(Above) David Kershaw with his father. To read Matthew Taylor's article on the government's radical paternity leave reforms, click here
David Kershaw, 56Chief executive of M&C Saatchi My relationship with my own father was episodic but hugely enjoyable. I was eight when my parents divorced. I went to boarding school a year later and lived with my mother during the holidays. My father was a bringer of excitement and treats. A serial and cyclical entrepreneur, in the good times he would take us to the most exotic restaurants in London. Peer-group brownie points were scored when I was the first to have a Chinese meal or a flaming Steak Diane. He was probably the real reason I went into advertising: eating in fine restaurants without personally paying the bill was enormously appealing. He moved to Brighton and then Spain, so seeing him continued to be an adventure. More importantly, he became a wise counsellor and, when I suffered acute bouts of insecurity, his reassurance was immensely comforting.
Ian Hargreaves, 59Professor of journalism
Clive Stafford SmithDirector of Reprieve
David Kershaw, 56Chief executive of M&C Saatchi My relationship with my own father was episodic but hugely enjoyable. I was eight when my parents divorced. I went to boarding school a year later and lived with my mother during the holidays. My father was a bringer of excitement and treats. A serial and cyclical entrepreneur, in the good times he would take us to the most exotic restaurants in London. Peer-group brownie points were scored when I was the first to have a Chinese meal or a flaming Steak Diane. He was probably the real reason I went into advertising: eating in fine restaurants without personally paying the bill was enormously appealing. He moved to Brighton and then Spain, so seeing him continued to be an adventure. More importantly, he became a wise counsellor and, when I suffered acute bouts of insecurity, his reassurance was immensely comforting.
David Kershaw working at advertising agency M&C Saatchi
On to my own fathering. I married late, at 39, having enjoyed a somewhat debauched existence in the 1980s in London’s version of Mad Men. Fortunately, I was rescued by the love of my life: my wife Clare. That was good news for me, but the downside for her was that I had fossilised into a creature of selfish habit. A few years later, when she was eager to have children, this resulted in a contract being drawn up. The breeding programme would commence, but with three conditions. First, that I would never have to get up at night and change a nappy. (I should add that a sub-clause was that my wife gave up work.) Second, that she would never say “You can’t go to Arsenal because of the children” or “You can’t play golf because of the children.” As a woman of great honour, I can say that she abided by the contract 100 per cent. So now we have two children, Tom, 13, and Emma, 12, both of whom I adore. I hope and believe it’s mutual. The honest summary of my role is that I have replicated my own father’s as a bringer and sharer of treats, rather than a constant figure of responsibility. I am at work-related functions three nights a week and Arsenal and golf still absorb huge chunks of my leisure time. My son probably sees more of me than my daughter as I have brainwashed him, but not her, into sharing my obsessions. As with my own father, my relationship with my children has food at its centre. We always eat together as a family, either at home or out over the weekend, and the most intensive times of my relationship with them is when we go on holidays. So the honest truth is that, like my father, I am associated with all the nice things and my wife has all the pain of daily management and arbitration of intense sibling rivalry. While I am a very happy father, I’m certainly no role model. Perhaps Tom will be the Kershaw father who breaks the mould.Ian Hargreaves, 59Professor of journalism
Ian Hargreaves's father on holiday
My dad was a father of his time, as I am of mine. He was married in uniform, followed by seven unbroken years in the Middle East. When he returned from war, my mother didn’t recognise him at the station. She had baked a pie; it was left uneaten. She bore three sons in four years. To support us, Dad reoccupied the tall clerk’s stool at Massey’s Burnley Brewery, occupied in his wartime absence by my mother. He stayed with the same firm all his life. When I was six my mother, frustrated by domesticity, took over a small millworkers’ café and tripe shop. It made enough money to buy our first family car, before the fearsome head teacher of my primary school, Mr J K Helliwell, summoned her and said: “you are neglecting your boys. This must stop.” And it did. I never knew much of what my father did. He came home every evening, but wasn’t highly visible. I knew that he wanted me to do well at football and school, so I did. On the tennis court once a year he would ace me and my brothers on every service point. I suspect he partly disliked his role as sole provider. He was proud of us but wary, too. Goodness knows what he would have made of the fact that I, his youngest son, came briefly to be feted as a “New Model Dad” in the pages of the Guardian and the Daily Mail. That was in 1998, five years after I had divorced and remarried. By then my father was dead from Alzheimer’s. My son and daughter from my first marriage lived in Brighton with their mother and I tried very hard to pass muster as a father-in-exile. Adele, my new wife, was keen to start a family. Our first daughter arrived in 1997, when Adele was dreaming up a new social enterprise. The following year, when our second was born, she launched it. Engulfed by this avalanche of female energy I resigned as editor of the New Statesman for a post at Cardiff University and freelance work. “At last, a man who really is quitting to spend more time with his family,” said the Guardian. The Mail’s photographer captured us, aglow, on a windy beach in west Wales. The Guardian offered me a column writing about family; I made my excuses and left for a nomadic five years on the London-South Wales corridor, mixing babies, lectures, deadlines and grand designs. After another spell in London, we now live with our daughters just outside Cardiff. We both work part time, me at the university, my wife as chief executive of her latest social enterprise. We have childcare one night a week and, for the rest, we do it ourselves. The logistics are complex. Sometimes it takes a full half day to talk through the coming fortnight’s diaries. Parenting is, needless to say, a harder job than any I’ve done for money. My children’s mothering, I’d say, is sound. What about the fathering? Well, I’m writing this from a hotel room in Boston, where I’m doing some work for the British government. I am a fractal father: on call but not on the spot. I’m home roughly four nights a week, supplying routine in manageable doses, plus the odd moment of inspiration and useful male dullness at moments of drama, such as the day the dog ate the guinea pigs. An exceptional inspiration was the seven-week road trip we took last summer from St Petersburg to Barcelona. My Dad didn’t do abroad. Not after the Desert Rats. He drove us to Devon, which seemed to take about 18 hours, and when my Mum declared: “enough blue sky to make a pair of sailor’s trousers,” he would croon: “Blueueue sky around the corner.” I always knew there were corners in his life I couldn’t see round; places I wasn’t invited. That gave me confidence to make my own way and has made me, as a parent, recognisably my father’s son—for all the differences in our circumstances. I’ve been struck by recent research into children’s attitudes. They say they want to mix work and play in employment and not stay in any job too long. These sceptical, multi-tasking, work-life balancers should make good parents: fractal fathers and, let’s hope, fractal mothers too.Ian with his family
Clive Stafford SmithDirector of Reprieve
Clive as a young boy with his family
Experiences of fatherhood begin with our own childhood, and I am a little sad when I think of my own. I wondered, when my son Wilf was only ten days old, whether I had already kissed him (poor smothered infant!) more times than my father ever kissed me in 49 years. Partly it was generational. All of it was a shame. My father said he could never beat me—that was what boarding school was for. When I first went away, I cried every night for a week, feeling abandoned. The notion of doing this to Wilf seems utterly foreign. And I would miss his company. My father’s surrogates at school did take a slipper to me quite frequently for such heinous offences as talking after lights out. He was much too soft-hearted for that himself, but he had some strange views on parenthood. He felt that I, a seven year old, should be ready to meet the world and one summer evening, gave me £200 suggesting that I started paying rent or leave home and get on with life. My mother took the money back and sent me to bed. It was a long time before I saw that the incident was the manic part of his bipolar disorder talking. My father’s frequently incomprehensible example made me question his own qualifications for fatherhood. Many years later I learned that my older brother had done the same. We were both fortunate not to inherit the illness. Today, the evolution of gender roles has wrought many changes, though imbalances remain: some women’s purported desire to “have it all” has left them having to “do it all,” working the second shift at home. I, too, want to have it all with Wilf, and thanks to my privileged working position, to a certain extent I have succeeded. But for most people, our labour system fails to support fatherhood in any meaningful way. Many commentators at least now refer to “work in the home,” yet we reject the logical consequence of this: a salary for the partner who performs that labour. (We fund the NHS for healthcare; teachers for education; why not parents for the most important job of all?) My father used to speak of enthusiasm, referring to its Greek root, “imbued with God.” Wilf, now two and a half, has that exhilaration, and it’s contagious: big stones go splosh; little stones go splish. I never knew (or had long forgotten) the excitement of the things that surround us. Tractors, helicopters, trains and automobiles, they are all so thrilling. It’s my ugly secret, but I like to show him off, as he loudly identifies every make of car outside the supermarket. A year ago, I would not have known a Toyota from a Mercedes, nor would I have cared. Now I feel ready for Mastermind. I observe the enthusiasm with which he encounters his environment. He listens to classical music (more than I do), and squeals with laughter at a particular sequence of notes. Recently, we sat listening to a dour movement of the Nutcracker; he insisted on repeating it, even though it made him cry. I wonder when I lost this ability to feel. I find myself resenting grown-ups, and conspiring with Wilf to resist their stifling conformities. A US government official wanted to talk today about some affair of state. I told him that we’d have to cut it short, as bathtime was at six. It does not work all the time, but I rejoice in Wilf’s priority. Wilf turns towards me and smiles as I come down to the living room. “My big lovely Daddy!” he squeals. I know his mother put him up to it, but my heart is so full that it is close to breaking.Clive at home in Dorset
