West Ham beat Newcastle Untied 2-0 at the weekend. I watched the first half on TV. To be honest, I wasn’t terribly interested in either side and it wasn’t a top game. When West Ham went 2-0 up just before half-time, I switched the TV off. Nothing much happened in the second half, it seems. No goals anyway. Actually, I was only filling time, waiting for my grandson to contact me on FaceTime. He’d just got the results of an Ancestry DNA test he’d had done at Christmas and wanted to share it with me: “You’re definitely my grandad”, he said.
Billy Bonds was at the West Ham game. A camera picked him out. He was there for a special reason, viewers learned. The East Stand was renamed in his honour before the kick-off in tribute to the 72-year-oldWest Ham legend: the Billy Bonds Stand.
In the crowd, too, was Sir Trevor Brooking, another West Ham and England legend – a former England captain no less – who also has a stand named in his honour. He’d be about 70 now, Trev, and it could all have been so different. The winter he became eligible to run for our school senior cross-country team, I spent many a Friday as school cross-country captain trying to persuade him to turn out for us on the Saturday morning. To no avail. That was the year he started seriously with West Ham. To think, if I’d been successful in getting him to turn out for us, he might never have made it with West Ham, and there’d never have been a Trevor Brooking Stand at the former 2012 Olympic Stadium, now West Ham’s home ground.
We do things differently in Conductive Education it seems.
The other day, Paces posted on Facebook an invitation to ‘meet the team’. The website is welcoming, colourful, informative and easy to navigate. But you will search in vain for any mention of Gabor and Gyorgy Fellner who have only just left Paces after 15 years work, dedicated to children and their families and without whom Paces would not have the reputation it has. So do not look either for Elizabeth Janovski who retired last year, one of Paces first (maybe the very first) full-time conductor who retired last year along with her husband Laszlo. On the wall in the school at Paces is a plaque commemorating the opening of the new school buildings by the Duke of Gloucester. There isn’t a plaque anywhere commemorating a conductor. Imagine, for instance, ‘The Fellner Room’ above Gyrogyi’s old classroom. That would be something, wouldn’t it?
It’s not just Paces. A quick look around UK conductive education centre websites reveals much the same neglect. How quickly the waters close over the heads of those who went before and gave so much. One other example must suffice: on the website of the National Institute of Conductive Education, the only mention of Andrew Sutton, unless I am mistaken, is this
In 1986 Dr Andrew Sutton a psychologist from the University of Birmingham was instrumental in establishing a charity to bring Conductive Education, from Hungary to the UK. [About Us > History]
That’s all.
I’ll not labour the point. But, perhaps, in honouring those who have gone before football has something to teach us in conductive education?
