| Notes |
- From FindaGrave:
Author and public speaker. Son of Julian and Elisabeth. Brother of Lucy, Duncan, and Roderick. Husband of Sara. Father of Jesse and AJ.
Great-Grandson of Sir Winston Churchill.
------
"Life is something that happens when your busy making other plans!"
"I am born" (David Copperfield)
1975, the year Saigon fell to Communism, Beirut was torn by Moslems and Christians, the Americans and Russians first met in space and, one of my heroines, Margaret Thatcher, a woman who really did earn the title, 'the greatest Prime Minister since Churchill', became the first woman leader of the Conservative Party. It was in this tumultuous year that I, Jonathan Martin Edwin Sandys, drew my first breath of life on 16th March at 22:30.
My birth had been less complicated than many although there were various challenges that were faced and overcome along the way, my mother, Elisabeth needed to be induced and I myself entered this world, like my older brother Duncan previously, and my younger brother Roderick, known as Bod, (who two years later would steel my glory as the youngest Sandys in our family), with my umbilical cord around my neck. These days it is still a fear of doctors that a child will exit his mother's womb in such a way.
After an eventful birth, one I would never remember myself but would be told about in later years, I was presented to my parents as what they described, 'a beautiful baby boy with blue eyes, fair hair and a cheeky little smile to compliment the occasion'.
16th March also held another special celebration, it had been thirty-two year previously that my own mother had entered the world, as a result, I had a special bond with my mother and although she treated each of us the same, offering no over special attention to any of us, our relationship was set to face the same tumultuous ride as the year of my birth but, it has to be said, the years that followed, hard though they were, brought us together very close and now stands us side-by-side with a good, strong bond of friendship that to this day remains unbroken or scathed with the events of my over-energetic youth, the tempestuous teenage years and what I call 'The Years of Maturity', my twenties.
"My Early Life…" (Winston S. Churchill)
With a somewhat stilted but encouraging beginning, I learnt and practiced the usual tricks of any one-to-five year old, I began to speak, my first word as many' being incomprehensible, could have been "Mamma" or "Dada", it was something along those lines but as neither my parents, nor I myself remember, I'll have to go with the boring obvious.
I began my life in a small village called Shackleford, on the outskirts of Godalming in Surrey. Charnwood was a lovely Victorian house built around 1890, the two and a half acres of grass and woodland spoilt my eyes and like with most children who are fortunate to grow-up in such surroundings, lead me to the complacent attitude that 'there I was and there I would remain forever' The idea of moving from Charnwood was unthinkable.
The house was set on three levels with nine bedrooms, two reception rooms, a playroom and a wonderfully spacious garden and swimming pool in which as children, we would spend many hours, in the summer searching for conkers and swimming with friends and family, in the winter rolling snowballs and tobogganing down the not so steep hill leading from what was the conservatory but later began the dining room, down to the first level of our garden and then onward down to the bamboos that unfortunately, in 1980, were burnt to the ground, my revenge on a nest of wasps that had attacked Lucy, (the eldest, my sister), Duncan, myself, Bod and a friend Kate Driscoll.
Charnwood in the winter was a sight to be seen, the snow covering the garden was a wonder but the beautiful spread of white covering the building itself ensured my love for this home and engrained an everlasting memory of the last snow I saw in Surrey in 2001.
One of Charnwood's most magnificent features and a real talking point for all who visited; was the leaning tree. The tree was not meant to lean, it had been planted as a normal fir tree in the early part of the 20th century but, over the years, with Britain's inclement weather conditions, it began to lean more and more as the years passed. So unique was this feature that when we came to selling the property in 2001, I made the prospective purchasers promise never to remove the tree, a promise I am pleased to say, they have kept to date.
Growing up in the peaceful surroundings of Shackleford was a wonderful treat, never had I experienced such beauty, although we lived on a main road and the A3 to London/Portsmouth was only a mile away, the noise was minimal. The neighbours, most pushing sixty, never really bothered us accept one, who constantly complained about Bonzo, our dog who was our animal companion until 1982 when sadly he was hit by a car outside our house and the vet had to put him down.
Bonzo, like me in those early years was a very over-energetic grey, black and white bearded collie who would never bite in anger, only in fun, the bites would never hurt but unfortunately today, with the paranoid, namby-pamby state of England now, he would have been put to sleep earlier than was necessary.
"School days are the best of your life…" Clearly spoken by someone who never actually went to school
For myself as for many, we can testify that are school days were less than perfect, in some cases, mine included, those eleven to fifteen years of forced education encompassed the saddest in our lives.
My education was both a disappointment to myself as well as my parents. Hampered with Dyslexia that was finally diagnosed at the late age of ten, I was moved from one school to another but not before I had the unfortunate chance to encounter some of (in my opinion), the worst teachers the UK has ever seen.
I started my school life as many from the age of five. Puttenham C of E First School was a wonderful and friendly environment which encourage children to learn not through pressure or unkindness but instead through love and nurture. My headmistress, Mrs Ford was a wonderful lady in her fifties, the hours I spent with her while she patiently taught me to read and write, sparked a flame within me that launched my educational experience.
Unfortunately, the happiness of those two years at Puttenham were to be overshadowed when at seven, now too old for Puttenham, I was enrolled into Edgebrough School in Frensham.
Edgebrough, unlike Puttenham was run by a headmaster who without a doubt enjoyed education and pupils less than he enjoyed punishment and discipline. The unkind, savage way that he beat boys wielding a large oval shaped bat, instilled fear into me and did little to educate. My parents took me away from the school when they discovered that my desk had been located far at the back of the class and I spent most of my year and a half rejected and ejected from the class, unable to learn, watching teachers teach from the corridor outside my form room. I was not in any way a star pupil but I had never done anything to deserve the cruelty inflicted upon me.
So, it was from Edgebrough to Amesbury School. Now nine years old, I was to spend two equally unpleasant years in the company of not just headmaster but also many teachers who were uninterested in helping me learn and more interested in leaving me to rot. My parents evening was a wonder to behold, after my teachers had got through telling my parents how useless I was, they left that evening feeling desperate and uncertain of my future. At the sports day near the end of the term, it took one brave and honest teacher, Mr. Rudge, (French), who sought out my parents to correct a misconception. On approach, my parents expected the same tirade of abuse but were very pleasantly surprised and relieved when Mr Rudge's first words were not, "He's a pain who will never learn or amount to anything…" but in fact were; "Jonathan is a very bright young man who needs help and understanding. Please don't believe what the other teachers have been telling you." What stunned my parents even more was the fact that I had only achieved 1% in my recent French exam. My parents, out of interest, asked how I had achieved that. Mr Rudge chuckled and told them that I had got "Bonjour" correct. I had spelt it wrong but I had got it right. He was not prepared to give me nothing; instead he wanted to focus on the positive. Unlike the others, he had looked for one good thing in me and he found it. I'm still rubbish at French but Mr Rudge never complained and was determined that if nothing else, I would receive only encouragement from him.
So it was with that and two years of wins at the school swimming competition, that I left Amesbury, bound for Edington, a school in Bridgwater, Somerset which catered specifically for Dyslexic children.
Another disaster on the scale of my life, Edington held nothing more for me than the experience of bullies in the form of both pupils and staff. My house master and English teacher were the worse kind of cads, both unfortunately still in education, one wrote a book and is deputy of a college, the other is a headmaster of a school in Wales.
After two and a half years, (now thirteen years old), I decided to renter the mainstream education and take my Common Entrance (13+). I saw my Dyslexia as a debilitation not to my progress but instead to my character. On telling my house master and English teacher of my intention to leave Edington and take this exam, there reaction was to laugh, tell me that I would never make it and then they decided to exclude me from their lessons, instead of me participating in the projects of the group, I was given an old Common Entrance paper in Geography that, without proper coaching, I was expected to complete. I feel it says a lot about someone's inability to teach when the subject that they specialise in and teach, is one that a pupil (myself) is unable to answer even one question correctly in a paper that relates to a variety of topics on the given subject.
Relieved and satisfied, I embarked on a new and this time, finally happy year of my life when in 1988, I joined Millbrook House School. It had taken me eight years to find a school similar to Puttenham, one that cared to teach not requiring to be taught to care. Both staff and pupils were wonderful, the headmaster Hugh Glazebrook, a clean-shaven, larger than life character in his sixties, was the ultimate welcoming force that drove my inspiration to succeed. In that year I was never put down, my teachers pulled me up to the educational standard required to take and successfully pass (inspite of the negative endorsements from Edington), my Common Entrance exam to Shiplake College.
Before I move on, I would like to encourage any parent who would like their child to benefit from what I consider to be the best that education has to offer, to seek out Simon Glazebrook, (Hugh Glazebrook's son) who now, successfully and with the same principles as his father, runs Millbrook House in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
Shiplake College, Henley-on-Thames, the school that I attended for less than two months and who denies I ever attended at all. What a disaster, from day one I was unhappy. Having just left the caring, encouraging environment of Millbrook House, I entered a school that embodied many of the qualities of Edgebrough, Amesbury and Edington combined. I feel the less said about the weak willed headmaster but not his staff, the better. Suffice to say, Shiplake was a disaster and I wouldn't recommend anyone send their child within 100 miles of it.
On leaving Shiplake mid-term, I entered Brickwall House School, Northiam, ("Enter all ye who have abandoned all hope"). This school without a doubt was the worst that I have ever seen. The pupils were maniacs with serious mental problems, the majority of whom had an overwhelming propensity to violence. The staff were unable to control the louts of which there were many and in a desperate attempt to fit into a culture I had until now, never know could have existed in a civilised society, I tried to follow the crowd. Here I began to smoke heavily, I experienced drugs for the first time, I didn't work as I felt less than motivated and my nights were spent in fear of being beaten up by the dorm bullies. At the conclusion of my two year sentence, I left Brickwall House, (now Frewen College), a yob with no manners, a foul mouth, a smoker and someone who would without a doubt, end up in prison if not on a murder charge, something equally bad. Fortunately, returning to Surrey and beginning college in the September of 1992, began a change in me that returned me to the decent Youngman I had been brought up to be.
The College Years (like school but without the structure)
At Guildford Technical
College I decided to take a course in Hotel and Tourism although, much to my disappointment, the content was not what I had expected. My naive view of the world led me to believe that Hotel and Tourism meant Basil Fawlty and Fawlty Towers. This wonderful imagination and expectation was quickly scuppered when the opening words of my tutor confirmed the belief was incorrect.
I stayed with the course until April of the following year when I had suffered enough boredom and also bullying by fellow pupils and decided to launch myself headlong into the working world. This also was an experience I had neither anticipated correctly or was indeed ready for.
Welcome to the world of work "Hang on! I didn't sign-up to this…"
The working world had the perks of money but unfortunately I soon realised that for the coins I would earn, work would be required to a higher level and expectation than that of school or college. I adjusted to this but never settled into any career. I was young and wanted to experience life and all its riches. I flitted around from job to job and it wasn't until last year that I really settled down and became a profiler for Library of Life. The contact with people, a boss that not only encourages but wants my ideas and listens to them, managing my own time and exceeding expectations, has finally brought the maturity needed through encouragement and care, to what was a brash young man with no direction, feeling his way through life in the dark with no flashlight. I now work fulltime for myself, I run two businesses, Jjo PRINTS, (www.jjoprints.com), a company that takes slides, negatives and photos and transfers them to CD-ROM. The cost in the shops is astronimical, I charge £0.50 per item and I restore them for free. The other business I run is Churchill's Britain, (www.churchillsbritain.com), dedicated to the memory of my great-grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill. I dearly love both businesses, the latter is taking time to build up as the USA seems more interested to hear about the amazing life of Churchill, than the UK. As for Jjo PRINTS, our client base is slowly building, we are still a new business but going great guns, and I'm really excited about the progress.
Life has changed dramatically, but it's still great fun. I'm hanging in there and living life to the full. You should too!
So, what's next? "Crystal ball at the ready – oh yes, I see…"
I have recently finished my first book about my great-grandfather during the Anglo-Boer War (1899 - 1902). I'm hoping the book will get published in both America and the UK under the title: The Adventures of Winston - Escape From South Africa. I am now busy working on the second book, The Adventures of Winston - The March of The Lighthorse, I'm aiming to have that one ready for publication by March 2007. The first and second chapters are now complete, I'm working on the third, my illustrator is working around the clock on the first book, her work is really great and fun, she's going to end up run off her feet with the second, because I want to double-up on the pictures. Children love colourful and exciting pictures, Rachel has a great talent.
"One day the curtain will come down, when it does, who will remember? Will you?"
Dedication (tears in eyes, clasping my trophy and calling to all my fans…)
To all who have touched my life, to my family, friends and teachers who cared for me and believed in me, I dedicate this profile to you.
Source: http://jonathan-sandys.celebration-of.com/
|
1975 - 2018 (43 years)
