RIDERS ON THE STORM
To achieve great things, it’s generally held that the recipe should include brains, talent, charisma or luck, preferably all four – not forgetting a more recent theory that it also takes 10,000 hours of practice.
But what if an alternative route was a nasty, brutish, Dickensian childhood, grinding poverty or persecution? The terror of war could be another kick-starter, as could witnessing innocent people being killed or abandoned and shamed.
“Let’s be clear, I’m not advocating that parents go and wreck [their children’s] childhoods,” says Matthew Parris, author of a book making the case that trauma can unlock greatness or special qualities and abilities that might otherwise lie latent. “But there does seem to be something of a pattern.”
The British journalist, author and former MP has noticed it over 14 years hosting a BBC Radio 4 series, Great Lives, in which prominent people choose a figure they like and admire and discuss their life stories.
Time and time again, the subjects had undergone difficult, sometimes horrific early experiences. Genghis Khan, Freddie Mercury, Frida Kahlo, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Martin Luther King Jr, Coco Chanel, Marie Curie – the list was a veritable dolly mixture of history. Even some figures who’d had affluent beginnings, including the absurdist Edward Lear and the anti-slavery campaigner Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaft esbury, had nevertheless suffered profoundly damaging early experiences on which their future lives seemed to hinge. These experiences would break most people, and had certainly broken these great people at the time. But out of the emotional rubble rose greatness.
CAUSE AND EFFECT?
Parris set about researching the degree to which trauma might have
