1001 Challenge; thoughtful. Second chances

This plaque - or rather its location - reminds me of the second chances we sometimes get in life.

The owner of my local bike shop was diagnosed with cancer around the same time as I was and we soon found something besides bikes to talk about. I saw him a few days ago for the first time in about a year and he greeted me thus; “you’re still here then”. I returned the compliment in a similar fashion.

Shared experience allows a bluntness that would be unacceptable or uncomfortable in other circumstances. We have both been given something quite precious - a second chance. But this is not my first.

This plaque hangs on the wall of a remembrance garden in the Open University campus. The garden, once the kitchen garden of the original manor house that the occupied the grounds long before the OU came calling, has been designed as a place of contemplation for staff and visitors and a memorial to those who have bequeathed donations to the university.

From its improbable beginnings almost 50 years ago, the OU has grown to become the largest university in the UK and spawned similar institutions on almost every continent. Its origins are as bizarre as they are unlikely.

In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, community colleges were set up in the USA to provide a local post-school education for those unable, for whatever reason, to go to university - in some specific cases “to provide a career track for women who wanted to teach”.

A little later, across the political and oceanic divide, Russian farmers were being taught tractor maintenance, through lectures delivered over vast distances by radio.

Closer to home, Harold Wilson (Labour prime minister in the 1960s), is credited with the aim of bringing higher education to large numbers of people in the lower-income groups, by taking the principles of community colleges, mixing in a bit of tractor-teaching technology and creating what was known, in those early days, as The University of the Air.

This was an audacious plan - and doomed to failure by many - because conventional wisdom said that a university-level education could not be provided by the use of television and radio - especially to those with little previous education. Iain Macleod MP (Conservative Chancellor in the 1970s), in an attempt to close the OU down, described it as ‘blithering nonsense’. But the vision prevailed and it became, for many, a second chance.

I left school with no qualifications and nothing to look forward to, except a life of untapped potential. There were lots of us - a whole generation of 11-plus failures - the kids who were promised new bikes if we passed the exam - but who didn’t manage to. The promised bikes were never bought and the British cycle industry went into decline. (I made that last bit up. But it’s an interesting thought.)

The Open University, so called because it is ‘open to people, places and ideas’, demanded no entry qualifications other than a commitment to learning and intelligence. It took us in and gave us that most precious of gifts - an education. With that came confidence and self belief; and the though that we need no longer sit in the shade.