Latest / Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson / Fear, Tribe & Escape Rooms: A Life of Risk and Resilience with Paul Illingworth | Ep 35 Live Free Ride Free

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Fear, Tribe & Escape Rooms: A Life of Risk and Resilience with Paul Illingworth | Ep 35 Live Free Ride Free · Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson

0:00
Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
0:01
Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
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The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
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0:34
So now let's jump in.
0:36
Welcome back to Live Free, ride Free.
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I've got a very, very dear friend, old friend Paul Illingworth here.
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Paul is someone I've known for quite a while and who has done many, many,
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many interesting things in his life.
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And one of the reasons I asked him to come on was he really started from a place that
1:01
I wouldn't say disadvantaged.
1:02
I wouldn't say advantaged, but I'd say without an, an awful lot of
1:06
support and made his way in the world.
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And has actually helped quite a few people along the way as well, and has
1:14
been a great supporter of our work with Horse Boy Foundation and the work we've
1:19
done with autism and that sort of thing.
1:21
Big guy, big Heart big story.
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What I'd quite like to frame this story against though is, is we, I
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think we all know that we're dealing with a bit of an epidemic at the
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moment of lost young men, lost boys.
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And this is something that's kind of crept up on us over the last
1:41
10 15, but it's become more acute since COVID.
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And in the work that I do, I get a lot of moms who have say three kids daughters
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doing great you know, one at one married and off in the career, one at college and
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getting her masters and a son age 21 to 25 who can't come out of the basement.
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And this never used to be the case.
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And it occurred to me, you know, while we were doing this podcast, you know,
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why is this, and friends of mine that I've known who could have been lost boys.
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But who went out into world to find themselves?
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Can we examine this question a little bit?
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How do you, how do you find your way to this kind of self-actualization?
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It's a, it's a pressing question at the moment.
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So Paul, thanks for coming on the show.
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Can you tell the listeners and viewers a little bit about who
2:34
you are and what you do currently?
2:36
And then we'll start with how you got there.
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Paul Illingworth: Sure, yeah.
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Well, my name is Paul Linworth.
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I currently live in Texas.
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I've been over here for 27 years now.
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I moved over here back in 1998 when I was working in the oil and gas business.
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I'm now actually retired and I moved from Aberdeen.
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To Houston in 1998 to start a business there for a very good friend of mine who
3:02
company was actually based in Singapore.
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So I came over here.
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I was supposed to, to initially come to Texas for three months to get the
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business started, then go back to Aberdeen and carry on what I was doing
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over there and things kind of snowballed.
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I was very, very lucky and that having made the decision that I did wanna
3:20
move to Texas, that I managed to to get myself a green card pre nine 11,
3:25
which is which happened very quickly, and now it takes about 10 years.
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Wow.
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Yeah, it's it's taken at least 10 years to get a green card.
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And then I lived in Houston for 14 years and then moved out to the country.
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I live about 30, 40 miles north northeast of Austin, out in the countryside.
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I've got a 20 acre ranch here.
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I continued.
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Houston for a while after we did move out of the Houston area
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because I was still working there.
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And then I finally retired from the oil and gas business in 2019.
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Ran my own business in Austin until about a couple of months
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ago when we sold the business.
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So no, I am officially retired.
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Rupert Isaacson: So you, you make yourself sound like a bloke who sort of just
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kind of climbed the corporate ladder.
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It's anything but the case.
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And just so that listeners get a bit of an idea, while I've known Paul 'cause
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we, I used to live in Austin as well.
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I've known him running a skydiving business, which is keeping people alive
4:29
while you chuck 'em out of airplanes.
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Not easy.
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Yeah.
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And I've also known you run a series of escape rooms as well, even when
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you didn't have to, even when you'd retired from the oil and gas business.
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Because one of the things about Paul, ladies and gentlemen, he gets bored
4:43
very fast and he can't, you know, he can't, he can't abide not having
4:48
something to do and he tends to be very successful at, at what he does.
4:52
Before we start with how you got.
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Up through the non-corporate ranks of, of, of your, of your career.
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Why do you think it is, Paul, that when you pick up a business, you make it work?
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I've only ever seen you make them work, and I've often watched you kind of a bit
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awestruck and go, what, what's he got?
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What is this Midas touch that Paul's got?
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What, what, what do you put it down to?
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Paul Illingworth: I don't, I don't actually think I do have a
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Midas touch at all because I've.
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Over the, over the years I've been involved in four, maybe
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five different businesses.
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The skydiving business was very, very much an opportunistic thing whereby my
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wife Jen and myself were sky divers.
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I started jumping when I was in the military originally, but we
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got into, into sports skydiving in the early two thousands in Texas.
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The weather's a lot better over here, so obviously it's, it's a lot easier to
5:47
skydive than it was living in Scotland.
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And an opportunity came up to buy a drop zone that was very poorly
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managed, not particularly well run.
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And the guy that, the guy and the girl that owned it were ready to
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leave and go do something else.
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So, we could, we, the, the wife and I could just simply see the
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potential there that we could really turn it into something special.
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And we did.
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We invested a bit more money in.
6:17
We bought another couple of airplanes.
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We both got ourselves certified as part Love.
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How?
6:21
Oh, and we
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Rupert Isaacson: bought another couple of airplanes.
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Paul Illingworth: Yeah, well, just as you do, just like, like,
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Rupert Isaacson: you know, I'm actually nipping out to get one now, Paul.
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Do you want me to Yeah, right.
6:28
Yeah.
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Put up for you as well.
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Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
6:29
We're not, you know, we're not talking about Cessna citations or,
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you know, billion dollar airplanes, skydiving airplanes tend to be at
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the bottom end of the barrel as far as airplanes are concerned.
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So it wasn't really terribly difficult and we didn't have
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to put a lot of money in it.
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But, so to start off with, we just started very, very small and we built
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things up slowly and, and, you know, over the 13 years we owned the business, we
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turned it into a very, very successful business with a lot of hard work.
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I mean, it was hard, Rupert, I remember, I remember it stressing you.
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Yeah, I was working, I was working as the CEO of an oil and gas service
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company, spending about 200 days a year.
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Traveling overseas, working in business development, and we were
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also running the skydiving business that was open seven days a week.
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I would come, we would travel out to the skydiving business at the weekends.
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We had a manager out there that ran it during the week, and we'd be,
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my wife was a skydiving instructor.
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And I would be flying the airplanes.
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You know, we work seven days a week.
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That's all there is to it.
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Yeah.
7:29
You know, and then.
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After.
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It's just putting in the hours.
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It's just putting the hours in.
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It's as simple as that.
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I mean, I'll be quite honest with you, I didn't get where I was in this position in
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the world today by sitting around reading a newspaper and watching television.
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You know, you've got, you've gotta be prepared to work hard
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and that's all there is to it.
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But it's finding the thing to do.
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And as, as you mentioned, you know, the escape room business as well, that
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Jen and I love doing escape rooms.
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And it's the same thing.
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We love skydiving.
7:58
We bought skydiving business, we love escape rooms.
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And escape room business came up for sale that was 30 minutes drive
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from our house here in Austin.
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We went and had a look at it, looked at the books, thought I
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think we can make something outta this and actually do better.
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And that's what we did.
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But you know, it's almost like, you know, they say.
8:18
What, what?
8:18
What's the best thing about owning a boat?
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Well, the best thing about owning a boat is when you sell it, and
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it's a bit like owning a business.
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You've gotta have an exit strategy if you own a business.
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We had an exit strategy for the skydiving business.
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We had an exit strategy for the escape prune business.
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What, what those strategies?
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Well, it was basically just simply get to a certain point in terms of
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income and, and own the business.
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For so many years, the skydiving business was supposed to be 10 years.
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X number of dollars of, of profit.
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We ended up owning the business for 13 years.
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It just took a little bit longer to sell it than we expected.
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The Escape Room business, we had a five year plan.
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We hit all the targets on the escape room business despite the fact that we bought
9:00
it a year before COVID, where we bought it six months before COVID actually happened.
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But very quickly we recovered after COVID expanded the business as well.
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Took a punt that things would come back strong, and they did.
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We had a five year plan.
9:13
We sold the business.
9:16
If you look at COVID and when COVID sort of started to ease off a little
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bit, we sold the business five years from then, three months ago.
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Okay.
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So, you know, I, I've been lucky, Rupert.
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It's not just, it's not, but you've gotta be prepared to work hard.
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You've gotta seize an opportunity when you see it.
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And never be afraid.
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Never be afraid to go and do something.
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That's really what it comes down to.
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Rupert Isaacson: Well, let, let's talk about never be afraid.
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So again, for listeners you will have read the show notes so you actually
9:47
know the sort of slightly more swashbuckling story that, that, that
9:52
than Paul is giving away right now.
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But we're gonna go back and we're gonna swash and buckle a bit.
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You know, Paul, I also know you as an aviator.
10:00
I also know you as Ex Special Forces.
10:02
I also know you as Ex Merchant Navy, and I know you, you know, and all of
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these tough envi environments to come up through Rugby League, in which there's a
10:15
ton of fear and okay, you're a big guy.
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You know, whenever I'm referring to Paul to friends, I automatically
10:23
say, big Paul, you're a big guy.
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But that's being big's.
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Not, you know how it is.
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It's not the dog in the fight, it's the fight and the dog.
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You've had to face an awful lot of fear in your life.
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So let's start back now.
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Let's start with you as a boy.
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Where are you born?
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How'd you grow up?
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And then how do you end up going from there to the military?
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And then let's take it from there.
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Paul Illingworth: Okay.
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I was actually born in Australia but at a very, very early age
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my parents moved back to London.
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So let's talk about my father for a start.
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My father joined the Scots guards in 1936 when he was 16 years old.
11:03
So well before can tell us us what the
11:04
Rupert Isaacson: Scots guards are, because not every listener's gonna know.
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Paul Illingworth: Okay.
11:07
They, they, they.
11:09
So there are, there are, I think there's five or six guards regiments in the uk.
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They're basically the guys that wear the red tunics and have the big
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hats, the big black hats, and they do the guard at Buckingham Palace.
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So those are what the guards do,
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Rupert Isaacson: but they're also crack troops.
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When it comes combat.
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They're
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Paul Illingworth: very, very much crack, crack troops.
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They're always at the front of, of pretty much any battle.
11:31
My dad joined in 1936 but he actually started work at
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10 years old down the mines.
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He was a Yorkshire born lad in Castleford in Yorkshire,
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which is in northern England.
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And at 10 years old, he was working down the coal mines,
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Rupert Isaacson: which is amazing.
11:46
And I'm thinking about my son Ian, who you know, little man.
11:49
He's 10 now.
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Paul Illingworth: And
11:51
Rupert Isaacson: he was just on the field helping me pull rag what?
11:54
And I'm feeling a bit guilty about, you know, asking him to, you know, help me.
11:58
And now you say 10, your dad was down the mines in York back then.
12:02
Wow.
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He was, he was
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Paul Illingworth: working, yeah, he was working down the mines, which
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was a hard thing to do because his father was actually killed when he
12:08
was three years old in a mine crash.
12:10
Okay.
12:11
So he was raised by his aunt his mother.
12:15
I think my grandmother on my father's side died when he was a very, very early age.
12:19
I'm not really too sure, but he was basically brought
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up on his own by my aunt.
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He joined the Scots guards in 1936.
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I said before the second World War started.
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I don't really know why, other than the fact that he wanted to get out the mines.
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And the earliest you could join the Army, army was six.
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Why not a
12:36
Rupert Isaacson: Yorkshire line regimen?
12:37
Yeah.
12:37
Why, why the s Scott scars.
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He's not, wasn't Scottish.
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And you know,
12:41
Paul Illingworth: that.
12:42
That I honestly don't know, Rupert.
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I mean, I really don't.
12:44
Yeah, I think he, he probably just headed down to London at 16 with
12:48
the idea of doing something and, and the Scots guards took him on.
12:53
I And you have
12:54
Rupert Isaacson: to be tall Right?
12:54
To go in the guard.
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So he was probably a tall, you gotta
12:56
Paul Illingworth: be, you gotta be at least six foot.
12:58
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
12:58
Yeah.
12:59
Paul Illingworth: I think they've dropped that requirement now.
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But in those days you had to be six foot and my dad was six two.
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Pretty much the same as I was.
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Yeah, so he was a pretty big guy as, as well.
13:08
And you know, he was, he was in the Scots guards, he went to North
13:12
Africa with the eight farming.
13:15
During the war is where my grandfather was
13:17
Rupert Isaacson: too.
13:18
Was he?
13:18
Yeah.
13:19
Paul Illingworth: So he was, he was part of the eighth Army and, and then
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he ended up being recruited into the Lrd gs, which is a long range desert group.
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And those, those guys were the four, the forerunners to the formation of the SAS.
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So the lard, dgs, long Range Desert Group, they basically used to go and
13:37
scout things out in North Africa, which is where they were formed.
13:41
And then the SAS were formed in North Africa.
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I think it was in 1942.
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I can't remember exactly what the date was.
13:48
So he was a career soldier pretty much.
13:50
He stayed in the Scots guards, until, I think it was 1948 or 1950, he got
13:56
injured pretty badly at Monte Casino during the Second World War when they
14:00
were fighting coming up through Italy.
14:03
And he took some time off then and he went back in again.
14:05
But eventually he was medically discharged because he took some
14:08
shrapnel in his back and never really recovered properly from it.
14:13
But very, very much an army man.
14:15
That's, that, you know, that's what he was.
14:18
My mother also lied about her age during the Second World War and ended
14:21
up being what they call an AKA girl.
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So in London, she was firing the, the guns at the German aircraft that
14:29
were coming over a bomb in London.
14:31
And they met in London somewhere around about 1950.
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I'm not too sure exactly when it was, but that's when my parents got together
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Rupert Isaacson: and okay.
14:42
So.
14:44
How did they end up going to Australia?
14:45
How did they end up having you and then you come back?
14:48
My
14:48
Paul Illingworth: dad.
14:48
Okay.
14:49
My dad got into the building business with my uncle, who was my mother's brother.
14:56
They got into rebuilding London.
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That's really what it came down to.
15:00
And they, they had a pretty successful building business
15:02
in London in the early fifties.
15:05
And there was an opportunity because on my mother's side, there was my mother's side
15:09
of the family had Australian connections.
15:11
'cause my grandfather went down to Australia.
15:14
He was a policeman.
15:15
He went down to Australia back in the the, the twenties, I think it
15:19
was the twenties and the thirties.
15:20
So there was family connections down there.
15:23
And they decided to go to Australia to, to, because there was a lot of building
15:27
going on, on the west coast in Perth.
15:30
Mm-hmm.
15:30
So they went down, they went down there.
15:31
And that's how I ended up being born down there, basically.
15:34
But there was a lot going on in London and my dad felt that he really had to get
15:38
back to London, you know, which was where the, the, the main thrust of business was.
15:42
So that's why we moved back there when I was three months old.
15:46
Rupert Isaacson: Alright, so you are then born and brought up in London
15:50
Paul Illingworth: pretty much?
15:51
Yep.
15:51
You can, you can say that we lived in Bayswater.
15:54
The earliest recollections I have of like three, four years old was
15:58
living in a, a townhouse in Bayswater.
16:02
And we pretty much stayed there until my dad had had his first back
16:07
problem which was what caused him to end up selling, having to sell
16:11
his business, et cetera, et cetera.
16:13
And that kind of like almost leads to the story of how we ended up
16:18
living in a council house on social security with no money because
16:24
he ended up losing the business.
16:26
You know, I think people took advantage of him, or should I say, he was a bit
16:30
too generous with the way that he was doing things and he went from having
16:33
a very successful building business to nothing in a fairly short period of time.
16:39
Rupert Isaacson: And being somewhat of an invalid from the Walgreens.
16:41
Yes.
16:42
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
16:42
As well.
16:43
He ended up, he had a a spinal fusion.
16:47
I think the first one was in 1962 when I was six years old.
16:51
And he was laid up in bed for three, four months with that.
16:54
And he never really fully recovered.
16:56
The spinal fusions, even nowadays, are dodgy things back in the sixties.
16:59
It was just, it was horrendous, the stuff that they were doing.
17:03
And he never really recovered and he never really w work was able to work again.
17:07
He had a second spinal fusion a couple of years later because the first one
17:11
didn't take, and that was even worse.
17:13
And it just got to the point where he couldn't do anything.
17:15
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
17:16
So he went from being kind of a swashbuckling pirate, semi prior war
17:20
hero to a successful entrepreneur to losing it and being an invalid
17:27
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
17:27
Rupert Isaacson: With a young family.
17:28
So it must have been that pretty much a big knock to his self-esteem.
17:32
I would've thought
17:33
Paul Illingworth: it, it was, and it, and.
17:35
He was never the easiest of people to get on with.
17:38
But obviously because he was in a lot of pain he became very,
17:42
very difficult to live with.
17:44
Bitter perhaps, you know, to, to the point where, you know, my,
17:47
I had a I have a younger sister who's four years younger than me.
17:51
And, and you know, we pretty much both realized as we were growing up that the
17:55
best thing to do was get out the house and spend as much time out the house as
17:58
possible, which is literally what we did.
18:01
You know, just as my dad did at 10 years old, I got myself a
18:04
paper round and started working.
18:06
So at 10 years old I was doing, getting up at five o'clock in the morning.
18:09
Where was that?
18:10
Which part of was that was in?
18:12
I was in, that was in, we moved out to the country to Hartfordshire so about
18:17
30 miles north of, of central London.
18:20
Mm.
18:20
And we moved into a council house out there.
18:23
So I was delivering newspapers on a, on a house estate in a place called Hoon.
18:28
I know Hoist.
18:28
Yeah.
18:28
Which is in Har Har, you know, Hoon?
18:31
Yeah, yeah.
18:31
Near hitching.
18:31
Yeah.
18:31
Yeah, that's it.
18:32
Yeah.
18:32
Yeah.
18:33
And I, you know, I, I helped with a milk round at the weekends, but,
18:37
but seven days a week, no matter what the weather was doing, I was up
18:40
delivering newspapers and, you know, my mom and dad didn't have any money.
18:44
You know, so in order to, if you wanted anything, I mean, I can remember I bought
18:48
my first pair of Levi's Levi Jeans myself.
18:50
'cause my mom and dad couldn't afford anything.
18:52
We were living off social security.
18:54
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
18:55
Paul Illingworth: And that was all done through paper round money.
18:57
Rupert Isaacson: So you become, you know, yeah.
18:59
That boy who's out there making a bit of money pre-adolescence,
19:05
take us now into your adolescence.
19:06
Where does it go from there?
19:08
Paul Illingworth: Hmm.
19:10
Well.
19:11
I did pretty well at school.
19:13
God knows why.
19:14
I actually do have a, a, a relatively high iq.
19:17
Not that anybody realize that at the time you did.
19:19
Well, I really, yeah, I, I struggled with reading Rupert and I, I guess
19:25
that now I would be, what you would call dis I was dyslexic basically.
19:29
Right.
19:30
I was very, very But you still got through
19:31
Rupert Isaacson: the school system though.
19:32
Paul Illingworth: Yeah, I was, it was a bit of a struggle.
19:34
I was very, very good at math, but I couldn't read and
19:37
writing was a struggle for me.
19:39
Right.
19:39
And, and at the age of 11, when when you had to do what was called the
19:45
11 plus, 11 plus, that's it, the 11 plus, I had to do the 11 plus.
19:50
And I managed to pass the 11 plus barely, which gave me access to
19:54
go into local grammar school.
19:56
Okay.
19:56
But my parents couldn't afford the school uniform.
19:59
And there was a secondary modern school only about half
20:03
a mile from where we lived.
20:05
So I went to the secondary model school, secondary model school.
20:09
But I did manage to pass the 11 plus.
20:11
And then, but the first couple of years at school, I really struggled with English.
20:15
And, and you know, even then, I think moving forward a little bit, when
20:19
I, when I came to join the Navy, one of the qualifications I needed to
20:23
become an officer in the Navy was I had to have an English O level.
20:26
I failed it three times.
20:28
I had math, A level physics, a level technical drawing,
20:33
chemistry, and one other.
20:36
I had four A levels, but I couldn't pass English O level.
20:39
That's how bad I was.
20:40
I mean, really.
20:41
So, you know, I managed to take it and, and get it eventually and that
20:44
then allowed me to, to join the Navy.
20:47
But I was gonna go in the forces.
20:49
It was either that or go to university.
20:51
But again, gonna university in those days without any money
20:54
was very, very difficult.
20:56
I actually wanted to be an architect because of my dad's connection
21:00
with the building business.
21:01
He, even though he was invalid, he did teach me a lot of stuff growing up.
21:06
I, I got a lot of skills that he taught me.
21:09
You know, I mean, he taught me how to lay bricks.
21:11
He taught me how to sew the pipe, how to do electric work which you're messing
21:15
around as a kid with two 20 volts isn't a lot of fun if you get it wrong.
21:19
Yeah.
21:19
But he, he gave me all of the basic skills that I think I
21:23
built on as I got older myself.
21:26
Right.
21:26
But, you know, I left school when I was, when I was 16.
21:31
I could have stayed on, but I had the qualifications that I needed to join
21:35
the Navy as a, as a cadet officer.
21:37
My dad wanted me to go in the Army, as you can imagine.
21:40
He did not want me to go in the, in the Navy.
21:43
My first choice was the Air Force, but I would've had to have gone to college
21:48
to become a flight officer because they didn't take you straight from school.
21:51
So the Navy was the best way for me to go into the armed forces as an officer
21:56
without having to go to university and spend a whole hell of a lot of money.
21:59
That's why I ended up joining the Navy.
22:01
Rupert Isaacson: There's, let's, just before we get to the Navy
22:03
you spent a little bit of time playing professional rugby as well.
22:07
Mm-hmm.
22:08
And not rugby union, but rugby league.
22:09
And I think it, people need to know what the difference is.
22:11
Yeah.
22:11
Paul Illingworth: So
22:12
Rupert Isaacson: what, how did that happen and then how did that play into forces?
22:15
Paul Illingworth: Alright.
22:16
So my dad growing up in Yorkshire.
22:21
As a yorkshireman played rugby league.
22:23
There's a big divide between, well, there was in those days, not so much now, but,
22:27
but Rugby Union was played down south in the uk, which was a non-professional
22:33
sport that was just simply played for fun Guys played it at the weekend.
22:37
They didn't get paid.
22:37
Rugby league was a professional sport, just like soccer was in the uk.
22:42
Then where you actually got paid to play.
22:46
Rugby league was only played in the north of England.
22:49
My dad played rugby league when he was a kid growing up.
22:52
And also when he was a teen and, and I think even a, not after
22:57
the war, but before the war.
22:58
He played rugby league and he played for, for Castleford, which
23:01
was the the town he grew up in.
23:04
So I kind of grew up with a rugby ball.
23:07
In, in my hands all the time.
23:09
I always had a rugby ball, never played, really played soccer.
23:13
So when I went into secondary school, they didn't play rugby
23:17
because it was a secondary school.
23:19
Only the grammar schools played rugby.
23:21
The secondary schools played soccer.
23:24
I was very lucky because at 11 years old, when I went into secondary school, which
23:29
is like the American high school we got a new gym teacher, stroke coach who was
23:35
a welshman that was very much into rugby.
23:39
I had a desire to play rugby and the school I went to, it wasn't
23:45
the best of school, shall we say.
23:48
There was a very, very high proportion of Italian immigrants
23:51
lived in the area that I lived in.
23:53
And those guys, although they were all soccer mad, they also liked to fight.
23:59
So rugby being a lot more physical game than soccer, they saw it as an
24:03
opportunity to go on the pitch third ball around and fight with different people.
24:07
And isn't that that, what It's pretty much, yeah.
24:11
I I even today it's, it's pretty much the same thing.
24:13
Yeah.
24:14
So I ended up with the gym teacher, if you like it, 11, 12 years old.
24:19
Starting a rugby team at the school, we didn't have any, we didn't have
24:22
any h posts or anything like that, so we had to play on the soccer pitch.
24:26
And we managed to get a group of guys together that were
24:28
interested in playing rugby.
24:30
So with what I knew about rugby and obviously what the, our Welsh gym teacher
24:35
knew who played Rugby Foot virtually all of his life, we managed to get things
24:39
together and get a rugby team going.
24:41
The first game that we played the very first season we lost 50 N nil.
24:46
We got absolutely hammered, but there was a lot of fighting,
24:49
which my guys really, really.
24:52
And then things sort of moved on from there.
24:54
And as, as the years passed, we got better and better and better.
24:58
It was always the same guys just moving from one year up to the next.
25:02
I was captain of the rugby team pretty well from, from day one because I was
25:06
the only person I actually knew anything about the game to start off with.
25:10
And the last year that I was at school, we actually did very, very well.
25:13
We we won the county cup.
25:16
I got capped for for Hartfordshire for Southeast England and I
25:20
actually got a junior cap to and played for England as well.
25:23
So as a result of that, I was scouted, if you like, to go and play rugby league.
25:30
Rupert Isaacson: What position did you play?
25:31
Number
25:31
Paul Illingworth: eight.
25:32
So number eight.
25:33
Number eight is the guy that's at the very back of the pack.
25:36
So the, you've got your forwards and which are in a pack.
25:40
And I was at the very back, so I played number eight.
25:43
Now in rugby, rugby union there's 15 players.
25:46
Rugby league, there's only 13 because they have two less people in the pack.
25:49
And the position I played in Rugby Union number eight was called
25:54
lock, lock Forward in Rugby League.
25:57
So I ended up getting scouted and was offered an opportunity to go
26:03
and play for Featherston Rovers.
26:05
And as a result of that, I went to Featherston.
26:08
And how old were you at this point?
26:10
I was 15.
26:11
Wow.
26:12
So it would've been, it would've been an opportunity to play for
26:16
the, what they call the Cols team.
26:19
And basically, you know, you learn to play rugby league.
26:22
It, it, it's.
26:24
It's rugby, but it's a different type of rugby.
26:26
It's very, very different from rugby union.
26:28
And I'd never played rugby league before, so I went there for six.
26:32
What's the main
26:32
Rupert Isaacson: difference?
26:34
Paul Illingworth: Oh, the main difference basically is when somebody is tackled
26:39
in, in rugby union and you end up going down on the ground, the pack
26:43
form around you in order to be able to protect the ball and keep the ball
26:48
on your side with rugby league when you're tackled, you get up, you and
26:53
you just kick the ball back so there's no rucking, what they call rucking.
26:57
So it's Rugby league is kind of a faster game than rugby Union was at the time.
27:02
But it also was, it was, it was a tough game.
27:05
It was played by by miners, basically.
27:08
Yeah.
27:08
It was Yorkshire, it was Lancashire.
27:11
It was tough and it, for a London boy to go up to Yorkshire and try to play
27:16
rugby league, it just didn't work.
27:18
Okay.
27:18
It wasn't that it, I wasn't used to the, to the environment
27:23
to live in for one thing.
27:25
I wasn't really happy about leaving my family at the time as, as well.
27:29
My dad said I was nuts even considering going to Featherston because he
27:33
hated Featherston as a place.
27:35
And he, you know, he said the only team to play for is Castleford.
27:38
So it just, I went up there, I gave it a go.
27:41
Could I become a professional rugby player?
27:44
Yes.
27:44
There's no doubt about it.
27:45
I had the skills to be able to do it.
27:48
I would've had to have lived in Yorkshire in order to be able to do
27:50
it, you know, and then looking back on it now, it was a no brainer really.
27:55
At 30 years old, I'd be done.
27:56
I wouldn't have made an awful lot of money.
27:58
It's not like soccer where you make millions and millions of dollars.
28:01
Yeah.
28:01
It wasn't particularly well paid and all I was getting when I was
28:04
up there was expenses anyway.
28:06
Yeah, yeah.
28:07
But it was a good, it was a good experience because it gave me the
28:10
opportunity at that age to make the first career decision of my life.
28:16
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
28:17
And also because you had to start this rugby team at school and get it going
28:22
and get it up to this point of excellence from a, a pretty crappy beginning.
28:27
Mm-hmm.
28:27
That would've given you a kind of
28:33
mentor mentorship on the go in leadership and your, your Welsh mentor
28:39
himself must have helped you with that.
28:41
But then by the time you find yourself later going into the
28:44
forces, you already kind of know how to take a group of standard
28:49
idiots and turn them into something.
28:52
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
28:52
Rupert Isaacson: And if you, I think if you've been doing that since adolescence,
28:57
it's probably something which you don't even notice in yourself probably
29:01
by the time you're getting into your twenties, but that you can command.
29:04
And by commanding I don't mean just bossing people about to know about.
29:09
I mean, actually organizing people and getting a job done.
29:13
That could be a difficult job.
29:14
That could be a scary job.
29:17
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
29:17
I th I think that's very true.
29:19
I mean, the playing rugby at school, it wasn't just a case of, oh, I'm
29:23
gonna go play rugby at school on a Saturday afternoon, and that's it.
29:26
It was, it was every day of my life.
29:28
I mean, I lived and breathed for rugby and at 13 years old, I started playing
29:33
for the local rugby club as well.
29:35
Because Dave James, who was the gym teacher, played for the local rugby
29:39
club, and they had a, a junior team.
29:42
So 13 years old, I was, I was playing rugby for the club on a Saturday
29:48
afternoon and playing rugby for the school on Saturday morning,
29:50
and we had practice twice a week.
29:52
So, I mean, you know.
29:55
I think a lot of young people today, the problem that, that they have is they, they
29:59
don't know what to do with themselves.
30:01
Mm-hmm.
30:02
You know, and I hate bringing up computer games and things like that.
30:05
There was no computer games when I was growing up.
30:07
I didn't, we didn't even have a television in the house, so it's not like I
30:10
could watch television or do anything.
30:12
You had to go out and do something.
30:14
So rugby for me, rugby for me was, was really the way, I guess, of ignoring
30:20
everything else that was going on and just doing something that I really enjoyed.
30:24
You know?
30:24
I mean, we, you know, like I said, we didn't have any
30:26
money when I was growing up.
30:27
Yeah.
30:27
We didn't have a car.
30:29
My dad had a motorbike, which eventually I inherited.
30:32
But he couldn't ride the motorbike, not after he had his accident.
30:36
My mum used to go and get a groceries on a, on a bicycle, you
30:39
know, with a basket on the front.
30:41
So, you know, but I, but I think, yes, the leadership skills, certainly
30:47
started with the rugby team.
30:48
There's absolutely no doubt about that.
30:50
Rupert Isaacson: I guess too, the thing with leadership is
30:51
it's also responsibility, right?
30:53
If you are the one who says, okay, I'm gonna organize this team.
30:55
I'm gonna be the captain, I'm gonna take a group of boys who
30:58
are aggressive and chaotic.
31:01
It's a, it's a lot of responsibility.
31:02
You have to make it work or you look like it, you know, an idiot.
31:06
Yeah.
31:06
And the pack will turn on you.
31:08
Yeah.
31:08
And, so in a way where it's sort of do or die, isn't it?
31:11
That you have to Yes.
31:12
You, you have to take that risk and that must have been quite intimidating,
31:16
you know, equally going up to, to play rugby in the north like that.
31:20
And, and anyone who's never played rugby, honestly, you know, it was compulsory
31:25
at school when I, when I was a kid.
31:27
It, when Ablo like Paul is running at you, he's gonna hit you like a car, you
31:33
know, and you know it's gonna hurt, right?
31:36
Or if I, I am not a big guy.
31:38
If I have to tackle Paul, I've gotta hope that three of my mates are gonna
31:43
jump on as well, or it's just not fair.
31:45
I'm just sort of hanging onto his leg, just keeps running up the pitch, kicking
31:49
at my face, you know, as, as he does it, there is quite a lot of fear involved.
31:53
And when you end up on the bottom of the scrum, you know, when it collapses it
31:57
doesn't matter actually how big you are.
31:58
You can't breathe, you know, and I, I, you know, that panic that you get
32:02
when you, you just have to sort of wait until you can breathe again.
32:06
So.
32:08
I do wonder, you know, one of the things which I think young men need is they do
32:14
need a certain amount of risk and they do need a certain amount of danger.
32:18
We are supposed to go and hunt wildebeest with a spear kind of thing.
32:22
And do you feel that that's just less available these days?
32:30
Because I, I feel that young men need it, like they need oxygen.
32:34
Paul Illingworth: I, yes, it most definitely is unavailable.
32:39
But I think society has had an awful lot to do with this, Rupert, because
32:44
we, we multi, we mollycoddle kids now.
32:48
There's no doubt about it.
32:49
I know I'm not, I'm not a firm believer.
32:51
I don't think we should be going around beating our kids for no.
32:53
Every single thing that we do.
32:55
But the trouble is they're getting wrapped in cotton wool.
32:58
They're being, they're, they're being protected.
33:00
You know, you get a situation where if anything happens at school, if somebody
33:05
even turns around and yells at somebody, the parents can get called into the
33:09
school and the child gets disciplined.
33:11
Mm-hmm.
33:11
You know, there's is, you know, it's, it's easy for me in my sixties to
33:16
turn around and say that, you know, we produced a soft generation because
33:19
my father used to say exactly the same thing, you know about me when I was
33:23
growing up, and everybody says that, but I think it's just got to the point now.
33:28
Where there isn't enough things for, particularly for young men to do that
33:33
really challenge them enough and, and not only, not just challenge them
33:39
physically, but but challenge them mentally and prepare them for the world.
33:44
I mean, the world's a scary place, right?
33:46
Yes, it is.
33:46
The world is a scary place.
33:47
Believe you're me.
33:48
I mean, you know, I'm still scared of some of the things that I see happen.
33:52
I'm terrified when I go out and try driving on the roads at the moment.
33:55
Yeah.
33:55
But you know, there, there's, there isn't enough things for, but, and I don't
34:01
know, you know, I, I agree with you 100%.
34:03
There's a huge difference between young men and young women, the way that they,
34:06
they interact, but young girls aren't really brought up to be scared of things.
34:12
And, and, and, but young men seem to have lost.
34:17
The whole sense of, of fear and, and, and they don't want
34:21
anything to do with it anymore.
34:22
I think this is why they become insular and they go to things like computer games
34:28
because they don't wanna actually face what's going on outside in the real world.
34:31
And interestingly,
34:32
Rupert Isaacson: a lot of the computer games are showing the
34:33
very things that Yeah, right.
34:36
In the old days they'd have actually been doing
34:38
Paul Illingworth: Exactly, that's exactly what they are.
34:41
Rupert Isaacson: So, alright, then tell us, you enter the
34:43
forces, you go into the Navy.
34:46
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
34:46
Rupert Isaacson: Do you do that just because it's not what your dad wants you
34:49
to do or do you do that to a certain ex?
34:51
Paul Illingworth: No, to a certain extent, yes.
34:53
And what's
34:53
Rupert Isaacson: his reaction?
34:54
Paul Illingworth: No, he hated it.
34:55
I don't think we talked for the first two years.
34:58
I mean, I was, I was going away for long periods of time, you know, I
35:01
mean, I'd be gone for nine months.
35:03
Yeah.
35:03
So, and, and.
35:05
But, you know, my mother and I used to write letters every week.
35:08
I mean, I've still got a big box full of letters that my mother wrote me
35:11
while I, in my early days in the Navy, I was very, very close to my mum.
35:16
She was the one that used to get me up at five o'clock in the
35:18
morning to do my paper round.
35:20
She'd gimme a cup of tea, she'd gimme some toast.
35:23
Yeah.
35:23
I was very, very close to her.
35:25
I don't think, I never got a letter from my father at any point in time.
35:28
I mean, he didn't really believe in writing anyway.
35:30
There was no telephones or anything like that in those days.
35:33
There's no way of communicating other than through letters.
35:36
But he, he was angry with
35:37
Rupert Isaacson: you for going in the Navy.
35:38
Paul Illingworth: He was, yeah.
35:39
He was, he, he was ang he was angry.
35:42
He was pretty well angry all the time.
35:44
I think the only thing he really liked about me growing up was playing rugby.
35:48
Right.
35:48
And even then when I made the decision not to go to Castleford and
35:51
play rugby, he was annoyed at that.
35:53
And then I decided I was gonna go in the Navy and not in the Army.
35:56
And as I said, my first choice would've been the Air Force anyway, but Right.
36:00
It was, it was the Navy.
36:04
I'll be, I'll be quite honest with you, the Navy was a, an easy solution for me.
36:10
And that's probably why I took that route.
36:12
I know it's, it, it's not necessarily the way that I have done things since
36:16
then, but at that time it was the easiest way for me to get out the house, go
36:21
and see some of the world, which was the big thing because I didn't have to
36:25
get posted in the UK or go to a train in school or go to college for months.
36:31
I went to a ship, I went out to Singapore, I went to a ship and I was gone.
36:37
Right.
36:37
I started seeing the world from day one, literally.
36:40
And that was the big appeal I wanted to travel.
36:44
Rupert Isaacson: What did you do in the Navy?
36:45
What was the job?
36:46
Paul Illingworth: I was I started off as a, as a weaponry officer.
36:50
And then when I moved from the Royal Navy into the Merchant Navy
36:55
I had sufficient time in the Royal Navy and the qualifications to
36:58
be able to go to Naval College.
37:01
And worked my way up through the certification process.
37:04
So, so that I ended up with a captain certificate, so it would've
37:08
taken a lot of years in the Royal Navy to get to that point.
37:10
Right.
37:11
But in the Merchant Navy, it was quicker.
37:13
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
37:13
So that was gonna be a question A, why did you choose the merchant Navy B?
37:18
Explain to, and again, not everyone knows the British system, so if you can explain
37:21
what the Merchant Navy is and talk us through what life was like with that.
37:26
So, so first, why the change, then what is it?
37:28
And then talk us through life.
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39:19
Paul Illingworth: Okay.
39:20
Well, the, the, the main reason for the change was, money.
39:25
Okay?
39:25
You earn a lot more money in the Merchant Navy than you did in the Royal Navy.
39:29
Also it was to do with the ranking systems of the two different navies.
39:34
Now, the Merchant Navy is the same as the, the US Merchant Marine.
39:38
You could join the Merchant Marine and you can go to college as a, as a cadet
39:42
officer and work your way up through the, through the different ranks in
39:46
the Merchant Navy to become a captain.
39:48
The Royal Navy pretty well, works the same way, except the
39:51
process is, is a lot slower.
39:53
In order to be get to become a captain in the Royal Navy, you'd probably have
39:57
to have 25 or 30 years of service.
39:59
You could get to captain in the Merchant Navy with 10 years of service.
40:02
So it was a much, much quicker process.
40:05
Merchant Navy paid a a lot more money than the Royal Navy, and I
40:08
was, I was quite lucky in that I followed my and my older cousin.
40:15
Really was, he was kind of like my mentor.
40:17
He went into the Merchant Navy.
40:19
He was 12 years older than me, and he was more like a big brother
40:22
than a, than a than a cousin.
40:24
He went straight into the Merchant Navy fairly shortly probably six or seven
40:29
years after he went in the merchant Navy.
40:31
He went into the oil and gas business.
40:34
That's where the big money was.
40:36
So I was able, when I went in the Merchant Navy to do a couple of
40:40
trips on, on big cargo ships, see a bit of the world doing that.
40:44
And then I moved into the oil and gas business and the oil and gas business,
40:47
which was basically working on supply boats that ran supplies to the oil rigs.
40:52
That's where, where the money really was.
40:54
So, you know, it was a transition.
40:57
From really just one naval service to another naval service
41:01
doing something different.
41:03
Not so much of the, the military regime.
41:06
You know, not so much of the Yes sir, no sir.
41:09
Three bags full serve that you had in the Royal Navy.
41:12
A a lot more relaxed and to be quite honest with you, a lot more fun.
41:17
Why is it more fun?
41:19
It's, it, I I'm not really the type of person that, that is a disciplinarian.
41:25
I never really enjoyed the Yes, sir, no sir.
41:29
Stuff that came with the, with being in the Royal Navy, there was, so, it was a
41:34
more relaxed atmosphere, which I think just, just made it a little bit more fun.
41:38
Also, the other thing as well is, you know, when you go ashore, when you're
41:43
in the Navy and you've been at sea a long time, and you go ashore, you know,
41:47
you wanna really go and enjoy yourself.
41:50
In the Royal Navy, if you enjoyed yourself a little bit too, too much, there would
41:54
be somebody there to put handcuffs on you and take you back to the ship.
41:58
Right.
41:58
In the Merchant Navy, you just had to avoid the local police, and that was a lot
42:03
easier than avoid avoiding the the sps.
42:07
So that's why it was more fun.
42:09
And I went, I went to some very, very remote very uncivilized places when
42:17
I was in the, in the merchant Navy.
42:19
I worked in Nigeria, well, I worked in Nigeria for a number of years.
42:23
I worked in Angola when the war was going on.
42:25
Mm-hmm.
42:26
Were East Africa, went all around India all around South America pretty well.
42:32
I don't think there's, there's very many coasts in the world.
42:34
I haven't actually touched at some point in time, but I spent a lot of time
42:38
working in Africa and you really see some terrible, terrible things there.
42:43
Rupert Isaacson: What did you see?
42:45
Paul Illingworth: A lot of death.
42:47
A lot.
42:47
What sort of
42:47
Rupert Isaacson: death and why?
42:48
Paul Illingworth: Just dead bodies lying on the side of the road.
42:50
Poverty, starvation, shooting robbery.
42:54
It was India, this was Nigeria, specifically Nigeria.
42:58
Nigeria, Angola was the same.
43:00
Civil war was going on there.
43:01
Virtually the whole of West Africa, and I was there in the,
43:04
in the eighties was just a mess.
43:06
But the ports that you
43:07
Rupert Isaacson: were landing in had a certain amount of security to them?
43:10
Paul Illingworth: Not really, no.
43:11
They were pretty well open.
43:12
And, and that was half the problem as well, you know, I mean, we were working
43:17
on, on the offshore supply boats.
43:19
Pirate wasn't really an issue then.
43:21
The pirate in thing didn't, I was gonna ask you about piracy, you know,
43:24
compared to today off Yemen, for example.
43:26
Oh, it's, it's terrible Today.
43:28
I, I would, I would not want a to.
43:30
Be having to deal with that.
43:32
You know, when we, we carried guns on board more for protection against
43:37
robbers and things like that.
43:38
Now they say, I mean, to deal with pirates, now they've got AK 40
43:43
sevens, they've got automatic weapons.
43:44
You know, you don't really want to get involved in things like that.
43:47
It was a, it was a lot simpler when I was doing things in
43:52
West Africa apart from Angola.
43:54
And that, that is a different story because I, yeah, I, I,
43:57
that was the, the war zone.
43:58
Yeah, it was the war zone.
43:59
Yeah.
43:59
We'll talk about, we can talk about that a bit later on.
44:02
Okay.
44:02
But it was really just a case of protecting yourself.
44:05
You know, you had to.
44:08
My, shall we say, some of the training that I received when I
44:10
was in the military helped me a lot in terms of personal protection.
44:14
That I had a few instances in West Africa where I had to look after myself.
44:19
And that helped a lot.
44:20
But it was really just, if you went ashore, you went ashore in a group and you
44:24
were armed you, you just had to be armed.
44:27
It's as simple as that.
44:27
Not necessarily with a gun, but we used to take knives and clubs
44:30
and things like that with us.
44:33
And you know, to a certain extent it, it was just a way of life.
44:38
Was I scared?
44:39
No.
44:39
You know, would it stop me going to shore?
44:41
No, but it stopped me doing all the things I did know because I wasn't
44:45
really, I wasn't, I just wasn't scared.
44:46
It's as simple as that.
44:48
Rupert Isaacson: Why do you think you weren't scared
44:52
given that it was scary?
44:55
Paul Illingworth: That's a good, I think it all comes back to.
44:59
Just the way that I prepared myself for life.
45:02
There's, there's nothing I can honestly say that, that really scares me.
45:06
I mean, you, you know, you know my background, Rupert, you know, and
45:08
I I'll happily toss myself out of an airplane, you know, any point in
45:13
time and hope the parachutes work.
45:15
It's, I, I don't know.
45:16
You know, I, I think the fear is something that you build up inside you.
45:20
And if you let it overtake you, it can do you a lot of harm.
45:23
And the simplest thing is push it to one side.
45:25
Just get on and deal with life.
45:26
And that's what I've always done.
45:28
I was bullied, believe it or not, I was bullied as a kid.
45:32
One of the things we haven't touched on is when I was 10 years old I was riding
45:36
my bicycle and I got hit by a car.
45:38
Very, very lucky to survive.
45:40
I have a scar that goes from here all the way, my face,
45:43
and around the back of my ear.
45:44
I had 140 stitches there.
45:46
I had another scar down here.
45:48
My head hit the, the curb.
45:50
I wasn't wearing a helmet.
45:52
Smashed open the back of my head.
45:54
As a result of that, I got bullied at school 'cause the kids called me
45:59
Scarface, the older kids, a lot of whom were the, some of the immigrants I talked
46:04
about, I got bullied and I, I just, I had to learn, stand up for myself.
46:08
My father's attitude was basically, if you're gonna get into a fight,
46:13
have something to help you win it.
46:15
I got bullied.
46:17
It happened two or three times.
46:18
I ended up picking up a branch of a tree, hitting a couple of kids with it.
46:22
They never touched me again.
46:23
Mm-hmm.
46:24
And I'd be one of these people that if threatened, I just lash out.
46:29
You know, I am a fighter.
46:31
I always have been a fighter.
46:33
I've certainly quieted down a little bit now, but you know, you know me
46:37
well enough to know that I won't put up with any crap from anybody.
46:40
And No, but interestingly,
46:41
Rupert Isaacson: I do know that about you, but I also know you as actually
46:44
a very tolerant man with actually you've got a short fuse in that.
46:48
You, you can be a bit grumpy, but one of the things I've always respected
46:52
about you, Paul, is actually you don't throw your weight around.
46:55
You could, 'cause I think we're gonna, let's go into some more of
46:58
your background in a minute, but I, I've never seen you be a bully.
47:01
I've never seen you be cruel.
47:02
I've never seen you use that power misuse, that power.
47:07
So yes.
47:08
I mean, I think if, if somebody threatens you or something like sure.
47:10
I mean, you, I, I don't think I would want to do that, but I've ne oddly enough, I've
47:15
never seen you misuse that aggression.
47:18
No,
47:19
Paul Illingworth: I don't, I don't, I use it to defend myself.
47:21
Mm-hmm.
47:22
It's a, it's a, it's a, it's just a defensive reaction.
47:26
Mm-hmm.
47:26
And, and I mean, you know, anybody in the same situation,
47:30
you know, you can do two things.
47:32
You can run or you can stand and fight.
47:36
And I've run.
47:37
At times, and I can't run very well.
47:40
Sometimes it's very much the right thing to do, but sometimes it's
47:42
definitely the right thing to do.
47:43
Other times, other times it's stand up and fight and sometimes you
47:47
don't have a need to, to fight.
47:48
You just have to stand up for yourself.
47:50
It's as simple as that.
47:51
But, but again, you know, you, you asked me why am I not afraid of anything?
47:56
I mean, I guess I'll, I may well find something I'm afraid of.
47:59
Like I said, the one thing terrifies me at the moment is driving on the roads
48:03
because it, it, they're just, there's so many idiots out there and it just seems
48:06
to be getting worse and worse and worse.
48:08
And I think there's more chance of dying in a car wreck than anything else.
48:11
I mean, I'm not, yeah.
48:12
You know, I don't have to deal with wild animals.
48:15
I don't have to deal with, with war anymore.
48:18
There's no, there's really no fighting, no war or anything like
48:21
that, that I would get involved in.
48:22
So the most dangerous thing I do is go out and drive.
48:25
I ride a motorbike.
48:27
I was on the motorbike yesterday.
48:28
That is dangerous.
48:29
I riding motorbike.
48:30
Dangerous.
48:30
I've rid, but I've ridden a bike since I was 10, 11 years old.
48:33
Mm-hmm.
48:33
You know, only had a couple of spills.
48:36
Fortunately Touchwood, I've never seriously hurt myself, but you've just
48:40
gotta be, you've gotta be def you, you have to ride defensively yesterday and
48:45
it's just like everything else, isn't it?
48:46
You gotta be defensive.
48:48
Yeah.
48:48
You just gotta be prepared to look after yourself.
48:51
That's really what it comes down to.
48:53
So
48:53
Rupert Isaacson: you were talking about war there, so let's talk about that.
48:55
So, how do you end up going from the Merchant Navy back into the
48:59
forces and end up in Special forces?
49:01
What's the trick to be there?
49:03
Okay.
49:03
Paul Illingworth: Well, when I was in the, in the Royal Navy I was given
49:07
the opportunity to move sideways into the Royal Marine Commandos.
49:13
Which is, which is just like the, the American Marines.
49:17
The Marines are part of the US Navy.
49:20
So they're Royal Marine Commandos are actually technically not
49:24
part of the British Army.
49:25
They're, they're more part of the British Navy.
49:28
I was always interested in special forces, special forces training
49:33
because of what my father went through.
49:35
And so when an opportunity came for me to step sideways, if you like,
49:39
into the RMC, I took that opportunity.
49:42
And as a result of that ended up going to going to Special Forces Selection,
49:49
which I failed miserably the first time.
49:51
And then going through it again a second time, I managed, I didn't
49:55
know they gave you a second chance.
49:56
That's interesting.
49:57
Yeah, they do.
49:58
They do.
49:58
Yes, you can go back again.
50:00
And I ended up going back and, and basically getting through that.
50:05
So, so that was how how I ended up getting through and, and.
50:10
I just carried that, that training and that responsibility through with
50:15
some of the other stuff that I got, that I got involved in later on, so.
50:20
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
50:20
So what did you get involved in later on?
50:24
You, you ended up in the SASI know.
50:26
Tell us what you wanna tell us.
50:29
Paul Illingworth: I can't really say too much about anything that,
50:32
that, that happened during that period, to be quite honest with
50:35
you, and I'd really rather not.
50:36
Hmm.
50:37
However, one of the interesting things that, that did happen later
50:41
on when I was in the oil and gas business, I was I was working in
50:45
Angola when the war was actually on the, the Civil War was going on.
50:49
And through some contacts that I had that I met down there there was an
50:54
opportunity to, to actually do some work for the night for the Angola government.
51:00
So basically what the, the situation in, in Angola was that you had two
51:05
different political parties as quite often happens with a civil war.
51:09
And you had one ruling party, which was NPLA, and there was another ruling.
51:15
There was another party, which was you to, and the, the Civil War was really
51:20
you to, was being funded by the Russians.
51:23
MPLA was being funded, if you like, by the West, by non Russians.
51:29
The Russian funding got to the point where they were starting to, to get tooled up
51:33
with some very, very serious equipment.
51:36
And the government needed some help, if you like suppressing some
51:41
of the things that were going on, particularly fairly close to Luanda,
51:45
which was a capital of Angola.
51:47
So as a result of some of the associations that I had I was able to step to one
51:54
side of the oil and gas work that I was actually doing because I was working down
51:58
there as a consultant for Sogo, which is a national oil company of Angola.
52:03
So I got to meet some very high people up in the government including the
52:06
president of the country at the time.
52:09
And, ended up, if you like, helping them with some of the military
52:14
issues that, that, that they had.
52:15
It was really more protecting some of the, some of the, as the oil and gas assets
52:22
that they had that were being threatened by the, should we say, the Rebel forces.
52:27
And you know, there were, there were South African mercenaries
52:29
that were actually working there.
52:31
Ex special forces guys from South Africa that were working in Angola all the time.
52:35
I had some association with them.
52:37
Not working as a, I didn't work as a mercenary per se, but I, but I was
52:41
associated with some, should we say some of the strategic decisions that were made
52:46
in order to be able to help protect Luanda
52:51
And
52:52
Rupert Isaacson: what, what years are we talking there and
52:54
how long did that go on for?
52:56
Paul Illingworth: Well, I mean, my involvement was from
52:59
1992 to 1996, primarily 1994.
53:04
Okay.
53:04
I think the Civil War went on, I think for almost 20 years, Rupert, to be called.
53:09
Yeah, it did.
53:10
It did.
53:10
I remember I was in Angola a long, long, long time.
53:14
Yeah, 30 years.
53:15
There was a lot.
53:15
Yeah.
53:16
I think it was, there was a lot of very, very heavy fights around
53:19
Orlando and Soya during the nineties.
53:22
And, and most, you know, most of the rest of the, the problem was more in
53:26
land, but when it got to the coast and it started to threaten the the oil and
53:30
gas business that, you know, that's when the government realized that they
53:33
really needed to do something about it.
53:36
So it was during that period
53:37
Rupert Isaacson: and you had been deployed within the British forces as well.
53:41
Mm-hmm.
53:42
I don't, I know you don't wanna go too much into it, but you had
53:44
been, you, you had been deployed in the Falklands, correct.
53:47
And then, yeah, that's
53:47
Paul Illingworth: correct.
53:48
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
53:49
And that was Special forces, so you'd taken that.
53:52
Experience over absolutely.
53:55
Yes.
53:57
You know, Angola's a scary place.
53:59
Or at least it certainly was.
54:00
I remember staring down a barrel of a child soldiers automatic
54:05
that with a, with a comp compan.
54:09
I was, I had a traveling companion who was a German girl who we didn't
54:12
realize at the time was bipolar.
54:14
And she later sent me, 10 years later, sent me an apology letter.
54:18
She almost got me killed like two, three times.
54:20
And it was just her and a friend.
54:22
And we, there was nothing going on with us.
54:23
We were just travelers.
54:24
I was writing a guidebook actually and being a journalist, and I
54:27
just wanted people from youth hostels to split costs with.
54:30
And we ended up crossing the border into Angola briefly.
54:33
And she got.
54:38
Verbally aggressive with the wrong people.
54:40
And I was like, what are you doing?
54:41
You're gonna get us killed.
54:41
You're gonna get us killed.
54:42
You know, like, you really are gonna get us killed.
54:44
You've got to stop.
54:46
And you know how that thing is, you, you're looking down the
54:51
barrel of, of somebody who's 15 pointing that gun at you.
54:55
And you know that whatever decision they're making is not gonna be rational.
54:59
Paul Illingworth: That's, that, that's, that's actually,
55:00
you know, a, a good point.
55:02
Something, something very, very similar happened to me.
55:05
Funnily enough, not in Angola or Nigeria, it was actually Mozambique,
55:08
but that was during the Civil War there.
55:10
Yeah.
55:10
That was also nice, you know, where, where they were are, I mean, a lot of
55:13
the kids did have automatic weapons, and those were the ones that you
55:17
really did have to be worried about.
55:19
Yeah.
55:19
There's no doubt about it.
55:20
It, it, the regular soldiers, to a certain extent, weren't so bad
55:24
the kids, the kids just really didn't know what they were doing.
55:27
They had no training and, you know, they just saw, especially if you
55:30
were being aggressive with them, you are lucky you didn't get shot.
55:33
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, well, I was, I did just a lot of apologizing, you
55:35
know, and you know, you talk about having no fear, I had a lot of fear.
55:39
I was catching myself, you know, because Yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:44
But yeah, as you say, the, the, the way through is sometimes there, there are ways
55:50
to stand up for yourself and sometimes it's actually to talk your way through.
55:53
Yeah.
55:53
And in that case it was to sort of appeal to somebody's
55:57
sense of reason and humanity.
56:00
Okay.
56:00
So you're in the Merchant Navy.
56:02
You are not a mercenary in Angola.
56:09
At what point do you start aviating?
56:12
I presume with jumping out of airplanes, that must have
56:14
started with special forces.
56:15
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
56:16
I, you know, I did do some helicopter flying when I was in in the military.
56:22
Didn't get into it too seriously, but the aviating really just simply came
56:27
about as a result of buying a skydiving business and inheriting an airplane.
56:32
It came with an airplane.
56:33
We had a pilot.
56:34
Okay.
56:34
And one of the things that I think.
56:37
Jen and I realized pretty quickly, and we really knew
56:39
this just from our experiences.
56:41
Jen being your wife.
56:41
Yeah.
56:41
Jen being my wife.
56:42
Yeah.
56:43
Through our experience at other drop zones is if the pilot gets
56:47
sick, you don't do any business.
56:50
Most drop zones can't afford to hire more than one pilot.
56:53
So if you, you know, literally if the pilot does get sick, if
56:56
he gets a cold, he can't fly and then the business is shut down.
56:59
So when we bought the business, we had a pilot that if you like,
57:04
that was working for the business.
57:06
He'd already, he told us fairly quickly he was looking to move into the airlines.
57:10
'cause a lot of the times skydiving pilots use it to build hours, right.
57:14
So they can then go and fly for the airlines.
57:16
He told us that he was looking to go to the airline, so we
57:19
needed to find another pilot.
57:21
We found another pilot, luckily that stayed with us for almost 10
57:24
years, but it did make us realize that while it's fairly easy to hire
57:30
skydiving instructors, binding pilots is hard and keeping pilots is hard.
57:36
So Jen and I decided to have flying lessons.
57:40
We took flying lessons.
57:42
We started in 2005.
57:43
We both got our private pilot's license within about a year, nine months I
57:47
think it was, brought ourselves a little sesor airplane because we were
57:51
living in Houston and the business we owned was a two hour drive away, but
57:55
it was only a half an hour flight.
57:56
So we brought little airplane and then we could fly out there
58:00
for the weekends with the kids.
58:02
My kids were growing up at the time.
58:05
I decided that rather than just stop at private pilot's license, I'd get my
58:09
instrument rating, I'd get my multi-engine rating, I'd get my commercial.
58:14
So basically I had all of the different ratings that I'd need to fly any of
58:19
the airplanes we were ever likely to use in the skydiving business.
58:23
And I went through all of those over the next year or so, got all those ratings.
58:28
And then as soon as I is, it used be
58:31
Rupert Isaacson: so quick.
58:31
Doesn't it take longer normally to get
58:32
Paul Illingworth: No, I was, I was flying almost every day having lessons.
58:37
Okay.
58:37
You know, because, because we were running a business and it was
58:41
important that I got the ratings, the cost of, I mean, it's, it's.
58:45
Cost prohibitive for most people as well to do all of that because
58:48
of the cost of the instruction.
58:49
Mm-hmm.
58:50
But I was fortunate in that the business was able to help with the cost.
58:53
Mm-hmm.
58:54
And I literally, I would go and have a fly lesson at seven o'clock in the morning,
58:58
finish at nine o'clock, go to the office.
59:00
Right.
59:00
Work in the office till seven, eight o'clock at night.
59:03
Come home, go repeat the same, the same thing.
59:05
It's, and then, like I said, weekends, we'd be going out to a skydiving business.
59:09
So it's really, it was, you know, it was seven days a week working
59:14
and very, very long hours as well.
59:16
That's how we got into flying.
59:17
That's how both Jen and I got, got into flying.
59:20
We still fly today.
59:21
You know, we still, we, we still own a little airplane that we fly.
59:25
Even though we sold the skydiving business a number of years ago.
59:29
We owned a small jet for a period of time.
59:31
I mean, you've flown with us.
59:32
Well, I have.
59:33
It's my only.
59:34
You know,
59:34
Rupert Isaacson: experience of flying a private jet, I'm very, very, very great.
59:37
Yeah.
59:39
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
59:39
We've done, you know, we've done a, a lot of stuff and I mean, as I get older
59:42
now, we, you know, I'm almost 70 now, we sold the jet because once you hit 70,
59:47
it's pretty difficult to get insurance to fly small pri, you know, private jets.
59:53
So we, we are just scaling things down, but that's how, that's how
59:55
we got into the aviation side.
59:58
And I must say I love it.
1:00:00
I, I always wanted to join the Royal Air Force.
1:00:02
I think I said that very, very early on because I had, I'd never flown
1:00:07
at the time, but I just thought it looked like a lot of fun to do.
1:00:10
Yeah.
1:00:10
And it is a lot of fun and I really, really enjoy it.
1:00:13
So it's, you know, it's one of the things I think that probably motorcycling and,
1:00:18
and flying, I still get the most enjoyment out of, of pretty much everything we do.
1:00:23
We still enjoy jumping as well.
1:00:24
Just don't jump as much as, as, as we could do.
1:00:29
Rupert Isaacson: So.
1:00:31
Then you, you go from the Merchant Navy into the oil and gas business and you
1:00:36
Paul Illingworth: Yeah,
1:00:36
Rupert Isaacson: you, you do Well.
1:00:38
Paul Illingworth: And so let, let's just, let's talk about that.
1:00:40
Okay?
1:00:41
Yeah.
1:00:41
Yeah.
1:00:41
The same thing.
1:00:42
It's the same thing again.
1:00:43
I wanted, I wanted to, I wanted basically to get to a point where
1:00:50
I was caption in my own ship.
1:00:51
That was my target.
1:00:53
And when I went in the Navy, I can remember way, way
1:00:57
before I joined the Navy.
1:00:59
There was a guy that was playing at my rugby club.
1:01:01
I was probably 14 years old, 14 or 15.
1:01:04
He was a captain in the Merchant Navy, and he was earning, and I
1:01:09
remember this like it was yesterday.
1:01:11
He was earning 5,000 pounds a year.
1:01:13
That was a hundred pounds a week.
1:01:14
That was a huge amount of money.
1:01:17
I was earning 10.
1:01:17
What year was that?
1:01:19
Would that have been 70?
1:01:19
That, that, that would've been in let me think.
1:01:22
60.
1:01:24
69 70.
1:01:26
Oh yeah.
1:01:26
That would've
1:01:26
Rupert Isaacson: been a lot of money.
1:01:27
Paul Illingworth: Yeah, it was a lot of money.
1:01:28
Yeah.
1:01:28
I was earning 10 shillings a week till in newspapers.
1:01:31
He was earning a hundred pounds a week as a captain.
1:01:33
So ultimately my target was to get to be captain.
1:01:37
'cause I thought, well, you know, I've not had any money growing up, but
1:01:40
I'll be doing fairly well because he, you know, he drove a nice sports car.
1:01:43
I think he had a knee type jag and, you know, and he seemed
1:01:46
to live very comfortably.
1:01:48
So that was always really my target was to become a captain.
1:01:50
Mm-hmm.
1:01:51
Once I transitioned into a merchant Navy, 1984, I got, I went
1:01:57
to college for six months and I passed my captain's license test.
1:02:02
So from 1984, I had a license to captain any ship of any
1:02:07
size, anywhere in the world.
1:02:09
And at the time the company that I was working for, which was an
1:02:13
American offshore company, were desperately short of captains.
1:02:17
And I got an opportunity to move from first officer to captain,
1:02:21
working on the old Vig supply boats.
1:02:23
So I took that opportunity and then I ended up moving from
1:02:27
West Africa into the North Sea.
1:02:29
So I was captain of supply boats working the North Sea and some of
1:02:32
the most horrendous weather you'll ever I can imagine, possibly imagine.
1:02:37
And I did that until about 1990.
1:02:41
But in the interim period of time with a couple of other guys in
1:02:45
Aberdeen I end and we started our own company, a marine consultancy company.
1:02:51
And what we were doing was we were providing tow masters to move
1:02:55
oil rigs around the North Sea.
1:02:57
So I moved from being captain of a.
1:03:00
I worked as captain on the oil rigs in the Middle East for a couple of years.
1:03:04
Then I went back to the North Sea working for my own company with
1:03:09
these, with these two other gentlemen.
1:03:11
And we set the company up and we, we very, we've become very, very
1:03:14
successful at renting our services out to move oil rigs around to the
1:03:19
point where we ended up having to start hiring people to work for us.
1:03:24
So then the company started to grow.
1:03:27
I think the last, the last job I did when I was actually working on, on the
1:03:31
oil rig, the big tugs, because I was moving oil rigs around as a, as a tow
1:03:36
master at the time was probably 1990.
1:03:39
And then there was an opportunity shortly thereafter to go and work
1:03:44
for a small Canadian oil company as a marine superintendent.
1:03:48
So, and this was in Aberdeen, so I'm still working, I'm managing director of my own.
1:03:54
Consultancy company, they needed a marine superintendent.
1:03:58
So we literally contracted my services to this small Canadian
1:04:04
company as a marine superintendent.
1:04:07
And that's how I ended up, I did some work in the North Sea installing platforms in
1:04:12
the North Sea oil rig platforms for them.
1:04:15
And they also had a license in Angola.
1:04:18
And that's how I ended up in Angola, working for them down in Angola, meeting
1:04:22
the, the government officials from Sonal and doing and doing that sort of stuff.
1:04:27
So I ran that company as managing director for 13 years until 1998 when I ended up.
1:04:37
As a result of meeting some guys, funnily enough in Angola getting an opportunity
1:04:43
to come to Houston and I'd been in Aberdeen for eight years at that time.
1:04:47
I wanted to take the company International.
1:04:50
My two partners did not want to go international.
1:04:53
They wanted to stay in the uk So we started to come to a
1:04:56
point where we were gonna split.
1:04:59
The opportunity came up for me to go to Houston, so I ended up going to
1:05:03
Houston as a consultant working for this Singaporean based company to set up the
1:05:08
business development office for them.
1:05:11
And that was really an opportunity for me to just simply say, okay, I like it here.
1:05:16
I'm gonna stay here.
1:05:17
They're gonna pay me, well, I'll leave the UK consultancy company.
1:05:22
I'll just step back, keep my shares in the company, but not have anything
1:05:26
to do with the day-to-day running.
1:05:27
That's how I ended up in the us
1:05:29
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
1:05:31
Paul Illingworth: So.
1:05:32
Rupert Isaacson: You're talking about moving all platforms
1:05:34
around and as if that's an easy thing to do in the North Sea.
1:05:40
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
1:05:40
Rupert Isaacson: As you said, I've seen, I've seen what the weather can be.
1:05:43
You talk about not being afraid.
1:05:44
You must have been afraid sometimes in those storms that the ship might go down.
1:05:49
Not
1:05:51
Paul Illingworth: I was, I, there, there's a, there was a couple of
1:05:55
opportunities where I never thought I'd ever see weather worse than that.
1:05:58
And then there was weather worse than that.
1:06:00
I was never bothered about a ship going down.
1:06:02
And one of the things I should probably point out is that, remember
1:06:06
I told you I had an older cousin who was 12 years older than me.
1:06:09
I also had another cousin that was four years older than me, Neil,
1:06:14
he was actually on an offshore supply boat that did go down in the
1:06:17
Mediterranean and he was lost at sea.
1:06:20
Mm.
1:06:20
The ship, the ship just disappeared.
1:06:23
Wow.
1:06:23
And that was in the Mediterranean.
1:06:25
Rupert Isaacson: Wow.
1:06:25
You don't expect to see that kind of weather.
1:06:27
Paul Illingworth: And, and I'd been in the Navy, I think
1:06:30
two years when that happened.
1:06:31
And, you know, it, it was, it, it really brought it home with the vulnerability.
1:06:37
Now, when I was on my own ship as captain working in the North Sea, we
1:06:41
went out in some horrendous weather.
1:06:43
There was, I remember there was one Christmas where the
1:06:45
storms were really, really bad.
1:06:48
And I was, I was flown out by helicopter to a rig, which had broken a couple of his
1:06:52
moorings to try to be able to to get some, some tugs attached to the rig so we could
1:06:59
actually pull it away from the platform that it was gonna end up drifting towards.
1:07:04
That was some of the worst weather that I ever saw when I
1:07:06
was captain on a ship myself.
1:07:08
We went out in Force 10 a couple of times from Aberdeen.
1:07:11
I was never bothered about the ship going down.
1:07:15
Could it have happened?
1:07:15
Yes.
1:07:16
But I think, I guess that I felt that my superior seamanship skills were
1:07:21
able to deal with anything that the weather threw out us at the time.
1:07:25
And again, I think I was, I was very, very lucky.
1:07:27
We never got into a serious situation.
1:07:30
But I mean, I, that there was a lot of really, really nasty
1:07:33
things happened out there.
1:07:34
I'll tell you what, you know, one time I was a bit twitchy, I was, one
1:07:39
of the things that I had to do was move jack up rigs alongside platforms.
1:07:44
And when you're moving a jack up rig alongside a platform, and Jack
1:07:46
up rig basically is an oil rig.
1:07:48
They work in relatively shallow water up to about 150, two a hundred feet.
1:07:52
They go deeper now, but in those days, 152 feet.
1:07:55
And it's like, it's, it's a, it's a triangular shaped rig that has three legs.
1:08:00
It floats with the legs jacked up, and then you put it to
1:08:05
wherever you want it to go.
1:08:06
And there's normally three tugs attached.
1:08:08
One at one at each corner.
1:08:09
'cause it's a triangle and you move it where you want to go with the tugs.
1:08:13
And then you lower the legs down.
1:08:15
The legs, hit the sea bed, and they raise the rig up off, off the sea.
1:08:19
It literally comes up.
1:08:20
So you have a gap between the sea and the bottom of the rig.
1:08:23
It's called the air gap.
1:08:25
Now, one of the things we had to do in the southern part of the North
1:08:28
Sea was to actually move these jack up rigs alongside a fixed platform.
1:08:34
So now you've got something that is attached to the seabed that
1:08:38
has accommodation on top and it's got wells going through it.
1:08:41
And the jack up rig has to go right up close to that.
1:08:46
You jack it up.
1:08:48
It has a drilling deck that then can levers over the top of the
1:08:52
platform so they can get the drilling equipment down the well.
1:08:56
You have to move those rigs.
1:08:59
Four to six feet away from the legs of the fixed platform.
1:09:05
So the accuracy, the way that we do this is a combination of using anchors
1:09:11
and tugs, but you are literally moving the rig six inches at a time.
1:09:17
So I'm giving instructions to one of the tugs to pull six inches in on a toe line.
1:09:23
Another one, pull six inches in here.
1:09:26
That is the most, I won't say it's scary, it's nerve wracking
1:09:31
because there's no room for error.
1:09:34
Absolutely no.
1:09:35
And the way that we used to tell if we were in the right place is quite funny.
1:09:38
We have what we called surveyors on board, and the surveyors
1:09:41
were technical guys, okay?
1:09:44
We didn't have sat nav or anything like that.
1:09:47
So in order to tell whether or not we were in the right place on the platform,
1:09:51
'cause you had to get in exactly the right place, we'd get two aluminum
1:09:54
ladders, stick them out the back of the rig with a scaffolding pole going
1:09:59
across and a couple of paint marks.
1:10:02
And when that scaffolding po and the paint marks touched the legs of the platform,
1:10:07
we knew we were in the right place.
1:10:10
That's how technical,
1:10:11
Rupert Isaacson: that's that technical and what would happen if you got it wrong.
1:10:15
Paul Illingworth: You'd end up hitting the rig would hit the platform
1:10:18
and that was really, really bad.
1:10:20
Because, because, because if you have make contact with a platform
1:10:24
or the rig, you can't do anything.
1:10:25
You have to pull away.
1:10:27
You then have to, to fly a surveyor out to survey the rig to make
1:10:31
sure it doesn't have any damage.
1:10:33
You have to get divers to do NDT on the platform to make sure you haven't damaged
1:10:37
the integrity of the, of the platform.
1:10:39
'cause even if you say, oh, we just kissed it, we just touched it.
1:10:43
Doesn't matter.
1:10:44
Game is off.
1:10:45
Rig gets pulled away.
1:10:46
Oil company that you're working for get really angry because you've now
1:10:52
got a rig that's costing them a hundred thousand dollars a day and it's not
1:10:55
doing anything because you've screwed up.
1:10:59
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
1:10:59
And you're doing this in rough weather.
1:11:01
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
1:11:02
Yeah.
1:11:02
Rupert Isaacson: Rough
1:11:03
Paul Illingworth: weather.
1:11:03
Rupert Isaacson: How, how'd you do it?
1:11:03
How'd you do it?
1:11:04
How'd you get that level of accuracy in rough weather when the
1:11:06
waves are just tossing you about?
1:11:08
Paul Illingworth: Well, I mean.
1:11:09
In the Southern North Sea, the current is a, is a major issue as well.
1:11:13
So you have to wait for what they call slack water, which occurs every six hours.
1:11:17
And then there is a, there is a point with the weather where you
1:11:21
just say, no, we can't do it.
1:11:23
Okay.
1:11:24
But, you know, so there's a maximum wave height because obviously if you are
1:11:28
moving up and down and you're surging back and forward, you gotta be really,
1:11:31
really careful with what you're doing.
1:11:33
So you do get to the point where if the weather's really
1:11:36
bad, you just have to stop.
1:11:37
Okay.
1:11:38
And it's the same in the Northern North Sea when you're moving
1:11:40
the semi-submersible rigs around that float and have anchors.
1:11:44
You get to the point where when the weather, the waves get beyond
1:11:47
a certain height, you just have to stop, hold position and wait for
1:11:52
the weather to, to calm down a bit.
1:11:54
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
1:11:55
So yeah, went back to the subject of fear and you said, you know, it's nerve
1:11:58
wracking that, that that's another whole.
1:12:02
Thing with fear is that, well, there's fear for your own personal
1:12:06
safety, but then there's also fear.
1:12:07
Paul Illingworth: Fear of damage.
1:12:09
Rupert Isaacson: Well, and fear of effing up.
1:12:11
Screwing up.
1:12:12
Yeah.
1:12:12
Screwing up.
1:12:13
Yeah.
1:12:13
When it comes down to is responsibility, like these types
1:12:16
of job that you're talking about, they're ver they're very difficult.
1:12:19
And you've got to manage these natural conditions.
1:12:22
You've got to manage groups of people who are, you know, doing
1:12:27
this stuff, and that there's gonna naturally be human error in there,
1:12:30
not to mention the weather, you know?
1:12:33
So do you think that, you know, that's a lot of pressure to handle.
1:12:40
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
1:12:42
Rupert Isaacson: Do you think that it really, if you, if you look at where were
1:12:45
the skills that you built to be able to handle that sort of pressure that you
1:12:51
built them sort of in the paper rounds.
1:12:53
Age 10.
1:12:53
Yes.
1:12:55
Is that, is that where it all began?
1:12:57
Paul Illingworth: Standing up for yourself.
1:12:58
And, and I mean, it's really just, if you're gonna take on a job that has
1:13:02
that sort of level of responsibility, you have got to have a huge
1:13:07
amount of confidence in yourself.
1:13:09
Mm-hmm.
1:13:10
And you know, a as I said, one of the things that we were doing was we were
1:13:16
hiring people to work as tow masters.
1:13:18
Well, you don't just pull these guys off the street.
1:13:22
No.
1:13:22
They have got to be trained.
1:13:24
So, every single one of the people that we hired was a cer, a qualified captain.
1:13:30
They all had captains licenses.
1:13:31
They thought most of them had worked as captain on supply boats or on big tugs.
1:13:35
They knew what moving all rigs around was all about, but
1:13:39
you still had to train them.
1:13:41
So if you like, because I had my own company, I became a
1:13:46
tow master instructor per se.
1:13:49
And.
1:13:50
In order to be able to do, to do that type of job with a very, very high
1:13:54
level of responsibility, we're, you know, we're talking about hundreds
1:13:57
and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and potential
1:14:01
damage, not necessarily lives at stake.
1:14:04
Because, because it, it wasn't that type of a job, but you've gotta have a lot of
1:14:09
confidence in yourself and you've gotta not be afraid of what you're doing in
1:14:14
order to be able to do it successfully.
1:14:16
Right?
1:14:16
And in all, you've also gotta have the patience and the communication
1:14:22
skills to be able to pass that onto somebody when you're training them.
1:14:27
That the self-confidence definitely came, it started.
1:14:33
With me having to go out at five o'clock in the morning in the UK in the winter
1:14:39
when it was dark on my bicycle and go and deliver newspapers, and I was delivering
1:14:44
newspapers in the snow and in the rain.
1:14:47
Mm-hmm.
1:14:47
And actually not having that was probably the most fearful thing.
1:14:52
You know, as a, a 10-year-old actually going out in the dark on a bicycle and
1:14:56
having to go onto a house in estate and walk up people's drives with
1:14:59
dogs barking and deliver newspapers.
1:15:01
Hmm.
1:15:02
And it, it built up a certain amount of self-confidence, almost to the
1:15:07
point where you think, screw this.
1:15:09
You know, I mean, I can do this, I can do pretty much anything.
1:15:12
And one of the things I will say to you is I've never been,
1:15:21
how can I put this?
1:15:22
There hasn't been a situation where somebody's asked me if I could
1:15:25
do something where I've said, no.
1:15:30
I might have said, I have to think about it.
1:15:33
And I've done that a lot.
1:15:34
But in most cases, if somebody's asked me to do something, if I
1:15:38
haven't got the skills to do it, I can figure out how to do it.
1:15:42
'cause I'm very good at figuring things out.
1:15:44
But if it's just something that's completely off, off the wall, then I
1:15:48
would simply say, I'll think about it.
1:15:51
Which just really means no, I probably won't do it, but I'm gonna think about it.
1:15:55
'cause I like to be able to process things and, and that really does, it does
1:16:00
come down, there's no doubt about it.
1:16:03
Having that paper round and having to go out to work at such an early age
1:16:07
was, it was a great character builder.
1:16:09
There's no doubt about that.
1:16:11
And I did that.
1:16:12
I did that every day for six years.
1:16:14
I stopped my paper around the day I left the UK to join the Navy.
1:16:20
Rupert Isaacson: As you may know, if you've been following my work,
1:16:22
we are also horsey folk here.
1:16:25
And we have been training horses for many, many years in the manner of
1:16:29
the old classical dressage masters.
1:16:33
This is something which is often very confusing for people.
1:16:36
We shine a light on that murky, difficult stuff and make it crystal clear.
1:16:41
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1:16:46
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1:16:55
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1:17:15
Wow.
1:17:16
I'm also thinking about, the, you, you talked about communication
1:17:19
skills, and that's important too, because it's not enough to be
1:17:25
big and tough or even competent.
1:17:27
Paul Illingworth: No.
1:17:27
If you're
1:17:27
Rupert Isaacson: going to manage teams, you can't be going around scaring
1:17:31
your team because then you, there's no job getting rather the opposite.
1:17:35
They've got to feel that the big scary guy has their back.
1:17:38
Do you feel, do you think that the do you think that the communication skills came
1:17:42
with having to build that rugby team?
1:17:44
Paul Illingworth: Yes.
1:17:46
Absolutely, because I didn't, I didn't get, learn any communication skills from
1:17:51
being at home with Doesn't sound like
1:17:54
Rupert Isaacson: it.
1:17:54
No, I mean, I, although your mom sounds very warm.
1:17:56
My, my mom sounds, my mom was
1:17:58
Paul Illingworth: really, really great.
1:17:58
She was, she was a, a great help to me, but we weren't the sort of family
1:18:03
that we sat around in the evening, if you like, drinking tea and chatting
1:18:07
about what we did during the day.
1:18:09
Yeah.
1:18:09
That just, that didn't happen.
1:18:10
It was, it was being at school, playing rugby with the team, with the lads.
1:18:15
They were, you know, they were the closest group that we had
1:18:18
as any sports team really.
1:18:21
And then taking those communication skills.
1:18:24
I mean, I was, I was assessed very, very early on after I joined the
1:18:30
Navy as having natural leadership.
1:18:33
Qualities because I was able to, to guide people and I, and I was
1:18:38
able to communicate with people.
1:18:40
So I was actually given the opportunity to accelerate through the whole Navy
1:18:45
process very, very quickly because I had that ability to be able to talk
1:18:49
to people, to be able to communicate and be able to get over what I
1:18:53
was trying to communicate quickly.
1:18:56
Right.
1:18:56
Rupert Isaacson: So let's dive back to where we began.
1:18:59
We have this epidemic of young men who can't get out of the basement,
1:19:05
Paul Illingworth: who
1:19:05
Rupert Isaacson: are maybe doing playing video games that simulate
1:19:10
some of the adventures that you might have actually had in real life and
1:19:16
are lacking self-confidence on a level that is disabling.
1:19:26
What do we do about this?
1:19:31
Paul Illingworth: That's a 10, $10 million question, isn't it?
1:19:34
You know, 10-year-old kids nowadays can't go out and deliver papers.
1:19:37
No, no.
1:19:38
They can't.
1:19:38
It's a different world, you know.
1:19:39
Yeah.
1:19:39
You know, you, you just can't do it.
1:19:41
I mean, you know, when my kids were growing up, I was, I was, to be quite
1:19:45
honest with you, quite scared of them even just going and riding their bicycles
1:19:49
in our sub subdivision in Houston.
1:19:50
Sure.
1:19:51
You know, in Houston, you know, it's as simple as that.
1:19:54
But I think what you've gotta do is,
1:20:00
I think it really comes down to you've got to take an interest in
1:20:04
something that community is doing.
1:20:06
Okay.
1:20:06
That's interesting.
1:20:07
And, and, you know, that can be through a club.
1:20:11
Mm-hmm.
1:20:11
YMCA, you know, I, I, again, it's a Christian association.
1:20:16
I think a lot of people, certainly where I live, I mean, I live in, in
1:20:20
Texas in what they call the Bible Belt.
1:20:22
I'm not religious person myself, but I know that.
1:20:26
The young lads I've met here that do extremely well for themselves.
1:20:32
They are Christians and the religious, the, the religious side
1:20:37
of things over here, they go to church, which is a club in effect,
1:20:42
they communicate with other people.
1:20:44
And I'm talking about a lot of the young guys around here that grow up on farms
1:20:49
or on ranches and do things like that.
1:20:51
They get themselves out.
1:20:52
They don't get the opportunity to sit around watching television
1:20:55
or playing computer games 'cause they're out doing stuff.
1:20:57
They're,
1:20:58
Rupert Isaacson: exactly, and I mean, look, the life that we leave Paul, it's
1:21:03
not, it's not representative anymore.
1:21:06
I mean, you know, no, my kids also are out on the farm working with horses and doing
1:21:11
stuff and, you know, I don't force them to do it, but there's just stuff to do,
1:21:16
so, and it's kind of interesting to do.
1:21:18
So why wouldn't you?
1:21:19
But if you are living in, as you said, you know, you, you were
1:21:24
scared when your kids were going out in a subdivision in in Houston.
1:21:29
And that's of course where most people are is, is in those
1:21:31
types of suburban environments.
1:21:33
And you kids are not allowed to work anymore.
1:21:35
It's also not terribly is is less safe now than it used to be.
1:21:40
But I like what you said about involvement in community.
1:21:45
Yeah.
1:21:45
'cause if, if you haven't got a farm or a ranch to be part of, well
1:21:48
that just doesn't exist for you.
1:21:51
But if you're growing up in a, let's say you're on a housing state
1:21:54
today, in, let, let, let's yeah.
1:21:56
Dial it back to where you were as a boy.
1:21:58
You're in a housing state, outskirts of London.
1:22:01
What's around you?
1:22:02
There's gonna be
1:22:05
on the bad side, there's gonna be drugs, there's gonna be.
1:22:08
Gang stuff, there's going to, but that to some degree was always there.
1:22:11
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
1:22:12
Rupert Isaacson: On the positive side, there's going to be kids who
1:22:14
are doing creative things like music perhaps sport other things like that.
1:22:19
But I think, I like that you put your finger on something with community
1:22:23
involvement and, and service.
1:22:25
Most people are not gonna be in a church environment, but it's,
1:22:29
that's a good place to start from.
1:22:30
I think you are now in this housing estate today in 2025.
1:22:38
As a father of a bo of a 10-year-old boy.
1:22:43
What do you do?
1:22:49
Paul Illingworth: I think what I would, what I would, what I'd
1:22:51
want to try to do is obviously, you know, school is community.
1:22:56
Mm-hmm.
1:22:57
And, not only is school community, but your neighbors are community as well.
1:23:01
Mm-hmm.
1:23:02
And certainly when my kids were growing up and, and you know, this wasn't
1:23:06
that long ago, what was important was actually finding out what the other
1:23:11
kids in the neighborhood are doing.
1:23:13
Where are they going, where are they hanging out?
1:23:15
Are they the tennis court?
1:23:16
So that the swimming pool, you know, there are places where they, that
1:23:21
they're gonna go and they're going to, if you like, group together.
1:23:25
And I don't mean in gangs or anything like that Yeah.
1:23:27
But just to do, you know, following their interests, basically.
1:23:31
Interests, you know, do, do you know any, you've get, I, I just think you've
1:23:35
gotta get the kids out the houses.
1:23:37
Yeah.
1:23:37
That's really what it comes down to.
1:23:39
If you can get, which means you gotta do it
1:23:40
Rupert Isaacson: with them.
1:23:41
Paul Illingworth: You've gotta go do it with 'em.
1:23:42
So, I mean, over here, when my kids were growing up, when my son was growing
1:23:46
up, we did T-ball, we did baseball, we'd all, I know it's sports again, but
1:23:50
it's very sport orientated over here.
1:23:52
And that's what you gotta remember.
1:23:54
But you know, friends that we have now, they have girls that are in
1:23:57
gymnastics, that are in swim clubs.
1:24:00
Most of most of the things are some form of sport orientated.
1:24:05
But I mean, is there anything wrong with kids getting involved in sport?
1:24:08
I mean, I got involved in sport, you can't work or you can work,
1:24:13
but you can't work till you're 13 or 14 or even older than that.
1:24:17
But working doesn't really seem to be the important thing.
1:24:20
I think it's, it's community activities.
1:24:23
And community activities can be sports.
1:24:26
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
1:24:26
Paul Illingworth: It could be stamp collecting.
1:24:28
They could be, well, I mean, I think
1:24:29
Rupert Isaacson: that's the thing.
1:24:29
I mean, so in my case, the kind of nerd I was, obviously I was riding, right?
1:24:34
But I'm a huge nature nerd.
1:24:35
So for me it would've been birdwatching plant identification, animal watching,
1:24:41
and then from there you get into hiking, you get into mountaineering, you get into,
1:24:45
Paul Illingworth: exactly.
1:24:46
And that's one of the things I love now.
1:24:47
I mean, you know, I'd rather be, I'd rather be outside than
1:24:50
sitting here at the moment.
1:24:51
I'd rather be riding my tractor around riding my a TV, going and
1:24:54
mowing grass, walking with my dogs.
1:24:57
Yes.
1:24:57
You know, and, and that's another thing that we, we used to do as well.
1:25:01
But you did this with your kids?
1:25:02
I did it with my kids, yeah.
1:25:04
We used to go to the park, we used to walk the dogs on a regular basis,
1:25:07
teach them things to do with nature.
1:25:10
Mm-hmm.
1:25:10
The problem we have right now, Ruper, is that you've got kids that are growing up
1:25:16
with parents that almost grew up exactly the same way that they're growing up.
1:25:24
Mm-hmm.
1:25:24
Because you had computer games started in the nineties.
1:25:27
Mm.
1:25:27
They grew up with computer games.
1:25:28
They're now having kids.
1:25:30
So if the, if the parents don't know to go out.
1:25:34
Themselves and get things done.
1:25:36
Mm-hmm.
1:25:36
And want to stay in the house and want to watch television.
1:25:39
The kids are gonna be grow up exactly the same way.
1:25:43
So I, it's really, should our, should we be dealing with this from the point of
1:25:48
view of what should the kids be doing?
1:25:49
Or should we try, try to educate the parents in what they should be doing?
1:25:54
I guess
1:25:55
Rupert Isaacson: that's the other, you know, too, as you
1:25:57
say, like when, when I was a kid.
1:25:58
When you were a kid even like when I was in the country in England growing up,
1:26:02
that not everyone had a car by any means.
1:26:04
We didn't
1:26:04
Paul Illingworth: have one.
1:26:05
Rupert Isaacson: No.
1:26:05
And I'm talking about also people that lived like out on farms,
1:26:08
didn't necessarily have cars.
1:26:09
They'd walked to the top of their driveway, walk to the village, get
1:26:12
a bus or take a bicycle or whatever.
1:26:14
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
1:26:15
Rupert Isaacson: A lot of places didn't have electricity even growing
1:26:17
up, I remember on remote farms.
1:26:20
And then of course that will change somewhere in the eighties.
1:26:22
But crucially, I think that there was a lot of movement.
1:26:28
You had to move, right?
1:26:30
You, you, you, you didn't have an option if you wanted to move
1:26:35
yourself from one place to another to not do it with your body.
1:26:40
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
1:26:41
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
1:26:41
Now this is difficult.
1:26:43
If you grew up in a subdivision that has no public transport and you are
1:26:47
the only option is cars you might be able to ride your bicycle around, you
1:26:51
know, the cul-de-sacs or whatever.
1:26:53
But, but as you say, I guess then you do have things like skateboarding.
1:26:56
You do have things like, but it's very difficult not to
1:26:59
end up indoors on a computer.
1:27:03
Yeah.
1:27:03
And it's marketed at you and as you say, with parents who are maybe,
1:27:07
you know, two job parents or single parent, you know, more than one kid.
1:27:13
But I think you did put your finger on it when you talked about community.
1:27:19
So the way I would think about community as tribe.
1:27:23
And as you know, I spent a lot of time in Africa living with tribes
1:27:27
and my own family's very tribal.
1:27:29
I grew up with a lot of cousins, you know, southern Africans and there were
1:27:33
always just a procession of cousins coming through the house from everywhere.
1:27:36
And it was considered normal that we'd all end up at each other's
1:27:40
places at whenever, and you could kind of stay as long as you wanted.
1:27:44
It was all right.
1:27:45
You had to muck in, but everyone was always welcome everywhere.
1:27:49
That level of, so, you know, and so to some degree we were
1:27:51
all in service to each other.
1:27:52
Right.
1:27:57
I think I, I wonder if we've lost the habit of that, so that as you
1:28:01
say, yes, sometimes church, you know, but, and, and then you moved, you,
1:28:06
you didn't have that growing up.
1:28:08
But when you got to say Houston with your kids, you saw the value of it.
1:28:13
Why did you see the value of it when you didn't have it growing
1:28:16
up, and why did you know that that was something you had to give them?
1:28:19
Paul Illingworth: Well, you know, I think, to be quite honest with
1:28:21
you, it was, it was a really a case of what are the community doing.
1:28:27
So, you know, when we first moved over here and, and started to make contact
1:28:32
with, with local people and, and they had kids in the subdivision that we lived in,
1:28:36
it's like, well, what are the kids doing?
1:28:38
Oh, they're going down the road and they're playing T-ball,
1:28:40
they're playing baseball there.
1:28:41
Right, right next to where the house was.
1:28:44
There was there was a little sports field there.
1:28:47
And so, you know, we went down there to see what was going on.
1:28:50
Knew nothing about baseball T-Ball, you know.
1:28:54
Or any of the sports whatsoever.
1:28:56
Jack, my son was six at the time when we moved to the us.
1:29:00
My daughter wasn't even born.
1:29:02
She was born a couple of years after I moved over here.
1:29:05
So, you know, I had a 6-year-old that would've ended up being
1:29:09
stuck in the house all the time for didn't do something with him.
1:29:12
And I was, I was working, I mean, I, you know, I had a very,
1:29:14
very high busy, high level job.
1:29:17
But I had to do something.
1:29:18
So yeah, we would talk to the neighbors, the neighbors had kids,
1:29:22
find out what the kids were doing.
1:29:23
We used the community, if you like, to figure out what to do with the kids.
1:29:30
And, and that's what we did all the time.
1:29:32
So your tribe really, it, it's almost like.
1:29:37
It was a small subdivision that we lived in.
1:29:39
There was probably only about 20, 25 houses, but that was our community.
1:29:43
Yeah.
1:29:43
And that's plus the fact, you know, that I would, when I would go to work, I, I, as I
1:29:48
built the business up in Houston and start to hire people, I'd go to their houses,
1:29:53
talk to their families, what do you do?
1:29:55
You know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
1:29:57
Where do you do things?
1:29:58
How I needed to learn how the American system worked as well as you, you know
1:30:03
this because you came over here and lived over here for a number of years.
1:30:07
Yeah.
1:30:07
It's very different.
1:30:08
Very different from being living in Europe.
1:30:11
Yes, it is.
1:30:13
And we, but we've now got to the point 20 years later where you're absolutely right.
1:30:18
There is no public transport.
1:30:20
There is no way of getting around other than being driven by your parents.
1:30:24
Yeah.
1:30:24
So as a kid, all you do get, you get put in a car, you get taken somewhere.
1:30:30
Yeah.
1:30:30
You go and do that activity, you go back home.
1:30:32
And how much of those activities are related to the actual community that
1:30:38
you live in, and how much are related to the school is difficult to say.
1:30:41
It's probably more school orientated.
1:30:45
In other words, whatever the school kids do, that's what you do, but
1:30:49
the kids are being transported from one place to another.
1:30:53
Yeah.
1:30:53
One of the things that I have noticed is getting, and I dunno what it's like in
1:30:59
Europe, but is getting very, very bad over here, is what I call self gratification.
1:31:07
People are growing up with an attitude that the world owes them something,
1:31:12
community owes them something, and they expect to get that out of the
1:31:18
community without really putting an awful lot back into it again.
1:31:22
It, it's, it's almost like.
1:31:24
It's a bit of selfishness to a certain extent.
1:31:28
You know, I've always looked at life as you get out of it, whatever you put in.
1:31:32
So you've got to be prepared to put something into life in order
1:31:35
to be able to get something out.
1:31:36
And unfortunately, I think kids today, particularly in the, certainly where
1:31:42
I live in the US, expects everything to be handed to them on a plate.
1:31:46
Rupert Isaacson: I mean, I think every older generation has always said this
1:31:49
about every younger generation forever.
1:31:50
I'm sure
1:31:51
Paul Illingworth: they have.
1:31:51
Absolutely.
1:31:51
I mean, you remember
1:31:52
Rupert Isaacson: your dad would've moaned at you about that.
1:31:54
Yes.
1:31:54
And my dad and granddad moaned at me about that, you know, but I think
1:31:59
perhaps each generation is right in that what they observe is young
1:32:05
people trying to figure it out and.
1:32:09
While they're in that figuring out process, they get stuff wrong, you know?
1:32:14
Yeah.
1:32:14
And that noise, the older generation, but I, I do think it's more acute now
1:32:18
in terms of like, so for example, here in Germany where I am, my kids can
1:32:22
take a bicycle and ride to the store.
1:32:23
They can walk to the store, they can go and figure out how to do
1:32:27
their own shopping, and they're at their 10 and eight, and they can do
1:32:30
that, they can do that safely here.
1:32:32
They can walk to their grandparents' house.
1:32:35
This is all very normal, right?
1:32:36
They can go down to the creek and play.
1:32:39
And you are not paranoid about their safety in the way
1:32:45
that one would be in the USA.
1:32:47
Mm-hmm.
1:32:47
I wouldn't probably let them do it in the USA unless we were in a very, very
1:32:51
rural area and kind of had control of the land and the environment.
1:32:55
Mm-hmm.
1:32:55
And.
1:32:57
It is still safer here.
1:32:59
And then you have, you do have a lot of what are called vet
1:33:02
irons here, which are clubs.
1:33:04
So, you know, we're part of a, a right vet in a riding club, which means that
1:33:09
if we all put our money in, we all have access to these facilities like arenas
1:33:13
and jumps and things like that, that we wouldn't be able to put in ourselves
1:33:17
privately, but collectively we can.
1:33:19
Mm-hmm.
1:33:19
But we have to do a certain number of work hours as well as putting in dues.
1:33:24
We've actually, so the kids have to show up and, and, and, and there's
1:33:27
work hours for kids in the V Right.
1:33:29
It's not just for the, for the parents.
1:33:31
And then there's nabu, which is our local nature conservation, and we have
1:33:36
to go out and into the orchards around here and clean out the owl boxes.
1:33:43
Get up a ladder, do that, deal, scoop out the ship.
1:33:46
But there's interesting stuff in there.
1:33:47
And then you find door mice and you find, you know, and there is this.
1:33:52
Yeah, I think, I think you nailed it with community.
1:33:55
It's there people say it's not as good as it was.
1:33:59
You know, you talk to the old generation here, they say it's, it's,
1:34:01
Paul Illingworth: oh no, I'm, it's been eroded, but,
1:34:03
Rupert Isaacson: but it's still much stronger, I think.
1:34:05
And there's a very good public transport.
1:34:07
So you, you know, we're out here, for example, Rowan, my 23-year-old son who
1:34:12
you know very well, who's autistic.
1:34:13
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
1:34:14
When
1:34:14
Rupert Isaacson: he's in Texas, he has to drive everywhere
1:34:16
and thank God he can drive.
1:34:17
But here he takes the trains all over and he stays in youth hostels and he
1:34:22
explores different cities in, in Europe.
1:34:24
And he can do that because there is still kind of a, of a system.
1:34:29
But
1:34:32
you, you, when you were a kid, you didn't have that community involvement.
1:34:37
You had to make it through that rugby team, right.
1:34:39
You had to manufacture it.
1:34:40
What would've happened to you if you hadn't done that?
1:34:45
Paul Illingworth: Oh.
1:34:49
I'll be quite honest with you, I think I would've ended up being a
1:34:52
lot more insular and isolated Okay.
1:34:58
Than, than I was.
1:35:00
I mean, you know, the community I went, you know, my, my high school
1:35:05
had 600 kids which is nothing compared to what you have today.
1:35:10
And as you worked your way up through the years in the school, you almost
1:35:14
got to know everybody in the school.
1:35:16
I wouldn't say you knew everybody, but you know, you, you, you got it.
1:35:20
It really was being part of the community.
1:35:23
Now, it didn't matter whether you played a sport, you could be part of
1:35:26
the community by supporting one of the teams or just hanging out with
1:35:31
the guys that played in the teams.
1:35:32
If I did, if I hadn't have had anything to do with rugby, this.
1:35:36
I was involved in a lot of stuff at school as far as sports are concerned,
1:35:40
because I was a very sporty person.
1:35:41
Now, if I wasn't a sporty person or for whatever reason I couldn't do
1:35:46
the sport, I think I would've been a very, very insular type of person.
1:35:52
'Cause I think that's what made me, you know, I'm quite
1:35:55
gregarious, I'm very outgoing.
1:35:57
I'll talk to anybody, you know, that mm-hmm.
1:35:59
That has, that has, that's part of my character that really
1:36:02
built up through those years.
1:36:04
Mm-hmm.
1:36:04
Because prior to going to, at 10 years old, so, so I, I
1:36:11
wanna backtrack a little bit.
1:36:12
Okay.
1:36:13
So when my father got really, really sick and the building business started
1:36:17
to collapse in London I was six, seven years old and we couldn't afford
1:36:23
to live in the townhouse in London.
1:36:25
So, my mother who had some contacts, shall we say with the theater people
1:36:31
in London, I'm not gonna mention any names, but she she was good friends
1:36:34
with a couple of very famous actresses.
1:36:37
One of the actresses had an old cottage out in the Hartford sheer
1:36:41
countryside that had no electricity.
1:36:43
It had no water, running water, just as you were talking about.
1:36:48
And it needed work doing to it.
1:36:49
Well, my dad was able to do some work.
1:36:52
He couldn't do a lot of heavy work, but he was able to do some work.
1:36:55
We moved into that cottage and spent three years there.
1:36:59
But I went to a local school that had 20 kids in it.
1:37:04
So my junior school year Village school,
1:37:07
Rupert Isaacson: right?
1:37:07
Yeah.
1:37:07
Village
1:37:08
Paul Illingworth: school.
1:37:08
Yeah.
1:37:09
20 kids, right?
1:37:10
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:37:12
And tribe.
1:37:14
So I tribe, yeah.
1:37:16
I spent this little cottage was in the middle of nowhere.
1:37:19
Yeah.
1:37:19
With fields all round country.
1:37:21
All round.
1:37:21
I was surrounded by nature, but it was tribes.
1:37:24
So when we then moved into the council house in Hoon, which was a lot more urban,
1:37:30
shall we say, than than rural, that's when I started to get bullied because I wasn't
1:37:36
used to, I didn't know anybody there.
1:37:37
There was no tribe I'd lost it all completely.
1:37:40
And I was a bit of a loner.
1:37:42
I mean, I really, really was.
1:37:43
It was just me and my sister living there.
1:37:45
My mom and dad didn't know anybody.
1:37:46
They couldn't go out.
1:37:47
They couldn't do anything.
1:37:48
There was no community whatsoever.
1:37:51
So I became,
1:37:56
I definitely did become a loner.
1:37:57
'cause I can remember going out, what do I wanna do?
1:37:59
Well, I'm gonna go buy some, get some bicycle parts and build myself a bicycle.
1:38:03
'cause I couldn't afford to buy one.
1:38:04
So I ended up building a bicycle and then I started to get round.
1:38:08
But then I went into the high school, the secondary school, and all of a sudden.
1:38:14
I was able to build my own community there, and that's when
1:38:18
I started to be more outgoing.
1:38:19
So it's very, very easy.
1:38:22
Not you, you've, you've gotta work on those skills.
1:38:25
I think.
1:38:26
It doesn't come naturally and it doesn't come natural.
1:38:28
Yeah.
1:38:28
I, I think, I
1:38:29
Rupert Isaacson: think you're right.
1:38:29
I'm sort of thinking back to some of my own, because as you know,
1:38:32
I'm also very gregarious, but I wasn't always, and everyone's had
1:38:37
the experience of being bullied and everyone's had, everyone's had that and
1:38:40
Paul Illingworth: yeah, I
1:38:41
Rupert Isaacson: had to deal with it.
1:38:42
Right.
1:38:42
And there was also, I think, yeah, a crucial period of learning how to build
1:38:48
community through my love of horses.
1:38:50
And then of course, you, you find other people that have
1:38:53
that and you share that with us.
1:38:54
It was the local hunt.
1:38:56
Because you didn't need money to be in the hunt.
1:38:57
You know, you, you, you just had to be part of the pony club, right.
1:39:00
And the pony club let you hunt for free and subsidized everything
1:39:04
to get people onto that track.
1:39:06
And it was good 'cause it ended up being kind of a career track for me
1:39:09
alongside everything else I've done.
1:39:11
But it wasn't always like that and I wasn't terribly well accepted 'cause
1:39:16
I was a London boy not for English.
1:39:18
Like in less coming up through that and you had to kind of find your way.
1:39:23
Do you think that if the computer games and that whole thing had been
1:39:28
around when you were a kid on there, on that estate, would you have
1:39:33
fallen into that trap, do you think?
1:39:35
Paul Illingworth: Quite possibly.
1:39:36
I can't say no.
1:39:38
Yeah, because, you know, it's, it's, it's one of these things.
1:39:42
I mean, I think I mentioned earlier on, you know, I don't sit around watching
1:39:45
television or reading newspapers.
1:39:47
I gave up reading newspapers about 40 years ago when every time I opened the
1:39:51
newspaper, there was nothing good in them.
1:39:53
So I just stopped reading.
1:39:54
Was there anything good in that?
1:39:55
No, I don't think, I don't think there ever was any, anyway.
1:39:59
You know, and I mean, I would, I would watch the television really just to find
1:40:02
out what was happening with the news.
1:40:04
And even today, if I watch television, it's B, B, C, I just
1:40:06
watch B, you know, the B, b, C news, because I get worldwide news.
1:40:09
I don't get the, shall we say the American stuff that get
1:40:12
shoved down your throat here.
1:40:14
Yeah.
1:40:14
But yeah, you know.
1:40:17
If there was computer games around.
1:40:18
I mean, I've tried computer games when my kids were grown up and
1:40:22
they had computer games, but yeah.
1:40:24
But they're just not something that really, they don't engage me enough.
1:40:27
You know?
1:40:28
It, it's, it's, it's too tunnel vision for me.
1:40:31
I like to look at the broader picture of what's going on around me.
1:40:35
But, you know, it definitely being able to, to go out and get involved
1:40:42
with community activities Yeah.
1:40:45
Is, is, is, and it is, it comes back to the tribe.
1:40:48
It doesn't matter what your tribe is.
1:40:50
It can be a subdivision, you know, it can be a team at school, it can be anything.
1:40:54
But I think tribe is very, very important.
1:40:58
There, there was, there's, there's somewhere that, that I want to go here
1:41:02
and it's like in, it's, it's in the back of my mind and I'm just trying
1:41:05
to find the, the right words for it.
1:41:07
But.
1:41:10
One of my most recent experiences is running the escape room business.
1:41:15
Mm-hmm.
1:41:15
Okay.
1:41:15
Now, for those of you that may not know what an escape room
1:41:19
is, I'm sure most people do.
1:41:20
You actually, you don't get locked into a room and have to escape.
1:41:23
It's a themed room where there are puzzles that you have to solve to
1:41:28
work your way through the game.
1:41:29
So it's kind of a game, it's an interactive game.
1:41:33
And the staff that I had running the, this business, it, it know it was
1:41:37
a very, very successful business.
1:41:39
We had eight different games all themed differently.
1:41:41
We had a pirate one, we had a Scooby-Doo one we had a laboratory one, a haunted
1:41:46
mansion, so different types of things.
1:41:50
Almost all the staff that we employed at that business, and
1:41:53
we had 12 to 15 people were.
1:41:58
Guys and girls that were anything from high school age that's literally
1:42:02
17 years old through to 23, 24.
1:42:06
So mainly young people that were either at school or were at college or had
1:42:12
decided not to go to college, but needed, were looking for another career.
1:42:17
So I had five years of dealing with people, both guys and
1:42:23
girls of that age group, right?
1:42:27
And so I've got quite a lot of experience of actually what we are
1:42:31
talking about here to date through that.
1:42:35
Now, the people that we employed, there were basically three different positions,
1:42:42
but everybody started off as a host.
1:42:45
And as a host, you're, you're dealing with the customers when they
1:42:48
come in the store, you're talking to them, you're engaging them.
1:42:52
You have to learn to basically explain to them what.
1:42:56
The business is about what the game is about, that they're gonna play.
1:43:00
And then you help them to go into the room, brief them going in the room, and
1:43:05
then when they finish playing the game, you take them out of the room, take a
1:43:09
photograph, say thank you very much.
1:43:11
So it's customer service.
1:43:12
You are teaching people to communicate?
1:43:15
Mm-hmm.
1:43:15
Okay.
1:43:17
The other side of the business, once they've learned all that side
1:43:20
of the business, is going into the rooms and resetting the room.
1:43:24
So after you play a game, you've gotta put all the props
1:43:27
and everything back in place.
1:43:28
Okay.
1:43:29
That's attention to detail, totally different skillset, but
1:43:33
everybody has to learn it and.
1:43:36
Eventually when you're good, you start to time yourself.
1:43:40
So now you, you're giving yourself a challenge because you're seeing
1:43:43
how fast you can actually put all that stuff back in place again.
1:43:46
And there was little competitions we used to have, and you'd get a
1:43:49
$25 gift card for the fastest person per, you know, at a certain time.
1:43:54
The next set of skills you learn, when you learn how to reset the games, you
1:43:58
know, the games, you become a game master.
1:44:00
A game master is like playing a computer game, but with real people.
1:44:07
You're looking at a TV screen that has multiple cameras.
1:44:11
You are helping the people in the rooms, you're sending them clues,
1:44:15
it, you're answering questions.
1:44:17
So it's very, very focused, but looking like a computer going right.
1:44:23
And you don't run one game at a time.
1:44:25
The game Masters are running three or four games at a time.
1:44:28
So you may have, you can have eight people playing a game.
1:44:32
You can have four times eight people, or 32 people that you're responsible
1:44:37
for making sure they have a good time.
1:44:39
That's what the business is all about.
1:44:41
So where am I going with this?
1:44:44
How do you pick people that you're gonna hire?
1:44:47
Because you don't hire people as a game master straight away.
1:44:51
They've gotta learn the business.
1:44:52
It's like starting off as a deckhand and becoming the captain.
1:44:55
The captain is the game master.
1:44:57
Alright.
1:44:58
So we had to pick people and nine times outta 10, nine times outta 10,
1:45:05
the people that we interviewed had no communication skills whatsoever.
1:45:10
They could be 17, 18 years old, high schoolers.
1:45:13
They could be people that have been to college.
1:45:16
We ha we would interview people and we do zoom interviews.
1:45:19
We'd interview people that have very good resumes, five years of customer service.
1:45:25
They couldn't talk to anybody.
1:45:26
I'd do a Zoom interview with people and ask 'em questions, and they'd just stare
1:45:30
at me like a deer in the headlights.
1:45:31
They had no idea.
1:45:33
Did we hire those people?
1:45:34
Yes, we did, because it's a way of actually teaching what what we
1:45:39
made them was part of our tribe.
1:45:43
This is where I'm coming with this, right?
1:45:44
Because it was a great opportunity for us to actually take people from the
1:45:48
outside world, bring them into our tribe, and teach them skills going forward.
1:45:55
And the ones that succeeded were the ones that were able to embrace
1:46:00
the, the, the job responsibilities.
1:46:03
We, we hired high school girls that, that wouldn't say boo to a mouse three months
1:46:09
after coming to work for us, if, you know, they were literally throwing people
1:46:13
out the door that, you know, somebody came in drunk on a Saturday night.
1:46:17
That's, that's how good they got because they got confidence in themselves.
1:46:22
Now there's a point I'm going here with this.
1:46:25
Okay.
1:46:26
The point is that a lot of the boys, the boys struggled more with
1:46:33
the customer service side and the interaction than the girls did.
1:46:37
The girls always seemed to have the ability to be able to deal with customers.
1:46:42
What did the boys wanna do?
1:46:44
They wanted to become game masters because they were all gamers and
1:46:49
they wanted Right, that's, yeah.
1:46:50
Yeah.
1:46:50
They wanted to sit in a room on their own, not have to deal with,
1:46:55
not have to deal with the real world, but they were very good at
1:46:58
controlling what people were doing.
1:47:00
And they were the best game masters we had were gamers.
1:47:04
But because we made them go through the whole customer service thing
1:47:09
and they, once they got to become game masters, they didn't just sit
1:47:12
there and be a game master forever.
1:47:14
We used to make 'em go back up front and do customer service.
1:47:17
Okay.
1:47:18
But.
1:47:19
They were also very, very good at resetting the games 'cause they became
1:47:23
focused on what they were doing.
1:47:25
Rupert Isaacson: This is really interesting because basically what
1:47:28
you're, you're saying is that Yeah, something So community involvement,
1:47:32
that is an escape room business.
1:47:35
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
1:47:36
Rupert Isaacson: With tribe run by somebody like you who's taught people to
1:47:40
do much more complex and dangerous things with much high levels of responsibility.
1:47:44
So you're not worried, you, you, you like, you know, you can get these
1:47:47
people to where they need to go.
1:47:50
And yet at the same time, it's very real.
1:47:53
And that to my mind is a very interesting place to end up in this conversation
1:47:57
because you are, you are in the gaming world there in subdivision world.
1:48:04
This, these things are happening in the suburbs, often in strip malls.
1:48:07
I mean they might be downtown, but a lot of escape malls around,
1:48:10
you know, in, in strip mall land.
1:48:12
It's tapping into what that generation knows.
1:48:18
And I'm thinking, you know, one of the other things that we've often looked
1:48:22
at and and done stuff with with our autism work is LARPing Live action.
1:48:26
Role play.
1:48:27
Yeah, yeah.
1:48:28
Because it's, it's also, you know, it it, and that, that world is a brilliant world
1:48:32
for people that are sometimes neurodiverse that, you know, the Ren fare world, the
1:48:38
SCA, those of you dunno, the SCA is Yeah.
1:48:40
Or do a whole episode on the SCA.
1:48:42
It's, it's, it's, that's a great rabbit hole.
1:48:45
But gaming actually, because what, what is gaming?
1:48:49
Gaming is.
1:48:50
When you do it live well then you're back to your rugby team, aren't you?
1:48:54
You're back to community.
1:48:56
You're back to community and, and having this challenge that you have
1:48:59
to fulfill when then you're back to the hunting and gathering group.
1:49:01
You're back to the group of lads going out there with the spear, you know,
1:49:05
and there's an older one trying to keep them safe, but also enough risk
1:49:08
that they can actually get the kill.
1:49:10
There's the girls out there gathering and it's very dangerous.
1:49:13
They've got to dodge lines while they do it.
1:49:14
They've got a track, they've got to know that this plant is poisonous and looks
1:49:19
exactly like that one that isn't and beyond absolute high alert with that
1:49:23
while keeping all the kids safe and da da.
1:49:25
All of this takes a lot of communication.
1:49:27
Communication takes drive.
1:49:28
So it is just really interesting that you, you ended up actually, I think answering
1:49:32
the question of what, what do we do?
1:49:34
Which is go reach out to an escape room if, if, if you are that mom
1:49:40
whose son can't come out the basement.
1:49:44
Perhaps you could do worse than to look up who's your local live action
1:49:48
role play group and who's your It's, it's, I I mean, it, it is,
1:49:53
Paul Illingworth: there is, it's, it's something that, that escape rooms can
1:49:58
be played by, by kids young as seven years old and really, really enjoy it.
1:50:03
And we've seen a, over the five years of running that business, we've seen
1:50:06
multiple families that every time we'd have a new game, they'd play all our
1:50:10
games, the whole family would come, they play all our games, we get a new one.
1:50:13
They would hassle us when you open in a new game so we can come back and play.
1:50:17
You've convinced me, I'm gonna take my kids to an escape route.
1:50:20
They were, they were treating it as community, as a child.
1:50:23
Yeah, no,
1:50:24
Rupert Isaacson: you, you've, you've totally hit the nail on the head here.
1:50:27
I think Paul, because I, I did a, I did a podcast a few months
1:50:30
back with a, a really interesting lady called Lainey Liberty, who.
1:50:34
Took a year off to travel with her son and they just never went back.
1:50:39
And they now run a business together.
1:50:41
And what they do is get, they do board games, they run gaming cafes.
1:50:44
Mm-hmm.
1:50:45
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
1:50:46
Yeah.
1:50:46
And it's
1:50:46
Rupert Isaacson: very similar.
1:50:46
It's, it's, it's, it's the same thing.
1:50:48
Yeah.
1:50:48
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
1:50:49
It's exactly the same thing.
1:50:51
It's getting the kids, you know, if, if you get kids that, that are
1:50:55
not sporty and there's a lot of kids that aren't sure, the majority of
1:50:58
them I think are not sporty at all.
1:51:00
And you're not gonna get involved with that type of community.
1:51:03
Well pick something else.
1:51:05
Yes.
1:51:05
Playing chess, you know, checkers, board games.
1:51:09
What we do here with friends, you know, we live in the countryside.
1:51:12
We are miles from anywhere.
1:51:13
Right.
1:51:14
But what do we do Every month?
1:51:16
There's six or eight of us all get together, couples,
1:51:19
and we play board games.
1:51:20
Yeah.
1:51:20
We sit round, we drink wine, we play board games, we talk.
1:51:24
It's community.
1:51:25
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
1:51:25
Lainey convinced me, she said play board games with the kids if we game changer.
1:51:29
Yeah.
1:51:29
And.
1:51:30
I, I hadn't been, you know, I thought, oh, I don't need to do that.
1:51:34
You know, we're out with the horses.
1:51:35
We do, and I thought, no, she's right.
1:51:37
And we started and it completely changed the family dynamic.
1:51:40
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
1:51:41
Rupert Isaacson: It does.
1:51:42
So, so that is, listen to your Auntie Paul moms.
1:51:45
Yeah.
1:51:45
Paul Illingworth: There you go.
1:51:46
Rupert Isaacson: Start going to the escape rooms together and maybe, maybe
1:51:50
your son can escape the room that he's in and escape into somewhere.
1:51:55
It's gotta start somewhere.
1:51:56
I love that because, you know, you know me, I'm such a proponent of nature.
1:52:00
Yeah.
1:52:00
But not everyone has access.
1:52:02
And you also know how it is in, in Texas for example, you've gotta own that land.
1:52:06
There's not much public land out there.
1:52:08
Paul Illingworth: No.
1:52:09
Rupert Isaacson: And it's
1:52:09
Paul Illingworth: also too hot a lot of the time.
1:52:11
It is too hot Wanna go out, you know, in Texas, but other places not necessarily.
1:52:16
There you go.
1:52:17
Go find the and only get all Well, you
1:52:18
Rupert Isaacson: answered the question.
1:52:19
I I thought we were just gonna go round philosophical circle.
1:52:22
But that's so Paul, isn't it?
1:52:24
It's like, well actually Rupert, here's a solution.
1:52:27
I'm like, well Paul, actually
1:52:28
Paul Illingworth: you have Well the thing is that if I'd have mentioned that right
1:52:30
at the beginning, you know, they, we'd have had nothing to talk about for that.
1:52:33
That is true.
1:52:33
For the next two hours.
1:52:34
So there we go.
1:52:35
We got there in the end.
1:52:36
Got an escape room.
1:52:37
Rupert Isaacson: We, alright, well, I think, let, let's end on that note.
1:52:40
I've, I've got to go get horses off the hill before it gets dark.
1:52:43
Paul Illingworth: I've gotta go mo mo mow another 20 acres.
1:52:46
So here we go.
1:52:47
Rupert Isaacson: All right.
1:52:47
In the hot sun.
1:52:48
All right.
1:52:48
The
1:52:49
Paul Illingworth: hot sun.
1:52:50
Rupert Isaacson: Alright.
1:52:51
Paul Illingworth: You take care.
1:52:52
Rupert Isaacson: Alright.
1:52:52
I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm off to an escape room with my kids.
1:52:55
Paul Illingworth: Alright, good luck.
1:52:56
Alright,
1:52:56
Rupert Isaacson: Cheers.
1:52:57
Bye.
1:52:58
Bye.
1:52:58
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1:53:02
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1:53:06
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1:54:16
Welcome back to Live Free, ride Free.
1:54:17
I've got a very, very dear friend, old friend, um, Paul Illingworth here.
1:54:22
Um, Paul is someone I've known for quite a while and who has done many, many,
1:54:28
many interesting things in his life.
1:54:31
Um, and one of the reasons I asked him to come on was he
1:54:35
really started from a place that
1:54:42
I wouldn't say disadvantaged.
1:54:43
I wouldn't say advantaged, but I'd say without an, an awful lot of
1:54:47
support and made his way in the world.
1:54:50
Um, and has actually helped quite a few people along the way as well, and has
1:54:56
been a great supporter of our work with Horse Boy Foundation and the work we've
1:55:01
done with autism and that sort of thing.
1:55:04
Um, big guy, big Heart, um, big story.
1:55:08
What I'd quite like to frame this story against though is, is we, I
1:55:12
think we all know that we're dealing with a bit of an epidemic at the
1:55:15
moment of lost young men, lost boys.
1:55:19
And this is something that's kind of crept up on us, um, over the last
1:55:25
10 15, but it's become more acute since COVID.
1:55:28
And in the work that I do, I get a lot of moms who have say three kids,
1:55:35
um, daughters doing great, um, you know, one at one married and off in
1:55:40
the career, one at college and getting her masters and a son age 21 to 25
1:55:45
who can't come out of the basement.
1:55:47
And this never used to be the case.
1:55:50
And it occurred to me, you know, while we were doing this uh, podcast, you know,
1:55:54
why is this, and friends of mine that I've known who could have been lost boys.
1:56:03
Um, but who went out into world to find themselves?
1:56:05
Can we examine this question a little bit?
1:56:07
How do you, how do you find your way to this kind of self-actualization?
1:56:12
Um, it's a, it's a pressing question at the moment.
1:56:15
So Paul, thanks for coming on the show.
1:56:17
Can you tell the listeners and viewers a little bit about who
1:56:21
you are and what you do currently?
1:56:22
And then we'll start with how you got there.
1:56:25
Paul Illingworth: Sure, yeah.
1:56:25
Well, my name is Paul Linworth.
1:56:27
Um, I currently live in Texas.
1:56:30
I've been over here for 27 years now.
1:56:34
Um, I moved over here back in 1998 when I was working in the oil and gas business.
1:56:39
I'm now actually retired, um, and I moved from Aberdeen.
1:56:44
To Houston in 1998, uh, to start a business there, um, for a very
1:56:50
good friend of mine who company was actually based in Singapore.
1:56:54
Um, so I came over here.
1:56:56
I was supposed to, to initially come to Texas for three months to get the
1:57:00
business started, then go back to Aberdeen and carry on what I was doing
1:57:03
over there and things kind of snowballed.
1:57:06
Um, I was very, very lucky and that having made the decision that I did
1:57:11
wanna move to Texas, that I managed to, um, to get myself a green card pre nine
1:57:15
11, which is, uh, which happened very quickly, and now it takes about 10 years.
1:57:20
Wow.
1:57:20
Um, yeah, it's, uh, it's taken at least 10 years to get a green card.
1:57:25
Um, and then I lived in Houston, um, for 14 years and
1:57:32
then moved out to the country.
1:57:33
I live, uh, about 30, 40 miles north, uh, northeast of
1:57:37
Austin, out in the countryside.
1:57:39
I've got a 20 acre ranch here.
1:57:41
Uh, I continued.
1:57:44
Houston for a while after we did move out of the Houston area
1:57:47
because I was still working there.
1:57:49
Um, and then I finally retired from the oil and gas business in 2019.
1:57:54
Uh, ran my own business in Austin until about a couple of months
1:57:59
ago when we sold the business.
1:58:01
So no, I am officially retired.
1:58:04
Rupert Isaacson: So you, you make yourself sound like a bloke who sort of just
1:58:07
kind of climbed the corporate ladder.
1:58:11
It's anything but the case.
1:58:14
Um, and just so that listeners get a bit of an idea, while I've
1:58:18
known Paul, um, 'cause we, I used to live in Austin as well.
1:58:21
Um, I've known him running a, uh, skydiving business, which
1:58:26
is keeping people alive while you chuck 'em out of airplanes.
1:58:31
Not easy.
1:58:32
Yeah.
1:58:32
And I've also known you run, um, a series of escape rooms, um, as well, even when
1:58:38
you didn't have to, even when you'd retired from the oil and gas business.
1:58:42
Because one of the things about Paul, ladies and gentlemen, he gets bored
1:58:45
very fast and he can't, you know, he can't, he can't abide not having
1:58:49
something to do and he tends to be very successful at, at what he does.
1:58:54
Before we start with how you got.
1:58:56
Up through the non-corporate ranks of, of, of your, of your career.
1:59:01
Why do you think it is, Paul, that when you pick up a business, you make it work?
1:59:08
I've only ever seen you make them work, and I've often watched you kind of a bit
1:59:12
awestruck and go, what, what's he got?
1:59:13
What is this Midas touch that Paul's got?
1:59:16
What, what, what do you put it down to?
1:59:18
Paul Illingworth: I don't, I don't actually think I do have a
1:59:20
Midas touch at all because I've.
1:59:24
Over the, over the years I've been involved in four, maybe
1:59:28
five different businesses.
1:59:29
Um, the skydiving business was very, very much an opportunistic thing whereby my
1:59:35
wife Jen, uh, and myself were sky divers.
1:59:39
I started jumping when I was in the military originally, but we got
1:59:42
into, into sports skydiving, uh, in the early two thousands in Texas.
1:59:47
The weather's a lot better over here, so obviously it's, it's a lot easier to
1:59:50
skydive than it was living in Scotland.
1:59:53
And an opportunity came up to buy a drop zone that was very poorly
1:59:58
managed, not particularly well run.
2:00:02
And the guy that, the guy and the girl that owned it, um, were ready
2:00:06
to leave and go do something else.
2:00:08
So, um, we could, we, the, the wife and I could just simply see the
2:00:13
potential there that we could really turn it into something special.
2:00:19
Uh, and we did.
2:00:20
We invested a bit more money in.
2:00:22
We bought another couple of airplanes.
2:00:23
We both got ourselves certified as part Love.
2:00:25
How?
2:00:26
Oh, and we
2:00:26
Rupert Isaacson: bought another couple of airplanes.
2:00:28
Paul Illingworth: Yeah, well, just as you do, just like, like,
2:00:30
Rupert Isaacson: you know, I'm actually nipping out to get one now, Paul.
2:00:32
Do you want me to Yeah, right.
2:00:33
Yeah.
2:00:33
Put up for you as well.
2:00:34
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
2:00:34
We're not, you know, we're not talking about Cessna citations or,
2:00:37
you know, billion dollar airplanes, skydiving airplanes tend to be at
2:00:41
the bottom end of the barrel as far as airplanes are concerned.
2:00:44
So it wasn't really terribly difficult and we didn't have
2:00:47
to put a lot of money in it.
2:00:48
But, so to start off with, we just started very, very small and we built
2:00:52
things up slowly and, and, you know, over the 13 years we owned the business, we
2:00:56
turned it into a very, very successful business with a lot of hard work.
2:00:59
I mean, it was hard, Rupert, I remember, I remember it stressing you.
2:01:02
Yeah, I was working, I was working as the CEO of an oil and gas service
2:01:08
company, spending about 200 days a year.
2:01:10
Traveling overseas, working in business development, and we were
2:01:14
also running the skydiving business that was open seven days a week.
2:01:18
Um, I would come, we would travel out to the skydiving business at the weekends.
2:01:23
We had a manager out there that ran it during the week, and we'd be,
2:01:27
my wife was a skydiving instructor.
2:01:29
Uh, and I would be flying the airplanes.
2:01:31
You know, we work seven days a week.
2:01:33
That's all there is to it.
2:01:34
Yeah.
2:01:35
You know, and then.
2:01:36
After.
2:01:37
It's just putting in the hours.
2:01:38
It's just putting the hours in.
2:01:40
It's as simple as that.
2:01:41
I mean, I'll be quite honest with you, I didn't get where I was in this position in
2:01:45
the world today by sitting around reading a newspaper and watching television.
2:01:49
Um, you know, you've got, you've gotta be prepared to work hard
2:01:54
and that's all there is to it.
2:01:55
But it's finding the thing to do.
2:01:57
And as, as you mentioned, you know, the escape room business as well, that
2:02:01
Jen and I love doing escape rooms.
2:02:03
And it's the same thing.
2:02:04
We love skydiving.
2:02:05
We bought skydiving business, we love escape rooms.
2:02:07
And escape room business came up for sale that was 30 minutes drive
2:02:10
from our house here in Austin.
2:02:12
We went and had a look at it, looked at the books, thought I
2:02:15
think we can make something outta this and actually do better.
2:02:19
And that's what we did.
2:02:20
But uh, you know, it's almost like, you know, they say.
2:02:25
What, what?
2:02:25
What's the best thing about owning a boat?
2:02:27
Well, the best thing about owning a boat is when you sell it, and
2:02:30
it's a bit like owning a business.
2:02:32
You've gotta have an exit strategy if you own a business.
2:02:34
We had an exit strategy for the skydiving business.
2:02:37
We had an exit strategy for the escape prune business.
2:02:40
What, what those strategies?
2:02:42
Well, it was basically just simply get to a certain point in terms of
2:02:45
income and, and own the business.
2:02:47
For so many years, the skydiving business was supposed to be 10 years.
2:02:52
Uh, X number of dollars of, of profit.
2:02:55
Uh, we ended up owning the business for 13 years.
2:02:58
It just took a little bit longer to sell it than we expected.
2:03:01
The Escape Room business, we had a five year plan.
2:03:04
Uh, we hit all the targets on the escape room business despite the
2:03:07
fact that we bought it a year before COVID, where we bought it six months
2:03:10
before COVID actually happened.
2:03:13
Um, but very quickly we recovered after COVID expanded the business as well.
2:03:17
Took a punt that things would come back strong, and they did.
2:03:21
We had a five year plan.
2:03:22
We sold the business.
2:03:25
If you look at COVID and when COVID sort of started to ease off a little
2:03:30
bit, we sold the business five years from then, three months ago.
2:03:34
Okay.
2:03:35
So, you know, I, I've been lucky, Rupert.
2:03:39
It's not just, it's not, but you've gotta be prepared to work hard.
2:03:43
You've gotta seize an opportunity when you see it.
2:03:45
And never be afraid.
2:03:47
Never be afraid to go and do something.
2:03:49
That's really what it comes down to.
2:03:50
Rupert Isaacson: Well, let, let's talk about never be afraid.
2:03:52
So again, for listeners, um, you will have read the show notes so you
2:03:56
actually know the sort of slightly more swashbuckling story that, that, that
2:04:01
than Paul is giving away right now.
2:04:03
But we're gonna go back and we're gonna swash and buckle a bit.
2:04:06
Um, you know, Paul, I also know you as an aviator.
2:04:11
I also know you as Ex Special Forces.
2:04:13
I also know you as Ex Merchant Navy, and I know you, you know, and all of these
2:04:19
tough, uh, envi environments to come up through Rugby League, in which there's a
2:04:27
ton of fear and okay, you're a big guy.
2:04:30
You know, whenever I'm referring to Paul to friends, I automatically
2:04:34
say, big Paul, you're a big guy.
2:04:36
But that's being big's.
2:04:37
Not, you know how it is.
2:04:39
It's not the dog in the fight, it's the fight and the dog.
2:04:42
Um, you've had to face an awful lot of fear in your life.
2:04:48
So let's start back now.
2:04:50
Let's start with you as a boy.
2:04:52
Where are you born?
2:04:54
How'd you grow up?
2:04:55
And then how do you end up going from there to the military?
2:05:00
And then let's take it from there.
2:05:02
Paul Illingworth: Okay.
2:05:03
Um, I was actually born in Australia, um, but at a very, very early age
2:05:09
my parents moved back to London.
2:05:11
Um, so let's talk about my father for a start.
2:05:15
My father joined the Scots guards, um, in 1936 when he was 16 years old.
2:05:20
So well before can tell us us what the
2:05:21
Rupert Isaacson: Scots guards are, because not every listener's gonna know.
2:05:24
Paul Illingworth: Okay.
2:05:24
They, they, they.
2:05:27
So there are, there are, I think there's five or six
2:05:29
guards regiments, um, in the uk.
2:05:31
They're basically the guys that wear the red tunics and have the big
2:05:35
hats, the big black hats, and they do the guard at Buckingham Palace.
2:05:38
So those are what the guards do,
2:05:40
Rupert Isaacson: but they're also crack troops.
2:05:42
When it comes combat.
2:05:43
They're
2:05:44
Paul Illingworth: very, very much crack, crack troops.
2:05:45
They're always at the front of, of pretty much any battle.
2:05:49
Uh, my dad joined in 1936, um, but he actually started work
2:05:54
at 10 years old down the mines.
2:05:56
He was a Yorkshire born lad in Castleford in Yorkshire,
2:05:59
which is in northern England.
2:06:01
And at 10 years old, he was working down the coal mines,
2:06:04
Rupert Isaacson: which is amazing.
2:06:05
And I'm thinking about my son Ian, who you know, little man.
2:06:08
He's 10 now.
2:06:10
Paul Illingworth: And
2:06:10
Rupert Isaacson: he was just on the field helping me pull rag what?
2:06:13
And I'm feeling a bit guilty about, you know, asking him to, you know, help me.
2:06:17
And now you say 10, your dad was down the mines in York back then.
2:06:21
Wow.
2:06:21
He was, he was
2:06:22
Paul Illingworth: working, yeah, he was working down the mines, which
2:06:24
was a hard thing to do because his father was actually killed when he
2:06:27
was three years old in a mine crash.
2:06:29
Okay.
2:06:30
So he was raised by his aunt, um, his mother.
2:06:34
I think my grandmother on my father's side died when he was a very, very early age.
2:06:39
I'm not really too sure, but he was basically brought up
2:06:42
on his own, um, by my aunt.
2:06:45
He joined the Scots guards in 1936.
2:06:48
I said before the second World War started.
2:06:50
I don't really know why, other than the fact that he wanted to get out the mines.
2:06:54
And the earliest you could join the Army, army was six.
2:06:55
Why not a
2:06:56
Rupert Isaacson: Yorkshire line regimen?
2:06:57
Yeah.
2:06:57
Why, why the s Scott scars.
2:06:58
He's not, wasn't Scottish.
2:06:59
And you know,
2:07:01
Paul Illingworth: that.
2:07:02
That I honestly don't know, Rupert.
2:07:04
I mean, I really don't.
2:07:05
Yeah, I think he, he probably just headed down to London, um, at 16
2:07:09
with the idea of doing something and, and the Scots guards took him on.
2:07:13
I And you have
2:07:14
Rupert Isaacson: to be tall Right?
2:07:15
To go in the guard.
2:07:16
So he was probably a tall, you gotta
2:07:17
Paul Illingworth: be, you gotta be at least six foot.
2:07:19
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
2:07:19
Yeah.
2:07:19
Paul Illingworth: I think they've dropped that requirement now.
2:07:21
But in those days you had to be six foot and my dad was six two.
2:07:24
Pretty much the same as I was.
2:07:26
Um, yeah, so he was a pretty big guy as, as well.
2:07:30
Um, and you know, he was, he was in the Scots guards, he went to North
2:07:35
Africa, um, with the eight farming.
2:07:38
During the war is where my grandfather was
2:07:41
Rupert Isaacson: too.
2:07:41
Was he?
2:07:42
Yeah.
2:07:43
Paul Illingworth: So he was, he was part of the eighth Army and, and then he ended
2:07:46
up, um, being recruited into the Lrd gs, which is a long range desert group.
2:07:51
And those, those guys were the four, the forerunners to the formation of the SAS.
2:07:58
Um, so the lard, dgs, long Range Desert Group, they basically used to go and
2:08:02
scout things out in North Africa, which is where they were formed.
2:08:05
And then the SAS were formed in North Africa.
2:08:08
I think it was in 1942.
2:08:10
I can't remember exactly what the date was.
2:08:12
Um, so he was a career soldier pretty much.
2:08:16
Um, he stayed in the Scots guards, uh.
2:08:20
Until, I think it was 1948 or 1950, he got injured pretty badly at Monte Casino
2:08:27
during the Second World War when they were fighting coming up through Italy.
2:08:31
Um, and he took some time off then and he went back in again.
2:08:34
But eventually he was medically discharged because he took some
2:08:37
shrapnel in his back and never really recovered properly from it.
2:08:41
Um, but very, very much, um, an army man.
2:08:45
That's, that, you know, that's what he was.
2:08:48
Um, my mother also lied about her age during the Second World War and ended
2:08:52
up being what they call an AKA girl.
2:08:54
So in London, she was, uh, firing the, the guns at the German aircraft that
2:09:00
were coming over a bomb in London.
2:09:02
Um, and they met in London somewhere around about 1950.
2:09:06
I'm not too sure exactly when it was, but that's when my parents got together
2:09:12
Rupert Isaacson: and, uh, okay.
2:09:14
So.
2:09:16
How did they end up going to Australia?
2:09:17
How did they end up having you and then you come back?
2:09:20
My
2:09:20
Paul Illingworth: dad.
2:09:21
Okay.
2:09:21
My dad got into the building business, um, with my uncle,
2:09:27
who was my mother's brother.
2:09:29
Um, they got into rebuilding London.
2:09:32
That's really what it came down to.
2:09:33
And they, they had a pretty successful building business
2:09:36
in London in the early fifties.
2:09:39
Uh, and there was an opportunity because on my mother's side, there
2:09:42
was my mother's side of the family, um, had Australian connections.
2:09:46
'cause my grandfather went down to Australia.
2:09:48
He was a policeman.
2:09:49
He went down to Australia back in the, uh, the, the twenties, I think
2:09:54
it was the twenties and the thirties.
2:09:55
So there was family connections down there.
2:09:58
And they decided to go to Australia to, to, because there was a lot of building
2:10:02
going on, on the west coast in Perth.
2:10:04
Mm-hmm.
2:10:05
Um, so they went down, they went down there.
2:10:07
And that's how I ended up being born down there, basically.
2:10:10
But there was a lot going on in London and my dad felt that he really had to get
2:10:13
back to London, you know, which was where the, the, the main thrust of business was.
2:10:18
So that's why we moved back there when I was three months old.
2:10:22
Rupert Isaacson: Alright, so you are then born and brought up in London
2:10:26
Paul Illingworth: pretty much?
2:10:26
Yep.
2:10:27
You can, you can say that we lived in Bayswater.
2:10:29
The earliest recollections I have, uh, of like three, four years old was
2:10:34
living in a, a townhouse in Bayswater.
2:10:38
Um, and we pretty much stayed there until my dad had had his first back
2:10:44
problem, uh, which was what caused him to end up selling, having to sell
2:10:48
his business, et cetera, et cetera.
2:10:50
And that kind of like almost leads to the story of how we ended up
2:10:56
living in a council house on social security with no money, uh, because
2:11:03
he ended up losing the business.
2:11:04
You know, I think people took advantage of him, or should I say, he was a bit
2:11:09
too generous with the way that he was doing things and he went from having
2:11:12
a very successful building business to nothing in a fairly short period of time.
2:11:18
Rupert Isaacson: And being somewhat of an invalid from the Walgreens.
2:11:20
Yes.
2:11:20
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
2:11:20
As well.
2:11:21
He ended up, he had a, um, a spinal fusion.
2:11:26
Uh, I think the first one was in 1962 when I was six years old.
2:11:31
Uh, and he was laid up in bed for three, four months with that.
2:11:34
And he never really fully recovered.
2:11:36
The spinal fusions, even nowadays, are dodgy things back in the sixties.
2:11:40
It was just, it was horrendous, the stuff that they were doing.
2:11:43
And he never really recovered and he never really w work was able to work again.
2:11:47
Um, he had a second spinal fusion a couple of years later because the first
2:11:51
one didn't take, and that was even worse.
2:11:54
Um, and it just got to the point where he couldn't do anything.
2:11:57
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
2:11:57
So he went from being kind of a swashbuckling pirate, semi prior war
2:12:01
hero to a successful entrepreneur to losing it and being an invalid
2:12:08
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
2:12:08
Rupert Isaacson: With a young family.
2:12:09
So it must have been that pretty much a big knock to his self-esteem.
2:12:13
I would've thought
2:12:14
Paul Illingworth: it, it was, and it, and.
2:12:16
He was never the easiest of people to get on with.
2:12:19
But obviously because he was in a lot of pain, um, he became very,
2:12:24
very difficult to live with.
2:12:25
Um, bitter perhaps, you know, to, to the point where, you know, my, I
2:12:30
had a, uh, I have a younger sister who's four years younger than me.
2:12:34
And, and you know, we pretty much both realized as we were growing up that the
2:12:38
best thing to do was get out the house and spend as much time out the house as
2:12:41
possible, which is literally what we did.
2:12:43
Um, you know, just as my dad did at 10 years old, I got myself a
2:12:48
paper round and started working.
2:12:50
So at 10 years old I was doing, getting up at five o'clock in the morning.
2:12:53
Where was that?
2:12:54
Which part of was that was in?
2:12:55
I was in, that was in, we moved out to the country to Hartfordshire, um, so about
2:13:01
30 miles north of, of central London.
2:13:04
Mm.
2:13:04
And we moved into a council house out there.
2:13:07
Um, so I was delivering newspapers on a, on a house estate in a place called Hoon.
2:13:13
I know Hoist.
2:13:13
Yeah.
2:13:13
Which is in Har Har, you know, Hoon?
2:13:16
Yeah, yeah.
2:13:16
Near hitching.
2:13:16
Yeah.
2:13:16
Uh, yeah, that's it.
2:13:17
Yeah.
2:13:18
Yeah.
2:13:18
Um, and I, you know, I, I helped with a milk round at the weekends,
2:13:23
but, but seven days a week, no matter what the weather was doing, I was up
2:13:26
delivering newspapers and, you know, my mom and dad didn't have any money.
2:13:30
Um, you know, so in order to, if you wanted anything, I mean, I
2:13:34
can remember I bought my first pair of Levi's Levi Jeans myself.
2:13:37
'cause my mom and dad couldn't afford anything.
2:13:39
We were living off social security.
2:13:41
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
2:13:42
Paul Illingworth: Um, and that was all done through paper round money.
2:13:45
Rupert Isaacson: So you become, you know, yeah.
2:13:47
That boy who's out there making a bit of money pre-adolescence,
2:13:52
take us now into your adolescence.
2:13:54
Where does it go from there?
2:13:56
Paul Illingworth: Hmm.
2:13:57
Well.
2:13:59
I did pretty well at school.
2:14:00
Uh, God knows why.
2:14:02
Um, I actually do have a, a, a relatively high iq.
2:14:06
Not that anybody realize that at the time you did.
2:14:08
Well, I really, yeah, I, I struggled with reading Rupert and I, I guess
2:14:14
that now I would be, what you would call dis I was dyslexic basically.
2:14:18
Right.
2:14:19
Um, I was very, very But you still got through
2:14:20
Rupert Isaacson: the school system though.
2:14:21
Paul Illingworth: Yeah, I was, it was a bit of a struggle.
2:14:24
I was very, very good at math, but I couldn't read and
2:14:26
writing was a struggle for me.
2:14:28
Right.
2:14:28
And, and at the age of 11, when, uh, when you had to do what was called
2:14:33
the 11 plus, 11 plus, that's it, the 11 plus, I had to do the 11 plus.
2:14:39
Um, and I managed to pass the 11 plus barely, which gave me access
2:14:44
to go into local grammar school.
2:14:47
Okay.
2:14:47
But my parents couldn't afford the school uniform.
2:14:50
And there was a secondary modern school, uh, only about half
2:14:55
a mile from where we lived.
2:14:56
So I went to the secondary model school, secondary model school.
2:15:00
Um, but I did manage to pass the 11 plus.
2:15:03
And then, but the first couple of years at school, I really struggled with English.
2:15:07
And, and you know, even then, I think moving forward a little bit, when
2:15:12
I, when I came to join the Navy, one of the qualifications I needed to
2:15:16
become an officer in the Navy was I had to have an English O level.
2:15:19
I failed it three times.
2:15:21
I had math, A level physics, a level technical drawing,
2:15:26
chemistry, and one other.
2:15:29
I had four A levels, but I couldn't pass English O level.
2:15:32
That's how bad I was.
2:15:33
I mean, really.
2:15:34
So, um, you know, I managed to take it and, and get it eventually and that
2:15:38
then allowed me to, to join the Navy.
2:15:40
But um.
2:15:44
I was gonna go in the forces.
2:15:45
It was either that or go to university.
2:15:47
But again, gonna university in those days without any money
2:15:50
was very, very difficult.
2:15:52
Um, I actually wanted to be, um, an architect because of my dad's
2:15:57
connection with the building business.
2:15:58
He, even though he was invalid, he did teach me a lot of stuff growing up.
2:16:03
I, I got a lot of skills that he taught me.
2:16:06
You know, I mean, he taught me how to lay bricks.
2:16:08
He taught me how to sew the pipe, how to do electric work, um, which you're
2:16:13
messing around as a kid with two 20 volts isn't a lot of fun if you get it wrong.
2:16:17
Yeah.
2:16:17
Um, but he, he gave me all of the basic skills that I think I
2:16:21
built on as I got older myself.
2:16:25
Right.
2:16:25
But, you know, I left school when I was, when I was 16.
2:16:29
I could have stayed on, but I had the qualifications that I needed to join
2:16:33
the Navy as a, as a cadet officer.
2:16:36
Um, my dad wanted me to go in the Army, as you can imagine.
2:16:40
He did not want me to go in the, in the Navy.
2:16:43
My first choice was the Air Force, but I would've had to have gone to college to
2:16:47
become a flight officer, um, because they didn't take you straight from school.
2:16:51
So the Navy was the best way for me to go into the armed forces as an officer
2:16:55
without having to go to university and spend a whole hell of a lot of money.
2:16:59
That's why I ended up joining the Navy.
2:17:01
Rupert Isaacson: There's, let's, just before we get to the Navy,
2:17:03
um, you spent a little bit of time playing professional rugby as well.
2:17:09
Mm-hmm.
2:17:09
And not rugby union, but rugby league.
2:17:11
And I think it, people need to know what the difference is.
2:17:13
Yeah.
2:17:13
Paul Illingworth: So
2:17:14
Rupert Isaacson: what, how did that happen and then how did that play into forces?
2:17:17
Paul Illingworth: Alright.
2:17:18
So my dad, um, growing up in Yorkshire.
2:17:23
As a yorkshireman played rugby league.
2:17:26
Uh, there's a big divide between, well, there was in those days, not so much now,
2:17:30
but, but Rugby Union was played down south in the uk, which was a non-professional
2:17:36
sport that was just simply played for fun Guys played it at the weekend.
2:17:39
They didn't get paid.
2:17:40
Rugby league was a professional sport, just like soccer was in the uk.
2:17:45
Then where you actually got paid to play.
2:17:49
Rugby league was only played in the north of England.
2:17:52
My dad played rugby league when he was a kid growing up.
2:17:55
Uh, and also when he was a teen and, and I think even a, not
2:18:00
after the war, but before the war.
2:18:01
He played rugby league and he played for, for Castleford, which was
2:18:05
the, um, the town he grew up in.
2:18:08
So I kind of grew up with a rugby ball.
2:18:11
In, in my hands all the time.
2:18:13
I always had a rugby ball, never played, really played soccer.
2:18:17
So when I went into secondary school, they didn't play rugby
2:18:21
because it was a secondary school.
2:18:23
Only the grammar schools played rugby.
2:18:25
The secondary schools played soccer.
2:18:28
I was very lucky because at 11 years old, when I went into secondary
2:18:32
school, which is like the American high school, uh, we got a new gym
2:18:37
teacher, stroke coach who was a welshman that was very much into rugby.
2:18:43
I had a desire to play rugby and the school I went to, it wasn't
2:18:50
the best of school, shall we say.
2:18:52
There was a very, very high proportion of Italian immigrants
2:18:56
lived in the area that I lived in.
2:18:58
Um, and those guys, although they were all soccer mad, they also liked to fight.
2:19:04
So rugby being a lot more physical game than soccer, they saw it as an
2:19:08
opportunity to go on the pitch third ball around and fight with different people.
2:19:13
And isn't that that, what It's pretty much, yeah.
2:19:16
I I even today it's, it's pretty much the same thing.
2:19:19
Yeah.
2:19:19
So I ended up, um, with the gym teacher, if you like it, 11, 12 years old.
2:19:27
Um, starting a rugby team at the school, we didn't have any, we didn't have
2:19:31
any h posts or anything like that, so we had to play on the soccer pitch.
2:19:35
Um, and we managed to get a group of guys together that were
2:19:37
interested in playing rugby.
2:19:39
So with what I knew about rugby and obviously what the, our Welsh gym teacher
2:19:44
knew who played Rugby Foot virtually all of his life, we managed to get things
2:19:48
together and get a rugby team going.
2:19:50
The first game that we played the very first season, uh, we lost 50 N nil.
2:19:56
We got absolutely hammered, but um, there was a lot of fighting,
2:19:59
which my guys really, really.
2:20:01
Um, and then things sort of moved on from there.
2:20:04
And as, as the years passed, we got better and better and better.
2:20:09
It was always the same guys just moving from one year up to the next.
2:20:13
Um, I was captain of the rugby team pretty well from, from day one because
2:20:17
I was the only person I actually knew anything about the game to start off with.
2:20:21
Um, and the last year that I was at school, we actually did very, very well.
2:20:25
Um, we, um, we won the county cup.
2:20:29
Um, I got capped for, uh, for Hartfordshire for Southeast England
2:20:35
and I actually got a junior cap to and played for England as well.
2:20:38
So as a result of that, I was scouted, if you like, to go and play rugby league.
2:20:44
Rupert Isaacson: What position did you play?
2:20:46
Number
2:20:46
Paul Illingworth: eight.
2:20:47
So number eight.
2:20:48
Number eight is the guy that's at the very back of the pack.
2:20:51
So the, you've got your forwards and which are in a pack.
2:20:54
And I was at the very back, so I played number eight.
2:20:57
Now in rugby, rugby union there's 15 players.
2:21:00
Rugby league, there's only 13 because they have two less people in the pack.
2:21:04
And the position I played in Rugby Union number eight was called, uh,
2:21:09
lock, lock Forward in Rugby League.
2:21:13
So I ended up getting scouted and was offered an opportunity to go
2:21:18
and play for Featherston Rovers.
2:21:21
Um, and as a result of that, I went to Featherston.
2:21:25
And how old were you at this point?
2:21:26
I was 15.
2:21:28
Wow.
2:21:29
So it would've been, it would've been an opportunity to play for
2:21:33
the, what they call the Cols team.
2:21:35
Um, and basically, you know, you learn to play rugby league.
2:21:39
It, it, it's.
2:21:41
It's rugby, but it's a different type of rugby.
2:21:43
It's very, very different from rugby union.
2:21:45
And I'd never played rugby league before, so um, I went there for six.
2:21:50
What's the main
2:21:50
Rupert Isaacson: difference?
2:21:52
Paul Illingworth: Oh, the main difference basically is um, when somebody is
2:21:58
tackled in, in rugby union and you end up going down on the ground, the pack
2:22:03
form around you, um, in order to be able to protect the ball and keep the
2:22:08
ball on your side with rugby league when you're tackled, you get up, you and
2:22:13
you just kick the ball back so there's no rucking, what they call rucking.
2:22:17
Um, so it's Rugby league is kind of a faster game than
2:22:21
rugby Union was at the time.
2:22:23
Um, but it also was, it was, it was a tough game.
2:22:27
It was played by by miners, basically.
2:22:30
Yeah.
2:22:30
It was Yorkshire, it was Lancashire.
2:22:33
It was tough and it, for a London boy to go up to Yorkshire and try to play
2:22:38
rugby league, it just didn't work.
2:22:40
Okay.
2:22:40
It wasn't that it, I wasn't used to the, to the environment
2:22:45
to live in for one thing.
2:22:47
Um, I wasn't really happy about leaving my family at the time as, as well.
2:22:52
My dad said I was nuts even considering going to Featherston because he
2:22:55
hated Featherston as a place.
2:22:58
Um, and he, you know, he said the only team to play for is Castleford.
2:23:01
So it just, I went up there, I gave it a go.
2:23:05
Could I become a professional rugby player?
2:23:07
Yes.
2:23:07
There's no doubt about it.
2:23:09
I had the skills to be able to do it.
2:23:11
Um, I would've had to have lived in Yorkshire in order to be able to do
2:23:15
it, you know, and then looking back on it now, it was a no brainer really.
2:23:19
At 30 years old, I'd be done.
2:23:21
I wouldn't have made an awful lot of money.
2:23:22
It's not like soccer where you make millions and millions of dollars.
2:23:25
Yeah.
2:23:26
Um, it wasn't particularly well paid and all I was getting when I
2:23:29
was up there was expenses anyway.
2:23:31
Yeah, yeah.
2:23:32
Um, but it was a good, it was a good experience because it gave me the
2:23:35
opportunity at that age to make the first career decision of my life.
2:23:41
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
2:23:42
And also because you had to start this rugby team at school and get it going
2:23:47
and get it up to this point of excellence from a, a pretty crappy beginning.
2:23:52
Mm-hmm.
2:23:52
Um, that would've given you a kind of
2:23:59
mentor mentorship on the go in leadership and your, your Welsh mentor
2:24:05
himself must have helped you with that.
2:24:07
But then by the time you find yourself later going into the
2:24:09
forces, you already kind of know how to take a group of standard
2:24:15
idiots and turn them into something.
2:24:18
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
2:24:18
Rupert Isaacson: And, um, if you, I think if you've been doing that since
2:24:22
adolescence, it's probably something which you don't even notice in yourself
2:24:27
probably by the time you're getting into your twenties, but that you can command.
2:24:31
And by commanding I don't mean, um, just bossing people about to know about.
2:24:36
I mean, actually organizing people and getting a job done.
2:24:40
That could be a difficult job.
2:24:41
That could be a scary job.
2:24:43
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
2:24:44
I th I think that's very true.
2:24:45
I mean, the playing rugby at school, it wasn't just a case of, oh, I'm
2:24:49
gonna go play rugby at school on a Saturday afternoon, and that's it.
2:24:53
It was, it was every day of my life.
2:24:55
I mean, I lived and breathed for rugby and at 13 years old, I started playing
2:24:59
for the local rugby club as well.
2:25:01
Um, because Dave James, who was the gym teacher, played for the local rugby
2:25:06
club, and they had a, a junior team.
2:25:09
So 13 years old, I was, I was playing rugby for the club on a Saturday
2:25:15
afternoon and playing rugby for the school on Saturday morning,
2:25:17
and we had practice twice a week.
2:25:19
So, I mean, you know.
2:25:22
I think a lot of young people today, the problem that, that they have is they, they
2:25:26
don't know what to do with themselves.
2:25:28
Mm-hmm.
2:25:29
You know, uh, uh, and I hate bringing up computer games and things like that.
2:25:33
There was no computer games when I was growing up.
2:25:35
I didn't, we didn't even have a television in the house, so it's not like I
2:25:38
could watch television or do anything.
2:25:40
You had to go out and do something.
2:25:42
Um, so rugby for me, rugby for me was, was really the way, I guess, of ignoring
2:25:49
everything else that was going on and just doing something that I really enjoyed.
2:25:53
You know?
2:25:53
I mean, we, you know, like I said, we didn't have any
2:25:55
money when I was growing up.
2:25:56
Yeah.
2:25:56
We didn't have a car.
2:25:58
My dad had a motorbike, which eventually I inherited.
2:26:01
Um, but he couldn't ride the motorbike, not after he had his accident.
2:26:05
My mum used to go and get a groceries on a, on a bicycle, you
2:26:08
know, with a basket on the front.
2:26:10
So, um, you know, but I, but I think, yes, the leadership skills, um.
2:26:17
Certainly started with the rugby team.
2:26:19
There's absolutely no doubt about that.
2:26:21
Rupert Isaacson: I guess too, the thing with leadership is
2:26:23
it's also responsibility, right?
2:26:24
If you are the one who says, okay, I'm gonna organize this team.
2:26:26
I'm gonna be the captain, I'm gonna take a group of boys who
2:26:29
are aggressive and chaotic.
2:26:32
It's a, it's a lot of responsibility.
2:26:34
You have to make it work or you look like it, you know, an idiot.
2:26:37
Yeah.
2:26:37
And the pack will turn on you.
2:26:39
Yeah.
2:26:40
And, um.
2:26:41
So in a way where it's sort of do or die, isn't it?
2:26:43
That you have to Yes.
2:26:45
You, you have to take that risk and that must have been quite intimidating,
2:26:48
you know, equally going up to, to play rugby in the north like that.
2:26:52
And, and anyone who's never played rugby, honestly, you know, it was compulsory
2:26:58
at school when I, when I was a kid.
2:26:59
It, when Ablo like Paul is running at you, he's gonna hit you like a car, you
2:27:05
know, and you know it's gonna hurt, right?
2:27:08
Or if I, I am not a big guy.
2:27:10
If I have to tackle Paul, I've gotta hope that three of my mates are gonna
2:27:15
jump on as well, or it's just not fair.
2:27:17
I'm just sort of hanging onto his leg, just keeps running up the pitch, kicking
2:27:21
at my face, you know, as, as he does it, there is quite a lot of fear involved.
2:27:25
And when you end up on the bottom of the scrum, you know, when it collapses, um, it
2:27:30
doesn't matter actually how big you are.
2:27:31
You can't breathe, you know, and I, I, you know, that panic that you get
2:27:34
when you, you just have to sort of wait until you can breathe again.
2:27:39
Um, so.
2:27:41
I do wonder, you know, one of the things which I think young men need is they do
2:27:48
need a certain amount of risk and they do need a certain amount of danger.
2:27:51
We are supposed to go and hunt wildebeest with a spear kind of thing.
2:27:55
Um, and do you feel that that's just less available these days?
2:28:04
Because I, I feel that young men need it, like they need oxygen.
2:28:08
Paul Illingworth: I, yes, it most definitely is unavailable.
2:28:13
Um, but I think society has had an awful lot to do with this, Rupert, because
2:28:19
we, we multi, we mollycoddle kids now.
2:28:23
There's no doubt about it.
2:28:24
I know I'm not, I'm not a firm believer.
2:28:26
I don't think we should be going around beating our kids for no.
2:28:28
Every single thing that we do.
2:28:30
But the trouble is they're getting wrapped in cotton wool.
2:28:33
They're being, they're, they're being protected.
2:28:35
You know, you get a situation where if anything happens at school, if somebody
2:28:40
even turns around and yells at somebody, the parents can get called into the
2:28:43
school and the child gets disciplined.
2:28:46
Mm-hmm.
2:28:46
You know, there's is, you know, it's, it's easy for me in my sixties to
2:28:51
turn around and say that, you know, we produced a soft generation because
2:28:54
my father used to say exactly the same thing, you know about me when I was
2:28:58
growing up, and everybody says that, but I think it's just got to the point now.
2:29:03
Where there isn't enough things for, particularly for young men to do that
2:29:08
really challenge them enough and, and not only, not just challenge them
2:29:14
physically, but but challenge them mentally and prepare them for the world.
2:29:19
I mean, the world's a scary place, right?
2:29:21
Yes, it is.
2:29:21
The world is a scary place.
2:29:22
Believe you're me.
2:29:23
I mean, you know, I'm still scared of some of the things that I see happen.
2:29:27
I'm terrified when I go out and try driving on the roads at the moment.
2:29:30
Yeah.
2:29:30
Um, but you know, there, there's, there isn't enough things for, but, and I don't
2:29:36
know, you know, I, I agree with you 100%.
2:29:39
There's a huge difference between young men and young women, the way that they,
2:29:42
they interact, but young girls aren't really brought up to be scared of things.
2:29:48
And, and, and, but young men seem to have lost.
2:29:53
The whole sense of, of fear and, and, and they don't want
2:29:56
anything to do with it anymore.
2:29:58
I think this is why they become insular and they go to things like computer games
2:30:03
because they don't wanna actually face what's going on outside in the real world.
2:30:07
And interestingly,
2:30:08
Rupert Isaacson: a lot of the computer games are showing the
2:30:09
very things that Yeah, right.
2:30:11
In the old days they'd have actually been doing
2:30:13
Paul Illingworth: Exactly, that's exactly what they are.
2:30:17
Rupert Isaacson: So, alright, then tell us, you enter the
2:30:19
forces, you go into the Navy.
2:30:22
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
2:30:22
Rupert Isaacson: Do you do that just because it's not what your dad wants you
2:30:25
to do or do you do that to a certain ex?
2:30:27
Paul Illingworth: No, to a certain extent, yes.
2:30:28
And what's
2:30:29
Rupert Isaacson: his reaction?
2:30:30
Paul Illingworth: No, he hated it.
2:30:31
I don't think we talked for the first two years.
2:30:34
I mean, I was, I was going away for long periods of time, you know, I
2:30:37
mean, I'd be gone for nine months.
2:30:39
Yeah.
2:30:39
Um, so, and, and.
2:30:41
But, you know, my mother and I used to write letters every week.
2:30:44
I mean, I've still got a big box full of letters that my mother wrote me
2:30:48
while I, in my early days in the Navy, I was very, very close to my mum.
2:30:53
She was the one that used to get me up at five o'clock in the
2:30:55
morning to do my paper round.
2:30:56
She'd gimme a cup of tea, she'd gimme some toast.
2:30:59
Yeah.
2:30:59
Um, I was very, very close to her.
2:31:02
Um, I don't think, I never got a letter from my father at any point in time.
2:31:06
I mean, he didn't really believe in writing anyway.
2:31:08
There was no telephones or anything like that in those days.
2:31:11
There's no way of communicating other than through letters.
2:31:14
But he, he was angry with
2:31:15
Rupert Isaacson: you for going in the Navy.
2:31:16
Paul Illingworth: He was, yeah.
2:31:17
He was, he, he was ang he was angry.
2:31:20
He was pretty well angry all the time.
2:31:22
I think the only thing he really liked about me growing up was playing rugby.
2:31:25
Right.
2:31:26
Um, and even then when I made the decision not to go to Castleford and
2:31:29
play rugby, he was annoyed at that.
2:31:31
And then I decided I was gonna go in the Navy and not in the Army.
2:31:34
And as I said, my first choice would've been the Air Force anyway, but Right.
2:31:38
Um.
2:31:40
It was, it was the Navy.
2:31:43
I'll be, I'll be quite honest with you, the Navy was a, an easy solution for me.
2:31:49
Um, and that's probably why I took that route.
2:31:52
I know it's, it, it's not necessarily the way that I have done things since
2:31:56
then, but at that time it was the easiest way for me to get out the house, go
2:32:02
and see some of the world, which was the big thing because I didn't have to
2:32:06
get posted in the UK or go to a train in school or go to college for months.
2:32:12
I went to a ship, I went out to Singapore, I went to a ship and I was gone.
2:32:18
Right.
2:32:18
I started seeing the world from day one, literally.
2:32:21
And that was the big appeal I wanted to travel.
2:32:24
Rupert Isaacson: What did you do in the Navy?
2:32:26
What was the job?
2:32:27
Paul Illingworth: I was, uh, I started off as a, as a weaponry officer.
2:32:31
Um, and then, uh, when I moved from the Royal Navy into the Merchant
2:32:36
Navy, um, I had sufficient time in the Royal Navy and the qualifications to
2:32:41
be able to go to, uh, Naval College.
2:32:44
Uh, and worked my way up through the certification process.
2:32:48
So, so that, um, I ended up with a captain certificate, so it
2:32:52
would've taken a lot of years in the Royal Navy to get to that point.
2:32:54
Right.
2:32:54
But in the Merchant Navy, it was quicker.
2:32:56
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
2:32:57
So that was gonna be a question A, why did you choose the merchant Navy B?
2:33:01
Um, explain to, and again, not everyone knows the British system,
2:33:04
so if you can explain what the Merchant Navy is, um, and talk us
2:33:09
through what life was like with that.
2:33:11
So, so first, why the change, then what is it?
2:33:14
And then talk us through life.
2:33:15
Paul Illingworth: Okay.
2:33:15
Well, the, the, the main reason for the change was, uh.
2:33:20
Uh, money.
2:33:22
Okay?
2:33:22
You earn a lot more money in the Merchant Navy than you did in the Royal Navy.
2:33:27
Uh, also it was to do with the ranking systems of the two different navies.
2:33:31
Now, the Merchant Navy is the same as the, the US Merchant Marine.
2:33:36
Um, you could join the Merchant Marine and you can go to college as a, as a
2:33:40
cadet officer, um, and work your way up through the, through the different ranks
2:33:45
in the Merchant Navy to become a captain.
2:33:47
The Royal Navy pretty well, works the same way, except the
2:33:49
process is, is a lot slower.
2:33:52
Um, in order to be get to become a captain in the Royal Navy, you'd probably
2:33:56
have to have 25 or 30 years of service.
2:33:58
You could get to captain in the Merchant Navy with 10 years of service.
2:34:02
So it was a much, much quicker process.
2:34:04
Um, merchant Navy paid a a lot more money than the Royal Navy, and I
2:34:09
was, I was quite lucky in that I followed, uh, my and my older cousin.
2:34:17
Really was, he was kind of like my mentor.
2:34:19
He went into the Merchant Navy.
2:34:21
He was 12 years older than me, and he was more like a big brother
2:34:23
than a, than a than a cousin.
2:34:26
He went straight into the Merchant Navy fairly shortly, uh, probably six or seven
2:34:31
years after he went in the merchant Navy.
2:34:33
He went into the oil and gas business.
2:34:36
That's where the big money was.
2:34:38
Um, so I was able, when I went in the Merchant Navy to do a couple
2:34:42
of trips on, on big cargo ships, see a bit of the world doing that.
2:34:46
And then I moved into the oil and gas business and the oil and gas business,
2:34:49
which was basically working on supply boats that ran supplies to the oil rigs.
2:34:54
That's where, where the money really was.
2:34:56
So, you know, it was a transition.
2:35:00
Um.
2:35:01
From really just one naval service to another naval service
2:35:05
doing something different.
2:35:07
Not so much of the, the military regime.
2:35:10
Um, you know, not so much of the Yes sir, no sir.
2:35:14
Three bags full serve that you had in the Royal Navy.
2:35:16
A a lot more relaxed, um, and to be quite honest with you, a lot more fun.
2:35:22
Why is it more fun?
2:35:24
Um,
2:35:28
it's, it, I I'm not really the type of person that, that is a disciplinarian.
2:35:34
Uh, I never really enjoyed the Yes, sir, no sir.
2:35:38
Stuff that came with the, with being in the Royal Navy, there was, so, it was a
2:35:43
more relaxed atmosphere, which I think just, just made it a little bit more fun.
2:35:47
Also, the other thing as well is, you know, when you go ashore, when you're
2:35:52
in the Navy and you've been at sea a long time, and you go ashore, you know,
2:35:56
you wanna really go and enjoy yourself.
2:36:00
In the Royal Navy, if you enjoyed yourself a little bit too, too much, there would
2:36:04
be somebody there to put handcuffs on you and take you back to the ship.
2:36:07
Right.
2:36:07
In the Merchant Navy, you just had to avoid the local police,
2:36:12
and that was a lot easier than avoid avoiding the, uh, the sps.
2:36:17
Um, so that's why it was more fun.
2:36:20
And I went, I went to some very, very, uh, remote, um, very uncivilized places
2:36:31
when I was in the, in the merchant Navy.
2:36:33
I worked in Nigeria, well, I worked in Nigeria for a number of years.
2:36:37
I worked in Angola when the war was going on.
2:36:39
Mm-hmm.
2:36:40
Were East Africa, went all around India, uh, all around South America pretty well.
2:36:46
I don't think there's, there's very many coasts in the world.
2:36:49
I haven't actually touched at some point in time, but I spent a lot of time
2:36:52
working in Africa and you really see some terrible, terrible things there.
2:36:57
Rupert Isaacson: What did you see?
2:36:59
Paul Illingworth: A lot of death.
2:37:01
Uh, a lot.
2:37:02
What sort of
2:37:03
Rupert Isaacson: death and why?
2:37:04
Paul Illingworth: Uh, just dead bodies lying on the side of the road.
2:37:06
Poverty, starvation, shooting robbery.
2:37:09
It was India, this was Nigeria, specifically Nigeria.
2:37:13
Nigeria, Angola was the same.
2:37:15
Civil war was going on there.
2:37:17
Virtually the whole of West Africa, and I was there in the,
2:37:19
in the eighties was just a mess.
2:37:22
But the ports that you
2:37:22
Rupert Isaacson: were landing in had a certain amount of security to them?
2:37:25
Paul Illingworth: Not really, no.
2:37:26
They were pretty well open.
2:37:28
Um, and, and that was half the problem as well, you know, I mean, we were
2:37:33
working on, on the offshore supply boats.
2:37:35
Pirate wasn't really an issue then.
2:37:38
The pirate in thing didn't, I was gonna ask you about piracy, you know,
2:37:41
compared to today off Yemen, for example.
2:37:42
Oh, it's, it's terrible Today.
2:37:44
I, I would, I would not want a to.
2:37:47
Be having to deal with that.
2:37:49
You know, when we, we carried guns on board, um, more for protection
2:37:53
against robbers and things like that.
2:37:55
Um, now they say, I mean, to deal with pirates, now they've got AK 40
2:38:01
sevens, they've got automatic weapons.
2:38:02
You know, you don't really want to get involved in things like that.
2:38:05
It was a, it was a lot simpler, uh, when I was doing things, uh,
2:38:11
in West Africa apart from Angola.
2:38:13
And that, that is a different story because I, yeah, I, I,
2:38:16
that was the, the war zone.
2:38:17
Yeah, it was the war zone.
2:38:18
Yeah.
2:38:18
We'll talk about, we can talk about that a bit later on.
2:38:21
Okay.
2:38:21
Um, but it was really just a case of protecting yourself.
2:38:25
You know, you had to.
2:38:27
My, shall we say, some of the training that I received when I
2:38:30
was in the military helped me a lot in terms of personal protection.
2:38:34
Um, that I had a few, uh, instances in West Africa where
2:38:38
I had to look after myself.
2:38:40
Uh, and that helped a lot.
2:38:41
But it was really just, if you went ashore, you went ashore in
2:38:44
a group and you were armed, uh, you, you just had to be armed.
2:38:48
It's as simple as that.
2:38:49
Not necessarily with a gun, but we used to take knives and clubs
2:38:52
and things like that with us.
2:38:54
Um, and you know, to a certain extent it, it was just a way of life.
2:39:01
Was I scared?
2:39:01
No.
2:39:02
You know, would it stop me going to shore?
2:39:03
No, but it stopped me doing all the things I did know because I wasn't
2:39:07
really, I wasn't, I just wasn't scared.
2:39:09
It's as simple as that.
2:39:11
Rupert Isaacson: Why do you think you weren't scared
2:39:14
given that it was scary?
2:39:18
Paul Illingworth: That's a good, I think it all comes back to.
2:39:22
Just the way that I prepared myself for life.
2:39:24
There's, there's nothing I can honestly say that, that really scares me.
2:39:29
I mean, you, you know, you know my background, Rupert, you know, and I,
2:39:32
um, I'll happily toss myself out of an airplane, you know, uh, any point
2:39:36
in time and hope the parachutes work.
2:39:38
It's, I, I don't know.
2:39:40
You know, I, I think the fear is something that you build up inside you.
2:39:43
And if you let it overtake you, it can do you a lot of harm.
2:39:47
And the simplest thing is push it to one side.
2:39:49
Just get on and deal with life.
2:39:50
And that's what I've always done.
2:39:52
I was bullied, believe it or not, I was bullied as a kid.
2:39:56
One of the things we haven't touched on is when I was 10 years old, um, I was
2:40:01
riding my bicycle and I got hit by a car.
2:40:03
Very, very lucky to survive.
2:40:05
I have a scar that goes from here all the way, my face,
2:40:08
and around the back of my ear.
2:40:09
I had 140 stitches there.
2:40:11
I had another scar down here.
2:40:13
Uh, my head hit the, the curb.
2:40:15
I wasn't wearing a helmet.
2:40:17
Smashed open the back of my head.
2:40:20
As a result of that, I got bullied at school 'cause the kids called me
2:40:24
Scarface, the older kids, a lot of whom were the, some of the immigrants I talked
2:40:29
about, I got bullied and I, I just, I had to learn, stand up for myself.
2:40:34
My father's attitude was basically, if you're gonna get into a fight,
2:40:38
have something to help you win it.
2:40:40
I got bullied.
2:40:42
It happened two or three times.
2:40:44
Um, I ended up picking up a branch of a tree, hitting a couple of kids with it.
2:40:48
They never touched me again.
2:40:49
Mm-hmm.
2:40:50
And I'd be one of these people that if threatened, I just lash out.
2:40:55
You know, I am a fighter.
2:40:56
I always have been a fighter.
2:40:59
Um, I've certainly quieted down a little bit now, but you know, you know
2:41:03
me well enough to know that I won't put up with any crap from anybody.
2:41:06
And No, but interestingly,
2:41:07
Rupert Isaacson: I do know that about you, but I also know you as actually
2:41:10
a very tolerant man, um, with actually you've got a short fuse in that.
2:41:15
You, you can be a bit grumpy, but one of the things I've always respected
2:41:19
about you, Paul, is actually, um, you don't throw your weight around.
2:41:23
Um, you could, 'cause I think we're gonna, let's go into some more of
2:41:26
your background in a minute, but I, I've never seen you be a bully.
2:41:29
Um, I've never seen you be cruel.
2:41:31
I've never seen you use that power misuse, that power.
2:41:35
Um, so yes.
2:41:38
I mean, I think if, if somebody threatens you or something like sure.
2:41:41
I mean, you, I, I don't think I would want to do that, but I've
2:41:45
ne oddly enough, I've never seen you, um, misuse that aggression.
2:41:50
Um, no,
2:41:51
Paul Illingworth: I don't, I don't, I use it to defend myself.
2:41:53
Mm-hmm.
2:41:54
It's a, it's a, it's a, it's just a defensive reaction.
2:41:58
Mm-hmm.
2:41:58
And, and I mean, you know, anybody in the same situation,
2:42:02
you know, you can do two things.
2:42:04
You can run or you can stand and fight.
2:42:08
And I've run.
2:42:10
At times, and I can't run very well.
2:42:12
Sometimes it's very much the right thing to do, but sometimes it's
2:42:14
definitely the right thing to do.
2:42:16
Other times, other times it's stand up and fight and sometimes you
2:42:19
don't have a need to, to fight.
2:42:20
You just have to stand up for yourself.
2:42:22
It's as simple as that.
2:42:24
Um, but, but again, you know, you, you asked me why am I not afraid of anything?
2:42:29
I mean, I guess I'll, I may well find something I'm afraid of.
2:42:33
Like I said, the one thing terrifies me at the moment is driving on the roads
2:42:36
because it, it, they're just, there's so many idiots out there and it just seems
2:42:40
to be getting worse and worse and worse.
2:42:41
And I think there's more chance of dying in a car wreck than anything else.
2:42:45
I mean, I'm not, yeah.
2:42:46
You know, I don't have to deal with wild animals.
2:42:49
Um, I don't have to deal with, with war anymore.
2:42:51
There's no, there's really no fighting, no war or anything like
2:42:54
that, that I would get involved in.
2:42:56
So the most dangerous thing I do is go out and drive.
2:42:59
I ride a motorbike.
2:43:00
I was on the motorbike yesterday.
2:43:02
That is dangerous.
2:43:03
I riding motorbike.
2:43:03
Dangerous.
2:43:04
I've rid, but I've ridden a bike since I was 10, 11 years old.
2:43:07
Mm-hmm.
2:43:07
You know, only had a couple of spills.
2:43:09
Fortunately Touchwood, I've never seriously hurt myself, but you've just
2:43:13
gotta be, you've gotta be def you, you have to ride defensively yesterday and
2:43:19
it's just like everything else, isn't it?
2:43:20
You gotta be defensive.
2:43:22
Yeah.
2:43:22
You just gotta be prepared to look after yourself.
2:43:25
That's really what it comes down to.
2:43:27
So
2:43:27
Rupert Isaacson: you were talking about war there, so let's talk about that.
2:43:29
So, um, how do you end up going from the Merchant Navy back into the
2:43:33
forces and end up in Special forces?
2:43:36
What's the trick to be there?
2:43:37
Okay.
2:43:37
Paul Illingworth: Well, when I was in the, in the Royal Navy, um, I was
2:43:41
given the opportunity to move sideways into the Royal Marine Commandos.
2:43:48
Um, which is, which is just like the, the American Marines.
2:43:52
The Marines are part of the US Navy.
2:43:56
So they're Royal Marine Commandos are actually technically not
2:44:00
part of the British Army.
2:44:01
They're, they're more part of the British Navy.
2:44:04
Um, I was always interested in special forces, special forces training
2:44:09
because of what my father went through.
2:44:11
Um, and so when an opportunity came for me to step sideways, if you like,
2:44:16
into the RMC, I took that opportunity.
2:44:19
Um, and as a result of that, uh, ended up going to, um, going to
2:44:26
Special Forces Selection, which I failed miserably the first time.
2:44:31
Um, and then going through it again a second time, I managed, I didn't
2:44:35
know they gave you a second chance.
2:44:36
That's interesting.
2:44:37
Yeah, they do.
2:44:38
They do.
2:44:38
Yes, you can go back again.
2:44:40
Um, and I ended up going back and, and basically getting through that.
2:44:46
So, so that was how, uh, how I ended up getting through and, and.
2:44:52
I just carried that, that training and that responsibility through with
2:44:56
some of the other stuff that I got, that I got involved in later on, so.
2:45:01
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
2:45:02
So what did you get involved in later on?
2:45:05
You, you ended up in the SASI know.
2:45:07
Um, tell us what you wanna tell us.
2:45:11
Paul Illingworth: Um, I can't really say too much about anything that,
2:45:16
that, that happened during that period, to be quite honest with
2:45:19
you, and I'd really rather not.
2:45:20
Hmm.
2:45:21
Um, however, one of the interesting things that, that did happen, um, later on when
2:45:27
I was in the oil and gas business, um.
2:45:30
I was, uh, I was working in Angola when the war was actually on
2:45:34
the, the Civil War was going on.
2:45:36
Um, and through some contacts that I had that I met down there, um, there was an
2:45:43
opportunity to, to actually do some work for the night for the Angola government.
2:45:49
Um, so basically what the, the situation in, in Angola was that you
2:45:54
had two different political parties as quite often happens with a civil war.
2:45:59
Um, and you had one ruling party, which was NPLA, and there was another ruling.
2:46:05
There was another party, which was, uh, you to, and the, the Civil War was really
2:46:11
you to, was being funded by the Russians.
2:46:14
MPLA was being funded, if you like, by the West, by non Russians.
2:46:20
Um.
2:46:21
The Russian funding got to the point where they were starting to, to get tooled up
2:46:26
with some very, very serious equipment.
2:46:28
Um, and the government needed some help, if you like, uh, suppressing
2:46:35
some of the things that were going on, particularly fairly close to
2:46:37
Luanda, which was a capital of Angola.
2:46:41
Um, so as a result of some of the associations that I had, um, I was
2:46:48
able to step to one side of the oil and gas work that I was actually
2:46:53
doing because I was working down there as a consultant for Sogo, which
2:46:57
is a national oil company of Angola.
2:46:59
So I got to meet some very high people up in the government, um, including the
2:47:03
president of the country at the time.
2:47:05
Um, and, um.
2:47:09
Ended up, if you like, helping them with some of the military, uh,
2:47:13
issues that, that, that they had.
2:47:15
It was really more, uh, protecting some of the, some of the, as the
2:47:20
oil and gas assets that they had that were being threatened by the,
2:47:24
should we say, the Rebel forces.
2:47:27
Um, and you know, there were, there were South African mercenaries
2:47:31
that were actually working there.
2:47:32
Ex special forces guys from South Africa that were working in Angola all the time.
2:47:36
I had some association with them.
2:47:39
Uh, not working as a, I didn't work as a mercenary per se, but I, but I was
2:47:43
associated with some, should we say some of the strategic decisions that were made
2:47:48
in order to be able to help protect Luanda
2:47:53
And
2:47:54
Rupert Isaacson: what, what years are we talking there and
2:47:56
how long did that go on for?
2:47:58
Paul Illingworth: Well, I mean, my involvement was, uh, from
2:48:01
1992 to 1996, primarily 1994.
2:48:06
Okay.
2:48:06
Uh, I think the Civil War went on, I think for almost 20 years, Rupert, to be called.
2:48:11
Yeah, it did.
2:48:12
It did.
2:48:12
I remember I was in Angola a long, long, long time.
2:48:17
Um, yeah, 30 years.
2:48:18
There was a lot.
2:48:19
Yeah.
2:48:19
I think it was, there was a lot of very, very heavy fights around Orlando
2:48:23
and Soya, uh, during the nineties.
2:48:26
And, and most, you know, most of the rest of the, the problem was more in
2:48:30
land, but when it got to the coast and it started to threaten the, uh, the oil
2:48:34
and gas business that, you know, that's when the government realized that they
2:48:37
really needed to do something about it.
2:48:39
Um, so it was during that period
2:48:41
Rupert Isaacson: and you had been deployed within the British forces as well.
2:48:46
Mm-hmm.
2:48:46
Um, I don't, I know you don't wanna go too much into it, but
2:48:48
you had been, you, you had been deployed in the Falklands, correct.
2:48:51
And then, yeah, that's
2:48:52
Paul Illingworth: correct.
2:48:53
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
2:48:53
Um, and that was Special forces, so you'd taken that.
2:48:58
Uh, experience over, um, absolutely.
2:49:01
Yes.
2:49:03
You know, Angola's a scary place.
2:49:05
Um, or at least it certainly was.
2:49:07
I remember staring down a barrel of a child soldiers, uh, uh, automatic
2:49:15
that, um, with a, with a comp compan.
2:49:19
I was, I had a traveling companion who was a German girl who we didn't
2:49:23
realize at the time was bipolar.
2:49:25
And she later sent me, 10 years later, sent me an apology letter.
2:49:29
She almost got me killed like two, three times.
2:49:31
And it was just her and a friend.
2:49:32
And we, there was nothing going on with us.
2:49:34
We were just travelers.
2:49:35
I was writing a guidebook actually and being a journalist, and I
2:49:38
just wanted people from youth hostels to split costs with.
2:49:41
And, um, we ended up crossing the border into Angola, um, briefly.
2:49:46
And, um, she got.
2:49:51
Verbally aggressive with the wrong people.
2:49:52
And I was like, what are you doing?
2:49:53
You're gonna get us killed.
2:49:54
You're gonna get us killed.
2:49:55
You know, like, you really are gonna get us killed.
2:49:57
You've got to stop.
2:49:59
And, um, you know how that thing is, you, you're looking down
2:50:04
the barrel of, of somebody who's 15 pointing that gun at you.
2:50:09
And you know that whatever decision they're making is not gonna be rational.
2:50:13
Um.
2:50:15
Paul Illingworth: That's, that, that's, that's actually,
2:50:17
you know, a, a good point.
2:50:18
Something, something very, very similar happened to me.
2:50:21
Funnily enough, not in Angola or Nigeria, it was actually Mozambique,
2:50:24
but that was during the Civil War there.
2:50:26
Yeah.
2:50:27
That was also nice, you know, where, where they were are, I mean, a lot of
2:50:30
the kids did have automatic weapons, and those were the ones that you
2:50:33
really did have to be worried about.
2:50:35
Yeah.
2:50:35
There's no doubt about it.
2:50:36
It, it, the regular soldiers, to a certain extent, weren't so bad
2:50:40
the kids, the kids just really didn't know what they were doing.
2:50:43
They had no training and, you know, they just saw, especially if you
2:50:46
were being aggressive with them, you are lucky you didn't get shot.
2:50:49
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, well, I was, I did just a lot of apologizing, you know,
2:50:52
and, uh, you know, um, you talk about having no fear, I had a lot of fear.
2:50:57
I was catching myself, you know, because Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:51:01
Um, but yeah, as you say, um.
2:51:06
The, the, the way through is sometimes there, there are ways to stand up
2:51:10
for yourself and sometimes it's actually to talk your way through.
2:51:13
Um, yeah.
2:51:14
And in that case it was to sort of appeal to somebody's
2:51:17
sense of reason and humanity.
2:51:20
Um, okay.
2:51:23
So you're in the Merchant Navy.
2:51:24
You are not a mercenary in Angola.
2:51:32
Um, at what point do you start aviating?
2:51:36
Uh, I presume with jumping out of airplanes, that must have
2:51:38
started with special forces.
2:51:39
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
2:51:40
Uh, I, you know, I did do some helicopter flying, um, when I
2:51:45
was in, uh, in the military.
2:51:47
Um, didn't get into it too seriously, but, um, the aviating really just simply came
2:51:53
about as a result of buying a skydiving business and inheriting an airplane.
2:51:58
It came with an airplane.
2:52:00
We had a pilot.
2:52:00
Okay.
2:52:01
And one of the things that I think.
2:52:03
Jen and I realized pretty quickly, and we really knew
2:52:06
this just from our experiences.
2:52:07
Jen being your wife.
2:52:08
Yeah.
2:52:08
Jen being my wife.
2:52:09
Yeah.
2:52:09
Through our experience at other drop zones is if the pilot gets
2:52:14
sick, you don't do any business.
2:52:16
Most drop zones can't afford to hire more than one pilot.
2:52:19
So if you, you know, literally if the pilot does get sick, if
2:52:22
he gets a cold, he can't fly and then the business is shut down.
2:52:26
So when we bought the business, we had a pilot, uh, that if you like,
2:52:31
that was working for the business.
2:52:33
He'd already, he told us fairly quickly he was looking to move into the airlines.
2:52:37
'cause a lot of the times skydiving pilots use it to build hours, right.
2:52:41
So they can then go and fly for the airlines.
2:52:43
He told us that he was looking to go to the airline, so we
2:52:46
needed to find another pilot.
2:52:48
We found another pilot, luckily that stayed with us for almost 10
2:52:51
years, but it did make us realize that while it's fairly easy to hire
2:52:57
skydiving instructors, binding pilots is hard and keeping pilots is hard.
2:53:03
So Jen and I decided to have flying lessons.
2:53:07
We took flying lessons.
2:53:09
We started in 2005.
2:53:10
We both got our private pilot's license within about a year, nine months I
2:53:14
think it was, brought ourselves a little sesor airplane because we were
2:53:18
living in Houston and the business we owned was a two hour drive away, but
2:53:22
it was only a half an hour flight.
2:53:24
So we brought little airplane and then we could fly out there, uh,
2:53:27
for the weekends with the kids.
2:53:29
My kids were growing up at the time.
2:53:32
I decided that rather than just stop at private pilot's license, I'd get my
2:53:37
instrument rating, I'd get my multi-engine rating, I'd get my commercial.
2:53:42
Uh, so basically I had all of the different ratings that I'd need to
2:53:46
fly any of the airplanes we were ever likely to use in the skydiving business.
2:53:51
And I went through all of those over the next year or so, got all those ratings.
2:53:56
Um, and then as soon as I is, it used be
2:54:00
Rupert Isaacson: so quick.
2:54:00
Doesn't it take longer normally to get
2:54:01
Paul Illingworth: No, I was, I was flying almost every day having lessons.
2:54:06
Okay.
2:54:06
You know, because, because we were running a business and it was
2:54:10
important that I got the ratings, the cost of, I mean, it's, it's.
2:54:14
Cost prohibitive for most people as well to do all of that because
2:54:17
of the cost of the instruction.
2:54:19
Mm-hmm.
2:54:19
But I was fortunate in that the business was able to help with the cost.
2:54:23
Mm-hmm.
2:54:23
Um, and I literally, I would go and have a fly lesson at seven
2:54:26
o'clock in the morning, finish at nine o'clock, go to the office.
2:54:30
Right.
2:54:30
Work in the office till seven, eight o'clock at night.
2:54:32
Come home, go repeat the same, the same thing.
2:54:35
It's, and then, like I said, weekends, we'd be going out to a skydiving business.
2:54:39
So it's really, it was, you know, it was seven days a week working
2:54:43
and very, very long hours as well.
2:54:45
That's how we got into flying.
2:54:47
That's how both Jen and I got, got into flying.
2:54:50
We still fly today.
2:54:51
You know, we still, we, we still own a little airplane, uh, that we fly.
2:54:55
Even though we sold the skydiving business a number of years ago.
2:54:58
We owned a small jet for a period of time.
2:55:01
I mean, you've flown with us.
2:55:02
Well, I have.
2:55:03
It's my only.
2:55:04
You know, uh,
2:55:04
Rupert Isaacson: experience of flying a private jet, I'm very, very, very great.
2:55:07
Yeah.
2:55:09
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
2:55:09
We've done, you know, we've done a, a lot of stuff and, um, I mean, as I get older
2:55:13
now, we, you know, I'm almost 70 now, we sold the jet because once you hit 70, it's
2:55:18
pretty difficult to get insurance, um, to fly small pri, you know, private jets.
2:55:24
So we, we are just scaling things down, but that's how, that's how
2:55:26
we got into the aviation side.
2:55:29
And I must say I love it.
2:55:31
I, I always wanted to join the Royal Air Force.
2:55:33
I think I said that very, very early on, um, because I had, I'd never
2:55:39
flown at the time, but I just thought it looked like a lot of fun to do.
2:55:42
Yeah.
2:55:42
And it is a lot of fun and I really, really enjoy it.
2:55:45
So it's, you know, it's one of the things I think that probably motorcycling and,
2:55:50
and flying, I still get the most enjoyment out of, of pretty much everything we do.
2:55:55
We still enjoy jumping as well.
2:55:56
Just don't jump as much as, as, as we could do.
2:56:01
Rupert Isaacson: So.
2:56:04
Then you, you go from the Merchant Navy into the oil and gas business and you
2:56:08
Paul Illingworth: Yeah,
2:56:08
Rupert Isaacson: you, you do Well.
2:56:10
Paul Illingworth: Um, and so let, let's just, let's talk about that.
2:56:13
Okay?
2:56:14
Yeah.
2:56:14
Yeah.
2:56:14
The same thing.
2:56:15
It's the same thing again.
2:56:16
Um, I wanted, I wanted to, I wanted basically to get to a point where
2:56:25
I was caption in my own ship.
2:56:26
That was my target.
2:56:28
And when I went in the Navy, I can remember way, way
2:56:32
before I joined the Navy.
2:56:34
There was a guy that was playing at my rugby club.
2:56:36
I was probably 14 years old, 14 or 15.
2:56:39
He was a captain in the Merchant Navy, and he was earning, and I
2:56:44
remember this like it was yesterday.
2:56:46
He was earning 5,000 pounds a year.
2:56:48
That was a hundred pounds a week.
2:56:49
That was a huge amount of money.
2:56:52
I was earning 10.
2:56:52
What year was that?
2:56:54
Would that have been 70?
2:56:54
That, that, that would've been in, uh, let me think.
2:56:57
60.
2:57:00
69 70.
2:57:01
Oh yeah.
2:57:02
That would've
2:57:02
Rupert Isaacson: been a lot of money.
2:57:03
Paul Illingworth: Yeah, it was a lot of money.
2:57:04
Yeah.
2:57:04
I was earning 10 shillings a week till in newspapers.
2:57:07
He was earning a hundred pounds a week as a captain.
2:57:09
So ultimately my target was to get to be captain.
2:57:13
'cause I thought, well, you know, I've not had any money growing up, but
2:57:15
I'll be doing fairly well because he, you know, he drove a nice sports car.
2:57:19
I think he had a knee type jag and, you know, and he seemed
2:57:22
to live very comfortably.
2:57:23
So that was always really my target was to become a captain.
2:57:26
Mm-hmm.
2:57:27
Um, once I transitioned into a merchant Navy, 1984, I got, I went
2:57:34
to college for six months and I passed my captain's license test.
2:57:38
So from 1984, I had a license to captain any ship of any
2:57:43
size, anywhere in the world.
2:57:46
Um.
2:57:47
And at the time the company that I was working for, which was an
2:57:51
American offshore company, were desperately short of captains.
2:57:55
Uh, and I got an opportunity to move from first officer to captain,
2:57:59
working on the old Vig supply boats.
2:58:02
So I took that opportunity, um, and then I ended up moving from
2:58:06
West Africa into the North Sea.
2:58:08
So I was captain of supply boats working the North Sea and some of
2:58:11
the most horrendous weather you'll ever I can imagine, possibly imagine.
2:58:16
And I did that, uh, until, um, about 1990.
2:58:22
But in the interim period of time with a couple of other guys in Aberdeen,
2:58:27
um, I end and we started our own company, a marine consultancy company.
2:58:33
Um, and what we were doing was we were providing, uh, tow masters to
2:58:38
move oil rigs around the North Sea.
2:58:41
So I moved from being captain of a.
2:58:43
I worked as captain on the oil rigs in the Middle East for a couple of years.
2:58:48
Then I went back to the North Sea working for my own company with
2:58:52
these, with these two other gentlemen.
2:58:54
Um, and we set the company up and we, we very, we've become very, very
2:58:59
successful at renting our services out to move oil rigs around to the
2:59:03
point where we ended up having to start hiring people to work for us.
2:59:08
So then the company started to grow.
2:59:11
Uh, I think the last, the last job I did when I was actually working on, on
2:59:16
the oil rig, the big tugs, because I was moving oil rigs around as a, as a tow
2:59:20
master at the time was probably 1990.
2:59:24
Um, and then there was an opportunity, um, shortly thereafter to go and
2:59:30
work for a small Canadian oil company as a marine superintendent.
2:59:34
So, and this was in Aberdeen, so I'm still working, I'm managing director of my own.
2:59:41
Consultancy company, they needed a marine superintendent.
2:59:45
So we literally contracted my services to this small Canadian
2:59:50
company as a marine superintendent.
2:59:54
And that's how I ended up, I did some work in the North Sea
2:59:57
installing, uh, platforms in the North Sea oil rig platforms for them.
3:00:02
And they also had a license in Angola.
3:00:05
And that's how I ended up in Angola, working for them down in Angola, meeting
3:00:09
the, the government officials from Sonal and doing and doing that sort of stuff.
3:00:14
So I ran that company as managing director for 13 years until 1998 when I ended up.
3:00:24
As a result of meeting some guys, funnily enough in Angola, um,
3:00:30
getting an opportunity to come to Houston and I'd been in Aberdeen
3:00:34
for eight years at that time.
3:00:36
Um, I wanted to take the company International.
3:00:39
My two partners did not want to go international.
3:00:42
They wanted to stay in the uk So we started to come to a
3:00:45
point where we were gonna split.
3:00:48
Um, the opportunity came up for me to go to Houston, so I ended up going to
3:00:53
Houston as a consultant working for this Singaporean based company to set up the
3:00:58
business development office for them.
3:01:01
And that was really an opportunity for me to just simply say, okay, I like it here.
3:01:06
I'm gonna stay here.
3:01:07
They're gonna pay me, well, I'll leave the UK consultancy company.
3:01:12
I'll just step back, keep my shares in the company, but not have anything
3:01:16
to do with the day-to-day running.
3:01:17
That's how I ended up in the us
3:01:19
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
3:01:21
Paul Illingworth: So.
3:01:22
Rupert Isaacson: You're talking about moving, um, all platforms
3:01:26
around and as if that's an easy thing to do in the North Sea.
3:01:31
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
3:01:32
Rupert Isaacson: As you said, I've seen, I've seen what the weather can be.
3:01:35
You talk about not being afraid.
3:01:36
You must have been afraid sometimes in those storms that the ship might go down.
3:01:41
Not
3:01:42
Paul Illingworth: I was, I, there, there's a, there was a couple of
3:01:46
opportunities where I never thought I'd ever see weather worse than that.
3:01:49
And then there was weather worse than that.
3:01:51
I was never bothered about a ship going down.
3:01:54
And one of the things I should probably point out is that, remember
3:01:57
I told you I had an older cousin who was 12 years older than me.
3:02:00
I also had another cousin that was four years older than me, Neil,
3:02:05
he was actually on an offshore supply boat that did go down in the
3:02:09
Mediterranean and he was lost at sea.
3:02:12
Mm.
3:02:12
The ship, the ship just disappeared.
3:02:14
Wow.
3:02:15
And that was in the Mediterranean.
3:02:16
Rupert Isaacson: Wow.
3:02:17
You don't expect to see that kind of weather.
3:02:19
Paul Illingworth: And, and I'd been in the Navy, I think
3:02:21
two years when that happened.
3:02:23
And, you know, it, it was, it, it really brought it home with the vulnerability.
3:02:29
Now, when I was on my own ship as captain working in the North Sea, we
3:02:32
went out in some horrendous weather.
3:02:34
There was, I remember there was one Christmas where the
3:02:37
storms were really, really bad.
3:02:39
Um, and I was, I was flown out by helicopter to a rig, which had broken
3:02:44
a couple of his moorings to try to be able to, uh, to get some, some, uh, tugs
3:02:50
attached to the rig so we could actually pull it away from the platform that
3:02:55
it was gonna end up drifting towards.
3:02:57
Um, that was some of the worst weather that I ever saw when I
3:03:00
was captain on a ship myself.
3:03:02
We went out in Force 10 a couple of times from Aberdeen.
3:03:05
I was never bothered about the ship going down.
3:03:09
Um.
3:03:10
Could it have happened?
3:03:11
Yes.
3:03:12
But I think, I guess that I felt that my superior seamanship skills were
3:03:17
able to deal with anything that the weather threw out us at the time.
3:03:21
Um, and again, I think I was, I was very, very lucky.
3:03:23
We never got into a serious situation.
3:03:26
Um, but I mean, I, that there was a lot of really, really
3:03:29
nasty things happened out there.
3:03:31
I'll tell you what, you know, one time I was a bit twitchy, I was, one
3:03:36
of the things that I had to do was move jack up rigs alongside platforms.
3:03:41
Um, and when you're moving a jack up rig alongside a platform, and
3:03:44
Jack up rig basically is an oil rig.
3:03:45
They work in relatively shallow water up to about 150, two a hundred feet.
3:03:50
They go deeper now, but in those days, 152 feet.
3:03:53
And it's like, it's, it's a, it's a triangular shaped rig that has three legs.
3:03:58
It floats with the legs jacked up, and then you put it to
3:04:02
wherever you want it to go.
3:04:03
And there's normally three tugs attached.
3:04:05
One at one at each corner.
3:04:07
'cause it's a triangle and you move it where you want to go with the tugs.
3:04:11
And then you lower the legs down.
3:04:12
The legs, hit the sea bed, and they raise the rig up off, off the sea.
3:04:17
It literally comes up.
3:04:18
So you have a gap between the sea and the bottom of the rig.
3:04:21
It's called the air gap.
3:04:22
Now, one of the things we had to do in the southern part of the North
3:04:26
Sea was to actually move these jack up rigs alongside a fixed platform.
3:04:31
So now you've got something that is attached to the seabed that
3:04:35
has accommodation on top and it's got wells going through it.
3:04:39
And the jack up rig has to go right up close to that.
3:04:43
You jack it up.
3:04:45
It has a drilling deck that then can levers over the top of the
3:04:49
platform so they can get the drilling equipment down the well.
3:04:54
You have to move those rigs.
3:04:57
Four to six feet away from the legs of the fixed platform.
3:05:02
So the accuracy, the way that we do this is a combination of using anchors
3:05:08
and tugs, but you are literally moving the rig six inches at a time.
3:05:14
So I'm giving instructions to one of the tugs to pull six inches in on a toe line.
3:05:20
Another one, pull six inches in here.
3:05:24
That is the most, I won't say it's scary, it's nerve wracking
3:05:28
because there's no room for error.
3:05:31
Absolutely no.
3:05:33
And the way that we used to tell if we were in the right place is quite funny.
3:05:36
We have what we called surveyors on board, and the surveyors
3:05:39
were technical guys, okay?
3:05:41
We didn't have, uh, sat nav or anything like that.
3:05:45
So in order to tell whether or not we were in the right place on the platform,
3:05:49
'cause you had to get in exactly the right place, we'd get two aluminum
3:05:52
ladders, stick them out the back of the rig with a scaffolding pole going
3:05:57
across and a couple of paint marks.
3:06:00
And when that scaffolding po and the paint marks touched the legs of the platform,
3:06:05
we knew we were in the right place.
3:06:08
That's how technical,
3:06:09
Rupert Isaacson: that's that technical and what would happen if you got it wrong.
3:06:13
Paul Illingworth: Uh, you'd end up hitting the rig would hit the platform
3:06:16
and that was really, really bad.
3:06:18
Because, because, because if you have make contact with a platform
3:06:22
or the rig, you can't do anything.
3:06:24
You have to pull away.
3:06:25
You then have to, to fly a surveyor out to survey the rig to make
3:06:30
sure it doesn't have any damage.
3:06:32
You have to get divers to do NDT on the platform to make sure you haven't damaged
3:06:36
the integrity of the, of the platform.
3:06:38
'cause even if you say, oh, we just kissed it, we just touched it.
3:06:41
Doesn't matter.
3:06:42
Game is off.
3:06:43
Rig gets pulled away.
3:06:45
Oil company that you're working for get really angry because you've now
3:06:50
got a rig that's costing them a hundred thousand dollars a day and it's not
3:06:53
doing anything because you've screwed up.
3:06:57
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
3:06:58
And you're doing this in rough weather.
3:06:59
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
3:07:00
Yeah.
3:07:01
Rupert Isaacson: Rough
3:07:01
Paul Illingworth: weather.
3:07:01
Rupert Isaacson: How, how'd you do it?
3:07:02
How'd you do it?
3:07:02
How'd you get that level of accuracy in rough weather when the
3:07:05
waves are just tossing you about?
3:07:06
Paul Illingworth: Well, I mean.
3:07:08
In the Southern North Sea, the current is a, is a major issue as well.
3:07:11
So you have to wait for what they call slack water, which occurs every six hours.
3:07:16
And then there is a, there is a point with the weather where you
3:07:20
just say, no, we can't do it.
3:07:22
Okay.
3:07:22
But, you know, so there's a maximum wave height because obviously if you are
3:07:26
moving up and down and you're surging back and forward, you gotta be really,
3:07:29
really careful with what you're doing.
3:07:31
Um, so you do get to the point where if the weather's really
3:07:34
bad, you just have to stop.
3:07:36
Okay.
3:07:37
And it's the same in the Northern North Sea when you're moving
3:07:39
the semi-submersible rigs around that float and have anchors.
3:07:43
You get to the point where when the weather, the waves get beyond
3:07:46
a certain height, you just have to stop, hold position and wait for
3:07:50
the weather to, to calm down a bit.
3:07:53
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
3:07:54
So yeah, went back to the subject of fear and you said, you know, it's nerve
3:07:57
wracking that, that that's another whole.
3:08:01
Thing with fear is that, well, there's fear for your own personal
3:08:04
safety, but then there's also fear.
3:08:06
Paul Illingworth: Fear of damage.
3:08:07
Rupert Isaacson: Well, and fear of, um, effing up.
3:08:11
Screwing up.
3:08:12
Yeah.
3:08:12
Screwing up.
3:08:13
Yeah.
3:08:13
When it comes down to is responsibility, like these types
3:08:16
of job that you're talking about, they're ver they're very difficult.
3:08:19
And you've got to manage these natural conditions.
3:08:22
You've got to manage groups of people who are, you know, doing
3:08:26
this stuff, and that there's gonna naturally be human error in there,
3:08:30
not to mention the weather, you know?
3:08:33
So do you think that, you know, that's a lot of pressure to handle.
3:08:40
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
3:08:42
Rupert Isaacson: Do you think that it really, if you, if you look at where were
3:08:45
the skills that you built to be able to handle that sort of pressure, um, that you
3:08:53
built them sort of in the paper rounds.
3:08:55
Age 10.
3:08:56
Yes.
3:08:57
Is that, is that where it all began?
3:08:59
Paul Illingworth: Standing up for yourself.
3:09:01
And, and I mean, it's really just, if you're gonna take on a job that has
3:09:05
that sort of level of responsibility, you have got to have a huge
3:09:09
amount of confidence in yourself.
3:09:11
Mm-hmm.
3:09:12
And you know, a as I said, one of the things that we were doing was we were
3:09:18
hiring people to work as tow masters.
3:09:21
Well, you don't just pull these guys off the street.
3:09:24
No.
3:09:24
They have got to be trained.
3:09:26
So, um, every single one of the people that we hired was
3:09:31
a cer, a qualified captain.
3:09:33
They all had captains licenses.
3:09:34
They thought most of them had worked as captain on supply boats or on big tugs.
3:09:38
They knew what moving all rigs around was all about, but
3:09:42
you still had to train them.
3:09:44
So if you like, because I had my own company, I became a
3:09:49
tow master instructor per se.
3:09:52
And.
3:09:53
In order to be able to do, to do that type of job with a very, very high
3:09:57
level of responsibility, we're, you know, we're talking about hundreds
3:10:00
and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and potential
3:10:04
damage, not necessarily lives at stake.
3:10:07
Because, because it, it wasn't that type of a job, but you've gotta have a lot of
3:10:12
confidence in yourself and you've gotta not be afraid of what you're doing in
3:10:17
order to be able to do it successfully.
3:10:18
Right?
3:10:18
And in all, you've also gotta have the patience and the communication
3:10:25
skills to be able to pass that onto somebody when you're training them.
3:10:29
Um, that the self-confidence definitely came, it started.
3:10:37
With me having to go out at five o'clock in the morning in the UK in the winter
3:10:43
when it was dark on my bicycle and go and deliver newspapers, and I was delivering
3:10:48
newspapers in the snow and in the rain.
3:10:51
Mm-hmm.
3:10:52
And actually not having that was probably the most fearful thing.
3:10:57
Uh, you know, as a, a 10-year-old actually going out in the dark on a
3:11:00
bicycle and having to go onto a house in estate and walk up people's drives with
3:11:04
dogs barking and deliver newspapers.
3:11:06
Hmm.
3:11:06
And it, it built up a certain amount of self-confidence, almost to the
3:11:11
point where you think, screw this.
3:11:13
You know, I mean, I can do this, I can do pretty much anything.
3:11:17
And one of the things I will say to you is I've never been,
3:11:25
how can I put this?
3:11:27
There hasn't been a situation where somebody's asked me if I could
3:11:29
do something where I've said, no.
3:11:35
I might have said, I have to think about it.
3:11:37
And I've done that a lot.
3:11:39
But in most cases, if somebody's asked me to do something, if I
3:11:42
haven't got the skills to do it, I can figure out how to do it.
3:11:46
'cause I'm very good at figuring things out.
3:11:48
But if it's just something that's completely off, off the wall, then I
3:11:53
would simply say, I'll think about it.
3:11:55
Which just really means no, I probably won't do it, but I'm gonna think about it.
3:11:59
'cause I like to be able to process things and, and that really does, it does
3:12:04
come down, there's no doubt about it.
3:12:07
Having that paper round and having to go out to work at such an early age
3:12:11
was, it was a great character builder.
3:12:13
There's no doubt about that.
3:12:15
And I did that.
3:12:16
I did that every day for six years.
3:12:19
I stopped my paper around the day I left the UK to join the Navy.
3:12:24
Rupert Isaacson: Wow.
3:12:25
I'm also thinking about, um.
3:12:29
The, you, you talked about communication skills, and that's important too,
3:12:33
because it's not enough to be big and tough or even competent.
3:12:38
Paul Illingworth: No.
3:12:38
If you're
3:12:39
Rupert Isaacson: going to manage teams, you can't be going around scaring
3:12:42
your team because then you, there's no job getting rather the opposite.
3:12:46
They've got to feel that the big scary guy has their back.
3:12:49
Um, do you feel, do you think that the, um, do you think that the
3:12:56
communication skills came with having to build that rugby team?
3:13:00
Paul Illingworth: Yes.
3:13:01
Absolutely, because I didn't, I didn't get, learn any communication skills from
3:13:07
being at home with Doesn't sound like
3:13:09
Rupert Isaacson: it.
3:13:09
No, I mean, I, although your mom sounds very warm.
3:13:11
My, my mom sounds, my mom was
3:13:13
Paul Illingworth: really, really great.
3:13:14
She was, she was a, a great help to me, but we weren't the sort of family
3:13:18
that we sat around in the evening, if you like, drinking tea and chatting
3:13:22
about what we did during the day.
3:13:24
Yeah.
3:13:24
That just, that didn't happen.
3:13:25
It was, it was being at school, playing rugby with the team, with the lads.
3:13:30
They were, you know, they were the closest group that we had
3:13:34
as any sports team really.
3:13:36
And then taking those communication skills.
3:13:39
I mean, I was, I was assessed very, very early on after I joined the Navy
3:13:45
as having, uh, natural leadership.
3:13:49
Qualities because I was able to, to guide people and I, and I was
3:13:54
able to communicate with people.
3:13:56
So I was actually given the opportunity to accelerate through the whole Navy
3:14:01
process very, very quickly because I had that ability to be able to talk
3:14:05
to people, to be able to communicate and be able to get over what I
3:14:09
was trying to communicate quickly.
3:14:11
Right.
3:14:12
Um,
3:14:14
Rupert Isaacson: so let's dive back to where we began.
3:14:18
We have this epidemic of young men who can't get out of the basement,
3:14:23
Paul Illingworth: who
3:14:24
Rupert Isaacson: are maybe doing playing video games that simulate some
3:14:29
of the adventures that you might have actually had in real life, um, and
3:14:36
are lacking self-confidence on a level that is disabling.
3:14:46
What do we do about this?
3:14:51
Paul Illingworth: Uh, that's a 10, $10 million question, isn't it?
3:14:55
Um, you know, 10-year-old kids nowadays can't go out and deliver papers.
3:15:00
No, no.
3:15:00
They can't.
3:15:01
It's a different world, you know.
3:15:02
Yeah.
3:15:02
You know, you, you just can't do it.
3:15:03
I mean, you know, when my kids were growing up, I was, I was, to be quite
3:15:07
honest with you, quite scared of them even just going and riding their bicycles
3:15:12
in our sub subdivision in Houston.
3:15:13
Sure.
3:15:13
You know, in Houston, you know, it's as simple as that.
3:15:16
But I think what you've gotta do is,
3:15:22
I think it really comes down to you've got to take an interest in
3:15:26
something that community is doing.
3:15:28
Okay.
3:15:29
Um, that's interesting.
3:15:29
And, and, you know, that can be through a club.
3:15:33
Mm-hmm.
3:15:34
YMCA, you know, I, I, again, it's a Christian association.
3:15:39
I think a lot of people, certainly where I live, I mean, I live in, in
3:15:43
Texas in what they call the Bible Belt.
3:15:45
I'm not religious person myself, but I know that.
3:15:49
The young lads I've met here that do extremely well for themselves.
3:15:55
They are Christians and the religious, the, the religious side
3:16:00
of things over here, they go to church, which is a club in effect,
3:16:04
they communicate with other people.
3:16:07
Um, and I'm talking about a lot of the young guys around here
3:16:11
that grow up on farms or on ranches and do things like that.
3:16:15
They get themselves out.
3:16:16
They don't get the opportunity to sit around watching television
3:16:19
or playing computer games 'cause they're out doing stuff.
3:16:21
They're,
3:16:22
Rupert Isaacson: exactly, and I mean, look, the life that we leave Paul, it's
3:16:27
not, it's not, um, representative anymore.
3:16:32
I mean, you know, no, my kids also are out on the farm working with
3:16:35
horses and doing stuff and, you know, um, I don't force them to do it,
3:16:42
but there's just stuff to do, so, and it's kind of interesting to do.
3:16:45
So why wouldn't you?
3:16:47
Um.
3:16:48
But if you are living in, as you said, you know, you, you were scared
3:16:54
when your kids were going out in a subdivision in, um, in Houston.
3:16:59
And that's of course where most people are is, is in those
3:17:01
types of suburban environments.
3:17:03
And you kids are not allowed to work anymore.
3:17:05
Um, it's also not terribly is is less safe now than it used to be.
3:17:11
Um,
3:17:13
but I like what you said about involvement in community.
3:17:18
Yeah.
3:17:18
'cause if, if you haven't got a farm or a ranch to be part of, well
3:17:22
that just doesn't exist for you.
3:17:24
But if you're growing up in a, let's say you're on a housing state
3:17:27
today, in, let, let, let's yeah.
3:17:29
Dial it back to where you were as a boy.
3:17:31
You're in a housing state, outskirts of London.
3:17:35
Um, what's around you?
3:17:36
There's gonna be
3:17:39
on the bad side, there's gonna be drugs, there's gonna be.
3:17:42
Gang stuff, there's going to, but that to some degree was always there.
3:17:45
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
3:17:46
Rupert Isaacson: On the positive side, there's going to be kids who are doing
3:17:49
creative things like music, um, perhaps sport, um, other things like that.
3:17:56
But I think, I like that you put your finger on something with community
3:17:59
involvement and, and service.
3:18:02
Most people are not gonna be in a church environment, but it's,
3:18:05
that's a good place to start from.
3:18:07
I think you are now in this housing estate today in 2025.
3:18:15
As a father of a bo of a 10-year-old boy.
3:18:20
What do you do?
3:18:26
Paul Illingworth: I think what I would, what I would, what I'd want
3:18:28
to try to do is, um, obviously, you know, school is community.
3:18:34
Mm-hmm.
3:18:35
And, um.
3:18:36
Not only is school community, but your neighbors are community as well.
3:18:40
Mm-hmm.
3:18:41
And certainly when my kids were growing up and, and you know, this wasn't
3:18:45
that long ago, what was important was actually finding out what the other
3:18:50
kids in the neighborhood are doing.
3:18:52
Where are they going, where are they hanging out?
3:18:54
Are they the tennis court?
3:18:55
So that the swimming pool, you know, there are places where they, that
3:19:00
they're gonna go and they're going to, if you like, group together.
3:19:04
And I don't mean in gangs or anything like that Yeah.
3:19:06
But just to do, you know, following their interests, basically.
3:19:10
Interests, you know, do, do you know any, you've get, I, I just think you've
3:19:14
gotta get the kids out the houses.
3:19:16
Yeah.
3:19:16
That's really what it comes down to.
3:19:18
If you can get, which means you gotta do it
3:19:19
Rupert Isaacson: with them.
3:19:20
Paul Illingworth: You've gotta go do it with 'em.
3:19:21
So, I mean, over here, when my kids were growing up, when my son was growing
3:19:25
up, we did T-ball, we did baseball, we'd all, I know it's sports again, but
3:19:29
it's very sport orientated over here.
3:19:31
And that's what you gotta remember.
3:19:33
But you know, friends that we have now, they have girls that are in
3:19:36
gymnastics, that are in swim clubs.
3:19:39
Most of most of the things are some form of sport orientated.
3:19:44
But I mean, is there anything wrong with kids getting involved in sport?
3:19:47
I mean, I got involved in sport, you can't work or you can work,
3:19:52
but you can't work till you're 13 or 14 or even older than that.
3:19:56
But working doesn't really seem to be the important thing.
3:19:59
I think it's, it's community activities.
3:20:02
And community activities can be sports.
3:20:05
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
3:20:05
Paul Illingworth: It could be stamp collecting.
3:20:07
They could be, well, I mean, I think
3:20:08
Rupert Isaacson: that's the thing.
3:20:08
I mean, so in my case, the kind of nerd I was, obviously I was riding, right?
3:20:13
But I'm a huge nature nerd.
3:20:14
So for me it would've been birdwatching, um, uh.
3:20:19
Plant identification, animal watching, and then from there you get into hiking,
3:20:24
you get into mountaineering, you get into,
3:20:26
Paul Illingworth: exactly.
3:20:27
And that's one of the things I love now.
3:20:28
I mean, you know, I'd rather be, I'd rather be outside than
3:20:31
sitting here at the moment.
3:20:32
I'd rather be riding my tractor around riding my a TV, going and
3:20:35
mowing grass, walking with my dogs.
3:20:38
Yes.
3:20:38
You know, and, and that's another thing that we, we used to do as well.
3:20:42
But you did this with your kids?
3:20:44
I did it with my kids, yeah.
3:20:45
We used to go to the park, we used to walk the dogs on a regular basis,
3:20:48
teach them things to do with nature.
3:20:51
Mm-hmm.
3:20:51
Um, the problem we have right now, Ruper, is that you've got kids
3:20:58
that are growing up with parents that almost grew up exactly the
3:21:04
same way that they're growing up.
3:21:06
Mm-hmm.
3:21:06
Because you had computer games started in the nineties.
3:21:09
Mm.
3:21:10
They grew up with computer games.
3:21:11
They're now having kids.
3:21:13
So if the, if the parents don't know to go out.
3:21:17
Themselves and get things done.
3:21:18
Mm-hmm.
3:21:19
And want to stay in the house and want to watch television.
3:21:22
The kids are gonna be grow up exactly the same way.
3:21:26
So I, it's really, should our, should we be dealing with this from the point of
3:21:31
view of what should the kids be doing?
3:21:32
Or should we try, try to educate the parents in what they should be doing?
3:21:37
I guess
3:21:38
Rupert Isaacson: that's the other, you know, too, as you
3:21:40
say, like when, when I was a kid.
3:21:41
When you were a kid, um, even like when I was in the country in England growing up,
3:21:45
that not everyone had a car by any means.
3:21:48
Um, we didn't
3:21:49
Paul Illingworth: have one.
3:21:49
Rupert Isaacson: No.
3:21:50
Um, and I'm talking about also people that lived like out on
3:21:52
farms, didn't necessarily have cars.
3:21:54
They'd walked to the top of their driveway, walk to the village, get
3:21:57
a bus or take a bicycle or whatever.
3:21:59
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
3:22:00
Rupert Isaacson: Um, a lot of places didn't have electricity even growing
3:22:03
up, I remember on remote farms.
3:22:05
Um, and then of course that will change somewhere in the eighties.
3:22:09
Um, but crucially, I think that there was a lot of movement.
3:22:16
You had to move, right?
3:22:17
You, you, you, you didn't have an option if you wanted to move
3:22:22
yourself from one place to another to not do it with your body.
3:22:28
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
3:22:28
Rupert Isaacson: Um, okay.
3:22:30
Now this is difficult.
3:22:32
If you grew up in a subdivision that has no public transport and you are
3:22:36
the only option is cars, um, you might be able to ride your bicycle around,
3:22:41
you know, the cul-de-sacs or whatever.
3:22:42
But, but as you say, I guess then you do have things like skateboarding.
3:22:46
You do have things like, but it's very difficult not to
3:22:49
end up indoors on a computer.
3:22:52
Yeah.
3:22:53
Um, and it's marketed at you and as you say, with parents who are maybe, you
3:22:58
know, two job parents, um, or single parent, you know, more than one kid.
3:23:05
But I think you did put your finger on it when you talked about community.
3:23:10
So the way I would think about community as tribe.
3:23:15
And, um, as you know, I spent a lot of time in Africa, um, living with
3:23:19
tribes and my own family's very tribal.
3:23:22
Um, I grew up with a lot of cousins, you know, southern Africans, um, and there
3:23:27
were always just a procession of cousins coming through the house from everywhere.
3:23:31
Um, and it was considered normal that we'd all end up at each other's
3:23:36
places at whenever, and you could kind of stay as long as you wanted.
3:23:39
It was all right.
3:23:40
You had to muck in, but everyone was always welcome everywhere.
3:23:44
Um, that level of, so, you know, and so to some degree we were
3:23:49
all in service to each other.
3:23:50
Right.
3:23:55
I think I, I wonder if we've lost the habit of that, so that as you
3:23:59
say, yes, sometimes church, you know, but, and, and then you moved, you,
3:24:04
you didn't have that growing up.
3:24:06
But when you got to say Houston with your kids, you saw the value of it.
3:24:11
Why did you see the value of it when you didn't have it growing
3:24:13
up, and why did you know that that was something you had to give them?
3:24:17
Paul Illingworth: Well, you know, I think, to be quite honest with
3:24:19
you, it was, it was a really a case of what are the community doing.
3:24:25
So, you know, when we first moved over here and, and started to make contact
3:24:29
with, with local people and, and they had kids in the subdivision that we lived in,
3:24:34
it's like, well, what are the kids doing?
3:24:35
Oh, they're going down the road and they're playing T-ball,
3:24:38
they're playing baseball there.
3:24:39
Right, right next to where the house was.
3:24:42
There was, uh, there was a little sports field there.
3:24:45
Um, and so, you know, we went down there to see what was going on.
3:24:49
Knew nothing about baseball T-Ball, you know.
3:24:52
Or any of the sports whatsoever.
3:24:55
Jack, my son was six at the time when we moved to the us.
3:24:59
My daughter wasn't even born.
3:25:01
She was born a couple of years after I moved over here.
3:25:04
So, you know, I had a 6-year-old that would've ended up being
3:25:08
stuck in the house all the time for didn't do something with him.
3:25:11
And I was, I was working, I mean, I, you know, I had a very,
3:25:13
very high busy, high level job.
3:25:16
Um, but I had to do something.
3:25:18
So yeah, we would talk to the neighbors, the neighbors had kids,
3:25:22
find out what the kids were doing.
3:25:23
We used the community, if you like, to figure out what to do with the kids.
3:25:29
And, and that's what we did all the time.
3:25:32
So your tribe really, it, it's almost like.
3:25:37
It was a small subdivision that we lived in.
3:25:39
There was probably only about 20, 25 houses, but that was our community.
3:25:43
Yeah.
3:25:43
And that's plus the fact, you know, that I would, when I would go to work, I, I, as I
3:25:48
built the business up in Houston and start to hire people, I'd go to their houses,
3:25:53
talk to their families, what do you do?
3:25:55
You know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
3:25:57
Where do you do things?
3:25:58
How I needed to learn how the American system worked as well as you, you know
3:26:03
this because you came over here and lived over here for a number of years.
3:26:07
Yeah.
3:26:07
It's very different.
3:26:08
Very different from being living in Europe.
3:26:11
Yes, it is.
3:26:13
And we, but we've now got to the point 20 years later where you're absolutely right.
3:26:18
There is no public transport.
3:26:20
There is no way of getting around other than being driven by your parents.
3:26:24
Yeah.
3:26:24
So as a kid, all you do get, you get put in a car, you get taken somewhere.
3:26:29
Yeah.
3:26:30
You go and do that activity, you go back home.
3:26:32
And how much of those activities are related to the actual community that
3:26:38
you live in, and how much are related to the school is difficult to say.
3:26:41
It's probably more school orientated.
3:26:45
In other words, whatever the school kids do, that's what you do, but
3:26:49
the kids are being transported from one place to another.
3:26:53
Yeah.
3:26:53
Um, one of the things that I have noticed is getting, and I dunno what
3:27:00
it's like in Europe, but is getting very, very bad over here, is, um,
3:27:06
what I call self gratification.
3:27:09
People are growing up with an attitude that, um, the world owes them something,
3:27:16
community owes them something, and they expect to get that out of the
3:27:21
community without really putting an awful lot back into it again.
3:27:25
Uh, it, it's, it's almost like.
3:27:28
It's a bit of selfishness to a certain extent.
3:27:32
Um, you know, I've always looked at life as you get out of it, whatever you put in.
3:27:36
So you've got to be prepared to put something into life in order
3:27:39
to be able to get something out.
3:27:41
And unfortunately, I think kids today, particularly in the, certainly where
3:27:46
I live in the US, expects everything to be handed to them on a plate.
3:27:51
Rupert Isaacson: I mean, I think every older generation has always said this
3:27:53
about every younger generation forever.
3:27:55
I'm sure
3:27:55
Paul Illingworth: they have.
3:27:56
Absolutely.
3:27:56
I mean, you remember
3:27:57
Rupert Isaacson: your dad would've moaned at you about that.
3:27:59
Yes.
3:27:59
And my dad and granddad moaned at me about that, you know, but I think
3:28:04
perhaps each generation is right in that what they observe is young
3:28:10
people trying to figure it out and.
3:28:14
While they're in that figuring out process, they get stuff wrong, you know?
3:28:18
Yeah.
3:28:19
And that noise, the older generation, but I, I do think it's more acute now
3:28:23
in terms of like, so for example, here in Germany where I am, my kids can
3:28:26
take a bicycle and ride to the store.
3:28:28
They can walk to the store, they can go and figure out how to do
3:28:32
their own shopping, and they're at their 10 and eight, and they can do
3:28:35
that, they can do that safely here.
3:28:36
Um, they can walk to their, uh, grandparents' house.
3:28:40
Um, this is all very normal, right?
3:28:42
They can go down to the creek and play.
3:28:44
Um, and you are not paranoid about, uh, their safety in the
3:28:52
way that one would be in the USA.
3:28:54
Mm-hmm.
3:28:54
I wouldn't probably let them do it in the USA unless we were in a very, very
3:28:58
rural area and kind of had control of the land and the environment.
3:29:02
Mm-hmm.
3:29:02
Um, and.
3:29:05
It is still safer here.
3:29:07
And then you have, you do have a lot of what are called vet
3:29:10
irons here, which are clubs.
3:29:12
So, um, you know, we're part of a, a right vet in a riding club, which means that
3:29:18
if we all put our money in, we all have access to these facilities like arenas
3:29:22
and jumps and things like that, that we wouldn't be able to put in ourselves
3:29:25
privately, but collectively we can.
3:29:27
Mm-hmm.
3:29:27
But we have to do a certain number of work hours as well as putting in dues.
3:29:33
We've actually, so the kids have to show up and, and, and, and there's
3:29:36
work hours for kids in the V Right.
3:29:37
It's not just for the, for the parents.
3:29:39
And then there's nabu, which is our local nature conservation, and we have
3:29:45
to go out and into the orchards around here and clean out the owl boxes.
3:29:51
Um, get up a ladder, do that, deal, scoop out the ship.
3:29:55
But there's interesting stuff in there.
3:29:56
And then you find door mice and you find, you know, and there is this.
3:30:01
Yeah, I think, I think you nailed it with community.
3:30:04
Um, it's there, um, people say it's not as good as it was.
3:30:10
You know, you talk to the old generation here, they say it's, it's,
3:30:13
Paul Illingworth: oh no, I'm, it's been eroded, but,
3:30:15
Rupert Isaacson: but it's still much stronger, I think.
3:30:17
And there's a very good public transport.
3:30:18
So you, you know, we're out here, for example, Rowan, my 23-year-old son who
3:30:23
you know very well, who's autistic.
3:30:25
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
3:30:25
When
3:30:25
Rupert Isaacson: he's in Texas, he has to drive everywhere
3:30:27
and thank God he can drive.
3:30:29
But here he takes the trains all over and he stays in youth hostels and he
3:30:33
explores different cities in, in Europe.
3:30:36
And he can do that because there is still kind of a, of a system.
3:30:41
Um, but
3:30:45
you, you, when you were a kid, you didn't have that community involvement.
3:30:49
You had to make it through that rugby team, right.
3:30:51
You had to manufacture it.
3:30:53
What would've happened to you if you hadn't done that?
3:30:57
Paul Illingworth: Oh.
3:31:01
I'll be quite honest with you, I think I would've ended up being a lot
3:31:05
more insular, um, and isolated Okay.
3:31:12
Than, than I was.
3:31:13
I mean, you know, the community I went, you know, my, my high school
3:31:19
had 600 kids, um, which is nothing compared to what you have today.
3:31:24
And as you worked your way up through the years in the school, you almost
3:31:28
got to know everybody in the school.
3:31:30
I wouldn't say you knew everybody, but you know, you, you, you got it.
3:31:34
It really was being part of the community.
3:31:37
Now, it didn't matter whether you played a sport, you could be part of
3:31:40
the community by supporting one of the teams, uh, or just hanging out with
3:31:45
the guys that played in the teams.
3:31:47
If I did, if I hadn't have had anything to do with rugby, this.
3:31:51
I was involved in a lot of stuff at school as far as sports are concerned,
3:31:54
because I was a very sporty person.
3:31:56
Now, if I wasn't a sporty person or for whatever reason I couldn't do
3:32:00
the sport, I think I would've been a very, very insular type of person.
3:32:06
Um, 'cause I think that's what made me, you know, I'm quite
3:32:10
gregarious, I'm very outgoing.
3:32:12
I'll talk to anybody, you know, that mm-hmm.
3:32:14
That has, that has, that's part of my character that really
3:32:17
built up through those years.
3:32:19
Mm-hmm.
3:32:19
Because prior to going to, at 10 years old, so, so I, I
3:32:26
wanna backtrack a little bit.
3:32:27
Okay.
3:32:28
So when my father got really, really sick and the building business started
3:32:32
to collapse in London, um, I was six, seven years old and we couldn't afford
3:32:39
to live in the townhouse in London.
3:32:41
So, uh, my mother who had some contacts, um.
3:32:46
Shall we say with the theater people in London, I'm not gonna mention any
3:32:50
names, but she, uh, she was good friends with a couple of very famous actresses.
3:32:55
One of the actresses had an old cottage out in the Hartford sheer
3:32:58
countryside that had no electricity.
3:33:01
It had no water, running water, just as you were talking about.
3:33:05
And it needed work doing to it.
3:33:07
Well, my dad was able to do some work.
3:33:10
He couldn't do a lot of heavy work, but he was able to do some work.
3:33:12
We moved into that cottage and spent three years there.
3:33:17
But I went to a local school that had 20 kids in it.
3:33:21
So my junior school year Village school,
3:33:24
Rupert Isaacson: right?
3:33:25
Yeah.
3:33:25
Village
3:33:25
Paul Illingworth: school.
3:33:26
Yeah.
3:33:26
20 kids, right?
3:33:28
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:33:29
And tribe.
3:33:31
So I tribe, yeah.
3:33:33
I spent this little cottage was in the middle of nowhere.
3:33:36
Yeah.
3:33:37
With fields all round country.
3:33:39
All round.
3:33:39
I was surrounded by nature, but it was tribes.
3:33:42
So when we then moved into the council house in Hoon, which was a lot more urban,
3:33:48
shall we say, than than rural, that's when I started to get bullied because I wasn't
3:33:53
used to, I didn't know anybody there.
3:33:55
There was no tribe I'd lost it all completely.
3:33:58
Um, and I was a bit of a loner.
3:34:00
I mean, I really, really was.
3:34:02
It was just me and my sister living there.
3:34:03
My mom and dad didn't know anybody.
3:34:05
They couldn't go out.
3:34:05
They couldn't do anything.
3:34:06
There was no community whatsoever.
3:34:09
So I became,
3:34:14
I definitely did become a loner.
3:34:15
'cause I can remember going out, what do I wanna do?
3:34:18
Well, I'm gonna go buy some, get some bicycle parts and build myself a bicycle.
3:34:21
'cause I couldn't afford to buy one.
3:34:22
So I ended up building a bicycle and then I started to get round.
3:34:27
But then I went into the high school, the secondary school, and all of a sudden.
3:34:33
I was able to build my own community there, and that's when
3:34:36
I started to be more outgoing.
3:34:38
So it's very, very easy.
3:34:41
Not you, you've, you've gotta work on those skills.
3:34:44
I think.
3:34:44
It doesn't come naturally and it doesn't come natural.
3:34:47
Yeah.
3:34:47
I, I think, I
3:34:47
Rupert Isaacson: think you're right.
3:34:48
I'm sort of thinking back to some of my own, because as you know, I'm
3:34:50
also very gregarious, but I wasn't always, and, um, everyone's had
3:34:56
the experience of being bullied and everyone's had, everyone's had that and
3:35:00
Paul Illingworth: yeah, I
3:35:01
Rupert Isaacson: had to deal with it.
3:35:01
Right.
3:35:02
And, um, there was also, I think, yeah, a crucial period of learning how to build
3:35:10
community through my love of horses.
3:35:12
And then of course, you, you find other people that have
3:35:15
that and you share that with us.
3:35:16
It was the local hunt.
3:35:18
Um, because you didn't need money to be in the hunt.
3:35:20
You know, you, you, you just had to be part of the pony club, right.
3:35:23
And uh, the pony club let you hunt for free and subsidized everything
3:35:26
to get people onto that track.
3:35:29
Um, and uh, it was good 'cause it ended up being kind of a career track for me
3:35:33
alongside everything else I've done.
3:35:35
But it wasn't always like that and I wasn't terribly well accepted 'cause
3:35:40
I was a London boy not for English.
3:35:42
Like in less coming up through that and you had to kind of find your way.
3:35:47
Do you think that, um, if the computer games and that whole thing had been
3:35:53
around when you were a kid on there, on that estate, would you have
3:35:57
fallen into that trap, do you think?
3:35:59
Paul Illingworth: Quite possibly.
3:36:01
Um.
3:36:03
I can't say no.
3:36:04
Yeah, because, you know, it's, it's, it's one of these things.
3:36:09
I mean, I think I mentioned earlier on, you know, I don't sit around watching
3:36:11
television or reading newspapers.
3:36:14
I gave up reading newspapers about 40 years ago when every time I opened the
3:36:18
newspaper, there was nothing good in them.
3:36:20
So I just stopped reading.
3:36:21
Was there anything good in that?
3:36:22
No, I don't think, I don't think there ever was any, anyway.
3:36:26
Um, you know, and I mean, I would, I would watch the television really just to find
3:36:30
out what was happening with the news.
3:36:31
And even today, if I watch television, it's B, B, C, I just
3:36:34
watch B, you know, the B, b, C news, because I get worldwide news.
3:36:37
I don't get the, shall we say the American stuff that get
3:36:40
shoved down your throat here.
3:36:41
Yeah.
3:36:42
But yeah, you know.
3:36:44
If there was computer games around.
3:36:46
I mean, I've tried computer games when my kids were grown up and
3:36:50
they had computer games, but yeah.
3:36:51
But they're just not something that really, they don't engage me enough.
3:36:55
You know?
3:36:55
It, it's, it's, it's too tunnel vision for me.
3:36:59
I like to look at the broader picture of what's going on around me.
3:37:02
Um, but, you know, it definitely being able to, to go out and get involved
3:37:11
with community activities Yeah.
3:37:13
Is, is, is, and it is, it comes back to the tribe.
3:37:16
It doesn't matter what your tribe is.
3:37:18
It can be a subdivision, you know, it can be a team at school, it can be anything.
3:37:22
But I think tribe is very, very important.
3:37:26
Um, there, there was, there's, there's somewhere that, that I want to go here
3:37:31
and it's like in, it's, it's in the back of my mind and I'm just trying
3:37:34
to find the, the right words for it.
3:37:36
But.
3:37:39
One of my most recent experiences is running the escape room business.
3:37:44
Mm-hmm.
3:37:44
Okay.
3:37:45
Now, for those of you that may not know what an escape room
3:37:48
is, I'm sure most people do.
3:37:49
You actually, you don't get locked into a room and have to escape.
3:37:53
Uh, it's a themed room where there are puzzles that you have to solve
3:37:57
to work your way through the game.
3:37:59
So it's kind of a game, it's an interactive game.
3:38:02
And, um, the staff that I had running the, this business, it, it know it
3:38:07
was a very, very successful business.
3:38:09
We had eight different games all themed differently.
3:38:11
We had a pirate one, we had a Scooby-Doo one, uh, we had a
3:38:15
laboratory one, a haunted mansion, so different types of things.
3:38:20
Almost all the staff that we employed at that business, and
3:38:23
we had 12 to 15 people were.
3:38:28
Guys and girls that were anything from high school age that's literally
3:38:32
17 years old through to 23, 24.
3:38:36
So mainly young people that were either at school or were at college or had
3:38:42
decided not to go to college, but needed, were looking for another career.
3:38:48
So I had five years of dealing with people, both guys and
3:38:54
girls of that age group, right?
3:38:58
And so I've got quite a lot of experience of actually what we are
3:39:02
talking about here to date through that.
3:39:05
Now, the people that we employed, there were basically three different positions,
3:39:12
but everybody started off as a host.
3:39:15
And as a host, you're, you're dealing with the customers when they
3:39:18
come in the store, you're talking to them, you're engaging them.
3:39:22
You have to learn, uh, to basically explain to them what.
3:39:27
The business is about what the game is about, that they're gonna play.
3:39:31
And then you help them to go into the room, brief them going in the room, and
3:39:36
then when they finish playing the game, you take them out of the room, take a
3:39:40
photograph, say thank you very much.
3:39:42
So it's customer service.
3:39:43
You are teaching people to communicate?
3:39:46
Mm-hmm.
3:39:46
Okay.
3:39:48
The other side of the business, once they've learned all that side
3:39:51
of the business, is going into the rooms and resetting the room.
3:39:55
So after you play a game, you've gotta put all the props
3:39:58
and everything back in place.
3:39:59
Okay.
3:40:00
That's attention to detail, totally different skillset, but
3:40:04
everybody has to learn it and.
3:40:07
Eventually when you're good, you start to time yourself.
3:40:11
So now you, you're giving yourself a challenge because you're seeing
3:40:14
how fast you can actually put all that stuff back in place again.
3:40:17
And there was little competitions we used to have, and you'd get a
3:40:20
$25 gift card for the fastest person per, you know, at a certain time.
3:40:25
The next set of skills you learn, when you learn how to reset the games, you
3:40:29
know, the games, you become a game master.
3:40:31
A game master is like playing a computer game, but with real people.
3:40:38
You're looking at a TV screen that has multiple cameras.
3:40:42
You are helping the people in the rooms, you're sending them clues,
3:40:46
it, you're answering questions.
3:40:48
So it's very, very focused, but looking like a computer going right.
3:40:54
And you don't run one game at a time.
3:40:56
The game Masters are running three or four games at a time.
3:40:59
So you may have, you can have eight people playing a game.
3:41:03
You can have four times eight people, or 32 people that you're responsible
3:41:08
for making sure they have a good time.
3:41:10
That's what the business is all about.
3:41:12
So where am I going with this?
3:41:15
How do you pick people that you're gonna hire?
3:41:18
Because you don't hire people as a game master straight away.
3:41:22
They've gotta learn the business.
3:41:23
It's like starting off as a deckhand and becoming the captain.
3:41:26
The captain is the game master.
3:41:28
Alright.
3:41:29
So we had to pick people and nine times outta 10, nine times outta 10,
3:41:36
the people that we interviewed had no communication skills whatsoever.
3:41:41
They could be 17, 18 years old, high schoolers.
3:41:44
They could be people that have been to college.
3:41:47
We ha we would interview people and we do zoom interviews.
3:41:50
We'd interview people that have very good resumes, five years of customer service.
3:41:56
They couldn't talk to anybody.
3:41:57
I'd do a Zoom interview with people and ask 'em questions, and they'd just stare
3:42:01
at me like a deer in the headlights.
3:42:02
They had no idea.
3:42:04
Did we hire those people?
3:42:05
Yes, we did, because it's a way of actually teaching what what we
3:42:10
made them was part of our tribe.
3:42:14
This is where I'm coming with this, right?
3:42:15
Because it was a great opportunity for us to actually take people from the
3:42:19
outside world, bring them into our tribe, and teach them skills going forward.
3:42:26
And the ones that succeeded were the ones that were able to embrace
3:42:31
the, the, the job responsibilities.
3:42:34
We, we hired high school girls that, that wouldn't say boo to a mouse three months
3:42:40
after coming to work for us, if, you know, they were literally throwing people
3:42:44
out the door that, you know, somebody came in drunk on a Saturday night.
3:42:48
That's, that's how good they got because they got confidence in themselves.
3:42:53
Now there's a point I'm going here with this.
3:42:56
Okay.
3:42:57
The point is that a lot of the boys, the boys struggled more with
3:43:04
the customer service side and the interaction than the girls did.
3:43:08
The girls always seemed to have the ability to be able to deal with customers.
3:43:13
What did the boys wanna do?
3:43:15
They wanted to become game masters because they were all gamers and
3:43:20
they wanted Right, that's, yeah.
3:43:21
Yeah.
3:43:21
They wanted to sit in a room on their own, not have to deal with,
3:43:26
not have to deal with the real world, but they were very good at
3:43:29
controlling what people were doing.
3:43:31
And they were the best game masters we had were gamers.
3:43:35
But because we made them go through the whole customer service thing
3:43:40
and they, once they got to become game masters, they didn't just sit
3:43:43
there and be a game master forever.
3:43:45
We used to make 'em go back up front and do customer service.
3:43:48
Okay.
3:43:49
But.
3:43:50
They were also very, very good at resetting the games 'cause they became
3:43:54
focused on what they were doing.
3:43:56
Rupert Isaacson: This is really interesting because, um, basically what
3:44:00
you're, you're saying is that Yeah, something So community involvement,
3:44:04
that is an escape room business.
3:44:07
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
3:44:08
Rupert Isaacson: With tribe run by somebody like you who's taught people to
3:44:12
do much more complex and dangerous things with much high levels of responsibility.
3:44:16
So you're not worried, you, you, you like, you know, you can get these
3:44:19
people to where they need to go.
3:44:22
And yet at the same time, it's very real.
3:44:24
Um, and that to my mind is a very interesting place to end
3:44:28
up in this conversation because you are, you are in the gaming
3:44:34
world there in subdivision world.
3:44:37
This, these things are happening in the suburbs, often in strip malls.
3:44:40
Um, I mean they might be downtown, but a lot of escape malls around,
3:44:44
you know, in, in strip mall land.
3:44:46
Um.
3:44:48
It's tapping into what that generation knows.
3:44:53
Um, and I'm thinking, you know, one of the other things that we've often
3:44:57
looked at and and done stuff with with our autism work is LARPing Live action.
3:45:02
Role play.
3:45:03
Yeah, yeah.
3:45:04
Because it's, it's also, you know, it it, and that, that world is a
3:45:07
brilliant world, uh, for people that are sometimes neurodiverse, um, that,
3:45:13
you know, the Ren fare world, the SCA, those of you dunno, the SCA is Yeah.
3:45:17
Or do a whole episode on the SCA.
3:45:19
It's, it's, it's, that's a great rabbit hole.
3:45:22
But gaming actually, because what, what is gaming?
3:45:26
Gaming is.
3:45:27
When you do it live well then you're back to your rugby team, aren't you?
3:45:31
You're back to community.
3:45:33
You're back to community and, and having this challenge that you have
3:45:36
to fulfill when then you're back to the hunting and gathering group.
3:45:38
You're back to the group of lads going out there with the spear, you know,
3:45:42
and there's an older one trying to keep them safe, but also enough risk
3:45:45
that they can actually get the kill.
3:45:47
There's the girls out there gathering and it's very dangerous.
3:45:50
They've got to dodge lines while they do it.
3:45:51
They've got a track, they've got to know that this plant is poisonous and looks
3:45:56
exactly like that one that isn't and beyond absolute high alert with that
3:46:00
while keeping all the kids safe and da da.
3:46:02
Um, all of this takes a lot of communication.
3:46:05
Communication takes drive.
3:46:06
So it is just really interesting that you, you ended up actually, I think answering
3:46:10
the question of what, what do we do?
3:46:12
Which is go reach out to an escape room if, if, if you are that mom
3:46:18
whose son can't come out the basement.
3:46:22
Um, perhaps you could do worse than to look up who's your local live
3:46:27
action role play group and who's your It's, it's, I I mean, it, it is,
3:46:31
Paul Illingworth: there is, it's, it's something that, that escape rooms can
3:46:36
be played by, by kids young as seven years old and really, really enjoy it.
3:46:42
And we've seen a, over the five years of running that business, we've seen
3:46:45
multiple families that every time we'd have a new game, they'd play all our
3:46:48
games, the whole family would come, they play all our games, we get a new one.
3:46:52
They would hassle us when you open in a new game so we can come back and play.
3:46:56
You've convinced me, I'm gonna take my kids to an escape route.
3:46:58
They were, they were treating it as community, as a child.
3:47:02
Yeah, no,
3:47:02
Rupert Isaacson: you, you've, you've totally hit the nail on the head here.
3:47:05
I think Paul, because I, I did a, I did a podcast, um, a few months back
3:47:09
with a, a really interesting lady called, um, Lainey Liberty, who.
3:47:14
Took a year off to travel with her son and they just never went back.
3:47:18
And they now run a business together.
3:47:20
Um, and what they do is get, they do board games, they run gaming cafes.
3:47:24
Mm-hmm.
3:47:25
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
3:47:26
Yeah.
3:47:26
And it's
3:47:26
Rupert Isaacson: very similar.
3:47:27
It's, it's, it's, it's the same thing.
3:47:28
Yeah.
3:47:28
Paul Illingworth: Yeah.
3:47:29
It's exactly the same thing.
3:47:31
It's getting the kids, you know, if, if you get kids that, that are
3:47:35
not sporty and there's a lot of kids that aren't sure, the majority of
3:47:38
them I think are not sporty at all.
3:47:40
And you're not gonna get involved with that type of community.
3:47:43
Well pick something else.
3:47:45
Yes.
3:47:45
Playing chess, you know, checkers, board games.
3:47:50
What we do here with friends, you know, we live in the countryside.
3:47:52
We are miles from anywhere.
3:47:54
Right.
3:47:54
But what do we do Every month?
3:47:56
There's six or eight of us all get together, couples,
3:47:59
and we play board games.
3:48:00
Yeah.
3:48:00
We sit round, we drink wine, we play board games, we talk.
3:48:04
It's community.
3:48:05
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
3:48:05
Lainey convinced me, she said play board games with the kids if we game changer.
3:48:09
Yeah.
3:48:09
And.
3:48:10
I, I hadn't been, you know, I thought, oh, I don't need to do that.
3:48:14
You know, we're out with the horses.
3:48:15
We do, and I thought, no, she's right.
3:48:17
And we started and it completely changed the family dynamic.
3:48:20
Paul Illingworth: Mm-hmm.
3:48:21
Rupert Isaacson: It does.
3:48:22
Um, so, so that is, listen to your Auntie Paul moms.
3:48:25
Yeah.
3:48:26
Um,
3:48:26
Paul Illingworth: there you go.
3:48:27
Rupert Isaacson: Start going to the escape rooms together and maybe, maybe
3:48:31
your son can escape the room that he's in, um, and escape into somewhere.
3:48:36
It's gotta start somewhere.
3:48:37
I love that because, you know, you know me, I'm such a proponent of nature.
3:48:41
Yeah.
3:48:42
Um, but not everyone has access.
3:48:44
And you also know how it is in, in Texas for example, you've gotta own that land.
3:48:48
There's not much public land out there.
3:48:50
Paul Illingworth: No.
3:48:50
Rupert Isaacson: Um, and it's
3:48:51
Paul Illingworth: also too hot a lot of the time.
3:48:53
It is too hot Wanna go out, you know, in Texas, but other places not necessarily.
3:48:58
There you go.
3:48:59
Go find the and only get all Well, you
3:49:01
Rupert Isaacson: answered the question.
3:49:01
I I thought we were just gonna go round philosophical circle.
3:49:05
But that's so Paul, isn't it?
3:49:06
It's like, well actually Rupert, here's a solution.
3:49:09
I'm like, well Paul, actually
3:49:11
Paul Illingworth: you have Well the thing is that if I'd have mentioned that right
3:49:13
at the beginning, you know, they, we'd have had nothing to talk about for that.
3:49:15
That is true.
3:49:15
For the next two hours.
3:49:16
So there we go.
3:49:17
We got there in the end.
3:49:18
Got an escape room.
3:49:20
Rupert Isaacson: We, alright, well, I think, let, let's end on that note.
3:49:22
I've, I've got to go get horses off the hill before it gets dark.
3:49:25
Paul Illingworth: I've gotta go mo mo mow another 20 acres.
3:49:28
So here we go.
3:49:29
Rupert Isaacson: All right.
3:49:29
In the hot sun.
3:49:30
All right.
3:49:31
The
3:49:31
Paul Illingworth: hot sun.
3:49:32
Rupert Isaacson: Alright.
3:49:33
Paul Illingworth: You take care.
3:49:34
Rupert Isaacson: Alright.
3:49:34
I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm off to an escape room with my kids.
3:49:37
Paul Illingworth: Alright, good luck.
3:49:38
Alright,
3:49:38
Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna hit the stop recording.
3:49:40
Cheers.
3:49:41
Bye.
3:49:41
Bye.