Lift Up Your Head

By Paul Crow and Steve Eggleston

I was born into poverty, ignorance, and crime. And for a while, I did exactly what most other kids like me do: I succumbed.   One day I saw a bridge and took it. For a kid from Burngreave in Sheffield, England, this road was as unlikely as it could be.   Today I live in affluence, with a wonderful family, a nice home bordering a green wooded zone, and luxury cars parked in my driveway.   I'm often asked how I did this, being a youth offender who never finished senior school or attended University. This book,   Lift Up Your Head, answers that question. I hope it will also serve as a beacon for other kids like me — past, present and future. And I hope it will enable these kids, when they grow up, to look at the world around them, and make it a better place.

An Inspirational, told with a touching humility, stark honesty and tremendous optimism.  Charts Paul's journey to become a leader in one of the top industries in the country.  This book will put a huge smile on your face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Crow
• Release date: Jun 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393474920

Book preview

Prologue

I have saved writing this preface for last, which is a bit amusing. But the journey of writing this book about my life has taught me that truly knowing how I got started in life depended on knowing not only where I am today, but how I got here. To spin the words of Socrates, I’ve learned that life unexamined is ill understood.

Today I am a highly successful Information Technology professional working in a dangerous cyberworld inside the halls of the biggest corporations in the United Kingdom. My position involves critical responsibilities—such as recovery from critical infrastructure disasters—the diligent discharge of which stabilises companies, protects jobs, preserves core assets, and even saves lives.

Companies depend on me for their survival in the darkest of times, and in that regard, I am with all humbleness and humility the reluctant leader who steps up to do the job that must be done. Leadership lies at the threshold of all properly functioning organisations. Without leadership—families, neighbourhoods, cities, companies, and nations, all stumble and go astray.

I didn’t grow up around leaders or leadership. With rare exception, the people swirling through my childhood world weren’t setting examples of how to be a good person, build a successful business, or take a city to the next level of prosperity. My childhood was a sharp stick jammed into the burning coals of poverty, crime, violence and systemic abuse.

I left secondary school without taking my O’ Levels, and within months I suffered my first arrest. Soon after, I succumbed entirely to a youth of crime, a victim of The Slippery Slope of Poverty, you could say. I did things I should not have done, and even when caught, repeated them, defying formal education, authority and lawfulness. Consequently, my life were fucked, if I’m honest, and honesty is what this book is about. So please excuse the occasional harshness of my chosen words—of the examined life.

I have changed from those early days. By embracing the spirit of rehabilitation and progress, and crossing the bridge out of poverty by immersing myself in reggae music, I escaped the clutches of poverty and prison and the evil ways of The Slippery Slope, allowing the good in life to give me a chance. And chance is what it’s all about, isn’t it? About answering the door when opportunity knocks. And you know what? It kept on knocking and I kept on answering.

Yes, once I opened that door and took the chance, a lucky break that in other parlance might be deemed an opportunity, I suffered painfully through the boredom and discipline and fixed work hours and learned and improved myself and got smarter and better at what I needed to do. This is what you do to get out and get away from the battlefield on which poverty thrusts you as an unknowing soldier.

It was not easy, however. Every pore of my being wanted to succumb to the clutches of The Slippery Slope, and so the battle was constantly raging, every minute of every day. But ultimately, when I did prevail and the success started to flow, well, I found myself doing what this book is about: lifting up my head. I stopped labelling myself the victim of circumstance, at being third or four or fifth best at the bottom of some barrel, and I shot for the stars.

Of course, I only did what I should have been doing all along. I should have been listening to inspirational leaders, engaging in positive, uplifting community projects, preparing for a life of hope, opportunity, and success. I should have been shooting for the stars. And finally when I did, I got the moon, which might be good enough for some but not for me. Because I haven’t stopped yet. I have plenty of miles to go and plenty of time to reach the stars. Stars, here I come!

At this stage in my life and my career, I want to become a civic leader and a humanitarian. To share the words that come from leading the examined life. To be a voice of hope and change for our youth. To give back to the community where I came from, and help it transcend its long history of poverty and darkness. To be a leader where I see very few.

I want my story to reach the eyes and ears of others as I continue to reach for the stars. And through this book, I am reaching, I am being honest, and I am using my common sense to move one step closer to my dream. Because in the end, I want to be my own success story, in hopes I may enable others to do the same. Together, let’s Lift Up Our Heads.

I

Growing Up Poor

1

City of Steel

As a young boy, I didn’t take school seriously. When I was living in Burngreave, I didn’t read books or learn my maths as I should. Read a book? Who has time? Finish senior school? Who cares? Back then, it didn’t mean anything to me. But oh, how things have changed.

As a successful, accomplished IT Director who has recently turned fifty years old, with a wife and children ensconced deeply in an affluent middle-class British life, I now take school and education very seriously. Today I read books and scour the internet for all the knowledge I can scrape together, setting an example for my children. Today, learning means everything to me.

Speaking of learning, are you familiar with the name, Sir Henry Bessemer? I am. Not because I learned about him in senior school. Not because a teacher lectured about him at the college or university I did not attend. Not because the British school system warmly reached a helping hand to a poor family like mine and nurtured me with understanding, encouragement, and opportunity.

No, I learned about Sir Henry by being self-taught, and in particular, by writing this book and doing research about him on the internet. Then I ordered the tome titled Sir Henry Bessemer, an autobiography of Sir Henry with a concluding chapter by his son, Henry Bessemer, Jr. Then after that, I tapped into C. Bodsworth’s book about Henry, titled Sir Henry Bessemer: Father of the Steel Industry.

And with this, let’s begin our story.

Sir Henry Bessemer was born in 1813 in Charlton, Hertfordshire, England, and died eighty-five years later. He became an inventor and engineer and highly successful businessman without any formal education. In 1856, in his forties, he invented a steelmaking process that would revolutionise the mass-production of steel. His Bessemer Converter became the most important invention in the world for the affordable processing of iron to steel.

Just over a mile from my house on Burngreave Road in Pitsmoor, there was once a public house called The Fountain. Many a night I spent there as a young, misdirected lad, where my brother Juddy and I rubbished about the car park and mixed with local kids, rarely up to any good. Well, in 2009, to commemorate and pay deserved homage to Sir Henry Bessemer, that same public house was renamed The Bessemer.

Why did they do that? Because of Sir Henry Bessemer’s important legacy: He planted his stakes deep into the fertile Sheffield soil and declared it the worldwide City of Steel. This is the man who in 2003 was recognised as one of the top ten innovators since the birth of Christ, despite being generally overlooked in his lifetime, to the consternation of many British and American engineers who profoundly admired him.

Because America embraced the prosperity of steel like no one’s business, eight cities and towns across the vast land adopted the Bessemer name; yet there are none in England or anywhere in the entire United Kingdom or British Empire over which the sun never sets. Henry’s success was never guaranteed to him in the nitty-gritty, live-and-let-die world of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution, but he followed his tenacious devotion to taking on new challenges, regardless of risk. He was a natural leader who overcame adversity.

As the story goes, Henry’s first efforts failed miserably. In today’s highly regulated world, he might even have been prosecuted for financial fraud, notwithstanding his dogged brilliance. That’s because in 1856 and years following, he sold his patented Bessemer process, described in the newspapers as ‘the Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel,’ to many unhappy Sheffield ironmakers who at that time were the bedrock of the iron economy.

The problem was that every one of them reported the same disappointment: the newly-patented Bessemer process failed to produce any usable steel. Astonished, shamed and discredited, Bessemer set out to rectify the errors of his ways, ascertaining two causes of the failure and fixing them. Then with his associates, he struck out on his own to establish his own Sheffield steelworks. And despite all the setbacks, and they were aplenty, it wasn’t long before Henry became a millionaire in times when millionaires were few.

The original Bessemer Converter was a rough-and-tumble capsule of molten steel with the look of an ancient time capsule. Today it resides in the Kelham Island Museum located on Alma Street next to the River Don in Sheffield Centre. And for his work as a pioneer of inexpensive steelmaking, as well as the inventor of over one hundred inventions in iron, steel, glass, and even solar energy, in 1879 at the young spry age of sixty-six, Henry Bessemer was knighted by the Queen.

Last year I turned fifty. When I was born fifty years ago, the likelihood of my prosperity was more or less as dismal as that of Henry Bessemer when he first strapped on his mud boots to slog into the moors for steel mud. And though I am no inventor, today I ask myself, if Henry Bessemer can be knighted, why can’t I?

Why not a poor kid who grew up in the ghetto of Burngreave?

Why not a kid with a juvenile criminal record who overcame the hard knocks of poverty and prison?

Why not a kid who didn’t finish senior school or take his O Levels but did become IT Director for major companies, working to protect their digital assets from catastrophic collapse?

Why not a mate who wants to put a domino in motion that will tilt other dominoes that will help to end poverty, educate the poor, and inspire our youth to turn Sheffield into the Silicon Valley of England?

Why not a Northerner who wants to look beyond his own city and take his message to all the other cities in the United Kingdom…and beyond?

Why not me?

After all, I still have thirty-four years to go before I reach eighty-five, and maybe I’ll live even longer with the latest advances in nutrition, technology, science, and medicine.

This book is the story of my life to date, with answers to three simple but also very hard questions that have driven me, and could be a bellwether to others—including you, your colleagues, the people you influence, and your children:

What do I want to be called in life?

How do I cross the bridge out of poverty (or any hardship) to success and affluence?

What legacy do I want to leave behind—for my neighbourhood (Burngreave), my community (Sheffield), my country (the United Kingdom), and all of mankind (the world and beyond)?

Humbly, I write this book first and foremost for my family—for my wife and sons and my closest friends—who have witnessed my journey first-hand. But I also write this book for all the kids who will be born into poverty in Sheffield and elsewhere, who are likely to shun school, experience violence, and succumb to crime, because they think that they haven’t got an iota of a chance in life.

Well, you do. All of you do. You have a chance. With desire, belief and self- discipline, you can do anything...if you just lift up your head. And when you lift up your head, remember one thing: ‘Aim for the Stars…and if you hit the moon, you’ll be alright.’

2

Born into Poverty

People are either born into it or they are not. It is not by the choice of the person born. The baby in the womb does not arrive at a crossroads, one arrow pointing to poverty and one arrow pointing to affluence, and say: ‘Hey, I’d like to be born poor and be uneducated and embrace a life of crime and violence.’ In that sense, being born into poverty is as random as being born at all. So, if you were born poor, banish any guilt from your psyche right now. It took me many decades to learn that simple human truth.

But for something so random, we sure have a lot of it. Depending on how it’s measured, most experts agree that between ten and twenty percent of the people born in the United Kingdom are born into true poverty. And when I say true poverty, I don’t mean a family having a bad year in which temporary belt-tightening is required because a breadwinner is caught between jobs. I mean downright, persistent, ongoing poverty or long-term low income that regularly trammels the poverty line.

If we don’t sugar-coat it, those percentages equate to over thirteen million Brits. And since we’re not sugar-coating, let’s be frank with what poverty means. Poverty means children who eat no food or rubbish pretending to be food; families rife with conflict, domestic abuse and violence; parents lacking education and plagued by mental health issues; lives afflicted by dependency and addiction to drugs and alcohol; crippling debt and homelessness; temptation to commit crimes; joblessness and suicide; and an absolute, total lack of any leadership that matters.

Let’s call it The Slippery Slope of Poverty, or for short, The Slippery Slope, as it is so difficult to escape and so easy to slide back into.

As I was writing this book in the spring of 2018, looking for telling news about Sheffield—something powerful to weave into my message that would grab the essence of things by the scruff of the neck—I came across this breaking news on the internet (which of course will not be breaking news when you read this, but just as apropos):

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Terrified residents demand action after latest stabbing in crime-plagued Sheffield suburb.

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I read the article to ascertain the suburb, and can you believe it? It was Pitsmoor, the very neighbourhood in Burngreave where I grew up and where my story begins. Apparently a man had been stabbed right there on Lopham Street, just a few minutes’ walk from where I was born on Burngreave Road.

The man was stabbed as a result of a feud between rival neighbourhood youth gangs. ‘You can still see the blood stains on the street from the other incidents because it hasn’t been cleaned,’ a horrified health care worker was quoted as saying. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

A policeman on the scene observed, ‘Yeah, we’re in the area protecting people but it’s still happening, and the word on the street is that it’s going to get worse.’ His tone was dire, exhausting, if not downright forlorn. You could tell the battle was being lost, not won – still being lost, I should say, because it was being lost when I was there forty years earlier.

‘We need far more education and employment training in the area to steer people away from gang crime,’ added a policeman who didn’t want to give his name, but no truer words could have been spoken. Battles like this, I thought, cannot be won in ignorance and unemployment. Optimism dies in darkness and silence. I must try to change that.

A local caregiver was asked for his thoughts. He was deeply upset as a Muslim man because the stabbing took place during Eid prayers, a spiritual time of peace and meditation. He believed the warring gangs were Kurdish and Somalian, gang members who in his opinion should have been attending mosque. But whatever you do, don’t jump to conclusions about ethnicity and skin colour.

As a Muslim, it upsets this caretaker deeply. He was part of the overwhelmingly pacifist majority at whom a Trumpian and Brexit world was now pointing unreflective, biased fingers, castigating his faith. ‘I'm worried that it gives the religion a bad name,’ he explained as he shook his head. ‘I hope they clean the area of the people responsible by arresting them and bringing them to justice.’

These words are universal, are they not? The voice of reason steaming up from a soup of poverty and anger, kids not knowing any other way. The lack of community leadership, of people espousing rules of opportunity and emotions of hope. But don’t worry, sir, there are those of us who know that violence has no religion. To blame a religion is to be ignorant and ridiculous. And sir, don’t stop with words, When you’re cleaning up the area, could you please clean the blood stains off the street?

And now, to my story, where Sheffield, Burngreave Council Housing, steel, poverty, crime, stabbings, the Children’s Home, reggae blues parties, and IT—strange bedfellows by any measure—all interconnect and play out in the humble life of Paul Crow, a kid from Pitsmoor where, after all these years, the pavements are still stained in blood because nobody can bother to scrub it off.

Except that the tone of this book will not be pessimistic. In this book, we will lift up our heads with optimism before the final page is turned. 

In the late 1900s, thousands of terraced homes were built to house people drawn to Sheffield to find gainful employment in Bessemer’s legacy of a mushrooming steel industry. Many structures were quickly and poorly constructed with questionable sanitation. As a result, by the 1960s, a good portion of these homes had fallen into disrepair, leading to a slum clearance programme which continued well into the 1980s and my early childhood.

The statistics are shocking. Between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s, no fewer than 44,600 families were relocated from the Sheffield slums to Council Houses that were newly-built to accommodate the poor. In 1976 alone, half of the new Council Houses were given to families who were relocated from impoverished suburbs such as Attercliffe, Brightside and Tinsley (all in greater Sheffield and not far from Pitsmoor).

Council Housing on Burngreave Road is a collection of terraced houses located north of Sheffield City Centre. The aged red brick and gritty cement is dirty, covered in greasy black soot belched into the sky from the small handful of steel, ironworks and grindstone factories still remaining after the collapse of the steel and coal industries.

In England, Council Housing is government-supported, low-income housing that in some areas devolves into a cyclical, self-sustaining world of the ghetto, where pessimism rules the roost. Pitsmoor is an example. You can see the despair in the stressed buildings, the barren flower boxes, the broken surroundings. Even the vertical rows of windows on the back side of the house I grew up in are crooked and different in dimension, as if measured off by a piss-drunk carpenter.

With a green strip of land on one side and a dilapidated brick wall on the other, Catherine Road is a plain strip of black asphalt that bounds the backside of our multi-unit building. The green strip is the only sign of life, as it’s a dead-end road, and though it’s called a road, its only function is car parking for a small smattering of decrepit vehicles owned by a select few.

No matter what time of year it is, in our front garden there are no flowers blooming, no colourful flags flying, no baby birds chirping. The place is forlorn, dire, and above the waist-high dividing wall with a top crooked like broken teeth, scraggly bushes try to grow, a metaphor for the youth whose lives begin here, in poverty.

Perhaps they are stunted trees, not bushes, because inspiration and light are foreign entities here. But no matter what they are, everything is covered in a dull, grey pallor, as if an evil giant had stood above it all and shook out a dusty bag of cement to coat the whole complex.

None of this bothers me, however, as I have no idea that the grimy soot covering every surface in Burngreave has also permeated the impoverished little souls of me and my mates. No, for us it is our playground, life as we know it, the place where I play, and I do like to play. We don’t like it or dislike it. It just is.

Oddly, in fact, when I’m forced to leave from time to time by the squalls of circumstance, I always want to come back to Burngreave because in the summer it’s where my mates and I play football, have fun and loll away the holidays in blissful, youthful innocence.

Put another way, some people call the neighbourhood of Pitsmoor a shit hole, but I called it home.

3

The Sheffield Blitz

For centuries the land around Sheffield was ideal for metalworks, which was practically born here. Rolling hills thick with timber and gouged by seven different rivers, lifelines in Mother Nature’s earthy palm, was a dream setting for steel mills, foundries, brickworks and masonry.

The city of Sheffield became known worldwide for making iron, transforming iron into steel through the augmented Bessemer process, inventing stainless steel, and then for producing beautiful cutlery. Through both World Wars, so powerful was its industry that it also manufactured the metal core for munitions galvanized to battle the Axis of Evil.

Hitler himself put his evil eye on Sheffield. Because of the legendary River Don Works, the oldest steel factory on the planet, Sheffield was on Hitler’s radar as one of the places to annihilate in the Nazi march toward world domination. But in the galvanised tradition of Sir Bessemer, River Don raised its head. There the indomitable British spirit manufactured steel crankshafts and vital parts for the British Spitfires and Hurricanes that engaged the German Luftwaffe in a life-or-death row, determined to stop Hitler at any cost.

One small slice of time stands out. Between 12 and 16 December 1940, in what is now known as the Sheffield Blitz, 300 German Heinkel 111 Fighters bombard the city of Sheffield with tens of thousands of bombshells, land mines, and flares, including one continuous nine-hour run of hell raining down on earth.

As the bombs near the ground, they scream. Cold steel tubes packed with payloads of powerful explosives shriek like theatregoers terrified by Victor Hugo’s gothic monster from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But the screams and shrieks do not come from just the bombs.

The men, women and children of Sheffield also scream and shriek as they flee for their lives to underground bomb shelters with only the clothes on their backs. All possessions are left behind except maybe a child’s toy clutched in a little hand. Normal concerns about children’s sore throats and stomach aches and fevers don’t even enter the picture.

Here lives are on the line. The nervous smell of threatened survival pungently fills the nostrils. Havoc is everywhere—and there, look—a pregnant woman in distress is being frantically pushed in a wheelbarrow toward a nursing home, because emergency vehicles cannot reach her. Her chances look slim; her baby’s, slimmer.

First the fire bombs rain on the south of the City Centre, a few kilometres from Burngreave over at Park Hill, Woodseats and Norton. By land this is