Courage: the most important virtue

“Life is mostly froth and bubble /

Two things stand like stone /

Kindness in another’s trouble /

Courage in your own”.

Adam Lindsay Gordon

 The Greeks maintained that there four virtues for the flourishing person: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage.  The most important of these was courage.

Indeed one of the most famous examples of courage was Socrates drinking hemlock despite Crito offering him freedom.

As I am writing this blog we are on our way to Kyoto, our final destination.  During our trip around Japan we happened upon a terrific example of courage.  It was at the Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum.  Tsuruga was the only port where Polish orphans in the 1920s, and Jewish refugees carrying “visas for life” in the 1940s, disembarked in Japan.

The hero is Chiune Sugihara, who saved the lives of Jewish refugees during World War II by issuing 2137 transit visas. He did this although he was forbidden by his country and eventually saving over 6,000 lives in the process.  For a field manger to disobey the order from head office is simply unthinkable in Japan.

Finally, I’d like to give an example of courage in my own life. I went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge as an undergraduate (1964-7) , In my first year, I played rugby, and then I and another player, a fellow freshmana player, Roger Tubb, were approached by a couple of engineers and said, would you like to try and get an oar? I said, what are you talking about? And they explained about the bumps, and they said, we think we’ve got a great chance of getting an oar, but we need you two guys in the engine room to basically put strength into the boat. We’ll teach you how to row, but you’ll have to be able to row every afternoon. Well, I approached my chemistry tutor at that time, doing chemistry, you were meant to go to a practical every afternoon, and when I said to him, I’ve been given this offer, and he said, if they think you’ve got a chance of getting an oar, forget the practicals, you’ve covered it already in A-levels, go and get that oar. You’re never going to win a Nobel Prize.

I took his advice and started learning to row, and it was fantastic fun, I really enjoyed it. And what happened is, we participated in the May Bumps.  The rule was  you get an oar if you get four bumps (see the picture above)

Because we, in the final day, we were running second with 3 bumps.  The boat in front of us was first. We bumped the firet  boat moving us to first,  We then moved to last position in the next division race and we bumped the next boat.  That gave us five bumps. It was the first time a Sidney Sussex boat had achieved five bumps in 80 years.  We got what was known as the “Spoons” when we marched into dinner that night.  The” Spoons” occurred if someone had achieved something good on the sporting field, or some sort of achievement.  What happens  is they hold you outside Hall, and then everyone would start rattling their spoons on the tables, and then you’d walk in.

My second claim to fame at the college occurred in my  second year we were out in digs. Unfortunately, on my 20th birthday in November, ,I got pretty drunk, and came back to my digs, and I threw up over the landlady’s dog, Thar made me some sort of a quasi Cambridge gentleman,

So I had this reputation being both a jock and sort of like an honorary Cambridge gentleman, and in the final year, I stood for election as the President of the J junior Common Room, and actually ended up winning by one vote, So the when the final third year started, I had the best rooms in the college for an undergraduate.

I was in charge of about a budget of about, well, I think it was half a million pounds;  we had to pay for the rowing boats, we paid for rugby trips to Oxford, sporting field maintence, etc.

About four weeks in, I got approached by this chap, who was a good rifle shot, to  give him a grant to go and participate in the national championships.

And I said, well, we don’t actually do that. I said, the money is really for team events, and any graduate can basically access the money we spend in the budget, in the sense that they can participate in any of the sports, like rowing or rugby, tennis, cricket, etc.  So I said, supporting an individual to go to an individual national championships doesn’t really sit easy with me.  The chap said, no, no, think of the prestige will bring to the College, and I said, well, I see a lot of prestige for you, but not much prestige for the college. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I said no, I wouldn’t do it. I ended up having a motion for my impeachment, so this time now, I’d lost all the jock support, a lot of the supporting people thought I should have supported them, particularly as I’d gotten their vote, and I said, no, it’s a matter of principle.  Everyone could claim they wanted money for an individual grant to go to a sporting final and that’s not what the budget’s for. The Budget is to provide the facilities for anybody to participate.  sothere was a motion of impeachment, and this time I then had to lobby the non-sporting people, which I did, and I ended up not getting impeached by one vote.

At the time, the Master of my College was a gentleman called E. P. Thompson, who was probably the top British historian on Europe. His very famous book is Europe Since Napoleon. Anyway, I was meeting with him a couple of times a month for tutoring sessions, and he said, “Chris, we’re all following your story with enthusiasm at the high table, and congratulations, you’ve learned several things. One, when a vote occurs you’ve got to have the numbers, and congratulations on your win.  Secondly, you’ve learned that you have values, and you will have to struggle for them but you have the courage to do so.  I am so proud to have you in my College.”