francie phoned a girlfriend and said: “You won’t believe what we’ve just seen.”
“She said, ‘Well, we know people who could afford to buy an iPod each, don’t we? Let’s do that, then my son can download some music for them’. I thought: okay, I’m on it, and that was the start.”
Jeremy did his bit by writing angrily that in the NHS, these soldiers wounded in the service of their country were treated no differently from “a lad who got drunk and smashed his Citroën into a tree”.
On their next visit to the hospital they went in three large estate cars. Francie had persuaded Sony to donate MP3 players, PlayStations and games; friends had given gifts and the Clarksons’ nanny, whose boyfriend was a former soldier, had given a television and DVD for the accommodation being prepared for the families.
When their convoy arrived they found the hospital was reluctant to let them in as “Jeremy had caused such a hoo-ha”. So they sat in the canteen “like naughty children” while a friend sorted things out. (Selly Oak hospital is a different place now, says Francie, with all the issues they highlighted resolved.)
The Clarksons were determined to continue to do what they could to help. Their friends had shown that there was a well of goodwill out there towards the soldiers that was at yet untapped. What they didn’t know was that Bryn Parry, a cartoonist and former member of the Royal Green Jackets, had also visited the wounded soldiers and come up with an inspired idea: a new charity, Help for Heroes, which is now part of The Sunday Times Christmas Appeal. It aims to channel that goodwill into the provision of better facilities for men such as Parkinson. WHEN the Selly Oak soldiers were fit enough to leave hospital, many were transferred to Headley Court, a military rehabilitation centre in Surrey which has specialist facilities for amputees.
Headley Court is run on military lines. One soldier said that after weeks as a hospital patient, the day you are wheeled into Headley Court is “the day hope begins”.
At Headley Court no one is allowed to feel sorry for himself. “They call it beasting, but they look after each other, pull each other up,” says Francie. “There’s lots of laughter and a feeling that they are among their own.”
The centre is publicly funded but its facilities are far from lavish, which is why Help for Heroes is raising money for it. One of the gyms where amputees are put through their paces is effectively a tent.
Parry was disturbed to find that, despite the importance of swimming in building body strength without putting stress on injured limbs, Headley Court had no swimming pool. A pool was recognised by the government as a “need” but not an “urgent need”.
With British troops engaged on two fronts, at high cost to the defence budget, the pool was never likely to make it to the top of the priority list, despite the growing number of injured soldiers being sent home from the two wars.
Instead troops were – and still are – being bussed to nearby Leatherhead where they have to share the pool with members of the public, to the dismay of both sides.
Boys who had been blown up or shot had to reveal their stumps and scars in front of gaping onlookers. As recently as 10 days ago there was an altercation when two women told the troops they should get out of the water as they were “scaring the children”.
“It’s happened so many times that that one didn’t even get reported up the chain,” says Francie grimly.
Neighbours have also objected to accommodation being built for soldiers’ families at Headley Court, she adds: “If I got their names and addresses I’d have them all tried for treason. These soldiers are prepared to do something none of us is prepared to do. And we owe them, big time.
“I’m not suggesting it should be different, it’s not a question of whether they should be going to war or not. The fact is that they are prepared to go and serve wherever they are told – they don’t get a choice – and they are giving an awful lot.
“When they come back hurt and damaged, the least we can do is everything we can to help them. They’re trained to have pride, to be dignified, never to complain, so it takes us civilians to do that on their behalf.”
Francie’s sense of the acute importance of supporting men who come back from war is informed by the experience of her own family. Her father Major Robert Cain was one of five men to win the VC at Arnhem in Holland in September 1944.
It was part of Market Garden, one of the largest airborne operations of the war. Some 10,600 troops went in; fewer than 2,500 came out. Major Cain was the only VC who lived to tell the tale.
The plan was to drop airborne forces at strategic bridges in occupied Holland so that land troops could drive through from Belgium into Germany. The last bridge, at Arnhem, proved – as Hollywood later had it – a bridge too far.
Francie’s father and his colleagues flew in by glider under heavy fire. Several gliders crash-landed or collided.
Some pilots were crushed when the vehicles or heavy machinery the gliders were carrying smashed into the cockpits.
Cain got to within 2,000 yards of the Arnhem bridge to face a German counterattack. Some 300 of the 400 men he was commanding were killed. He was then ordered to hold nearby high ground where 40 more of his men were killed in 90 minutes. In the siege that followed in Oosterbeek, where the allies had gathered, he was badly wounded and temporarily blinded when a PIAT antitank shell blew up in his face. Yet he carried on fighting.
“His face and legs were full of shrapnel, his eyes blackened and his eardrums were perforated,” Francie wrote after visiting the spot where it happened.
“He apparently declined medical treatment (morphine was in short supply), stuffing pieces of field dressing in his ear to stop the bleeding. His trousers had been pretty much blown off.
“The thought of a man with a bloody and blackened face, a rag protruding from his ear, with shredded trousers exposing bloody legs, running around shooting at Tiger tanks from the hip with a PIAT, [took] me back to Hollywood. So why didn’t Harrison Ford play him in the film? Dad didn’t even have a walk-on part.”
He “bagged” three Tiger tanks that day. “The citation told of my father’s boundless energy and bravery, motivating and inspiring those around him, putting any concerns for his own safety behind him while he took on an overwhelming enemy seemingly single-handed,” said Francie.
She added: “Despite my father’s unholy appearance during the battle, I am told he made his men find clean shirts and have a shave before they retreated over the river. He didn’t want them to retreat in disarray. I think it helped them to restore some pride in themselves.”
Months later, after collecting his VC at Buckingham Palace, Francie’s father went to a pub in Whitehall to celebrate with some mates who had also won awards. After a few drinks, he left the VC on the table.
“It made me laugh because I got to see and touch the medal the other day,” says Francie. “It’s part of an exhibition at the Isle of Man museum that I opened. They made me wear cotton gloves to handle it and I thought: God, and there’s my dad leaving it probably in a pool of beer in the pub.”
As a child she knew nothing of this – neither of Arnhem nor of its beery aftermath.
After the war, her father rejoined Shell, the oil company. He was 51 when she was born. A few years later he took early retirement and the family moved to the Isle of Man, where Francie grew up. Her father died of cancer when she was 13.
The VC had never been mentioned. “It wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t something he would have wanted to talk about,” she says. “He wasn’t a military man but he was a very disciplined, righteous person. Talking to my mother, he’d found what he had to do in the war very, very disturbing and suffered for years after that emotionally.”
Some years ago Jeremy made a television documentary about Major Cain’s VC. Soon afterwards an elderly man who called every year selling poppies for the British Legion appeared at the Clarksons’ door and gave Francie a bundle of letters.
“They were letters sent between him and two other mates who’d been together in the war. They’d gone home, where you couldn’t really talk about it, so the letters were all sharing the horrors they’d had together, which was their way of dealing with it,” says Francie.
“That’s the other importance of a place like Headley Court. Soldiers can talk to each other about things they wouldn’t even tell their wives or friends at home, because they can’t understand what they’ve been through. More Falklands veterans have died through suicide than were killed in the war and the emotional effects of what’s going on now are are going to be huge.
“Soldiers have seen their mates killed, they’ve maybe killed civilian children, they’ve been to hell and back. As a people we need to prepare for that.”
Help for Heroes, of which Jeremy and Francie have become patrons, was launched in The Sunday Times in September. It aims to raise £5m to build a swimming pool and gym complex at Headley Court. It has already raised £1.8m, including more than £100,000 from Sunday Times readers, and we hope you will continue to give to the charity as part of our Christmas Appeal.
It was Headley Court’s upbeat spirit that appealed to Francie when she visited. “It’s the bit where they start to get back on their feet,” she says. “Years ago I used to work in outplacement counselling, which was basically working with people who’d been made redundant and helping them get started again. People used to say to me, ‘Isn’t that very depressing being around people who are unemployed all the time?’ but I’d say it would be depressing if I’d been the one doing the firing: my bit is when the damage has been done, pulling them back up and helping them get started again.”
Parkinson, who is 23, has been at Headley Court for several months now. He has lost three years of memory but has regained a little movement in his arm and is learning to balance on special “kneeler legs” designed for double amputees.
“He’s being spoken of as the most wounded soldier that’s ever survived – it’s only down to modern techniques and a bit of luck that he’s still alive,” says Francie.
Despite that, Parkinson was initially offered only £152,000 in compensation, a sum meant to cover his medical costs for life, while a typist working for the RAF was awarded £484,000 for a repetitive strain injury to her thumb. To make matters worse, his girlfriend, Holly Wood has left him, unable to cope with the extent of his injuries, so he has also lost daily contact with his one-year-old son.
But he is facing up to things as bravely as you would expect. Last week, almost a year after they met, Francie fulfilled her promise and took him to visit the set at Top Gear. “It was a fabulous day,” she says. “He wasn’t able to get into the cars, but he could watch and talk to the Stig [Top Gear’s stunt driver].
“Your instinct is to mother these guys, but that’s the wrong thing; they don’t want sympathy. He was just in a T-shirt and I kept asking him if he was cold. Finally he said, ‘I’m a para – I don’t do cold’.”
My Jeremy’s got a girlie car and has done the ironing
When Jeremy wrote his attack on the treatment of wounded soldiers, he addressed it to Tony Blair, urging him “to help people who you put in harm’s way”.
A lot of people would like to see Jeremy enter the political arena directly: a petition on the Downing Street website proposing him for prime minister attracted 26,000 signatures recently.
“It’s about the only protest vote people get,” says his wife Francie. “We haven’t got Screaming Lord Sutch any more and I’ve always believed that people died for the right to vote – so you have to vote – but there is never a ‘none of the above’ category, which is what a lot of us feel like ticking. So Jeremy represents the ‘none of the above’ option.”
Would he make a good candidate? He is certainly a more rounded character than his popular image sometimes suggests. As a newlywed, says Francie, “he was very sweet, he’d do the shopping and the cooking, he even did some ironing for me. It’s not what people expect of Jeremy Clarkson.”
But “in truth, he’s not a great shopper. If he’s a bit hungry he’ll go and buy a packet of Smarties, but he can’t think, ‘I might want to eat something else later on today.’ He’s not properly domesticated.”
Francie, a former employment consultant, became his manager after the birth of their first daughter, Emily, now 13. “I picked up his bookkeeping, which he’d never been particularly good at, picked up the phone, which he’d never bothered answering, and answered letters he’d never got around to,” she says.
And Francie for prime minister’s wife? Or even prime minister herself? She comes over as the sort of Englishwoman the word “capable” was invented for.
At home, Jeremy drives an open-topped Merc: she declares it a bit too “girlie” and has a soft spot for hardcore, stripped-down Porsche 911s (to Jeremy’s horror: he hates them and once destroyed one on Top Gear by crushing the bonnet with a piano, dousing the car in acid, then dropping it onto a caravan.)
She negotiates his contracts, handles his diary, sorts the fan mail, yet seems slightly bemused by the way it has all taken off.
His diatribes about life in modern Britain, hemmed in by speed cameras, CCTV and health and safety guidelines, have struck a chord. The writer Tony Parsons once called him “a dazzling beacon of political incorrectness”, but Francie says he’s just talking common sense.
