"BE ADVENTUROUS"

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 133, 2 December 1935, Page 10

"BE ADVENTUROUS"

ADVICE TO YOUTH

"Be Adventurous." That was the message Mr. Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, gave to Britain's youth recently. And when his 88-year-old chantey-singing father, Lord Runciman, heard about it, he said: "There was no lack of enterprise on his part. If there had been I'd have rope-ended him."

Mr. Runciman was speaking at the opening of Culford Hall, the new quarters of the East Anglican School for Boys, at Bury St. Edmunds.

"If there is one thing lacking in our generation more than anything else," he said, "It is the spirit of adventure. Boys won't take risks. Parents are always timid in every generation.

"What with the desire of the parents to find good, safe billets for their sons, and of the sons to be able to step into something that requires very little preparation after school, but which does provide a steady career right to the end, we are running the risk of losing our national character.

"I beg you boys to look round and not play for safety. He who plays for safety will never win any 'respectable game. What we require in this country, and thoughout the Empire and the world, is a larger number of young men who are prepared to risk everything for high ideals."

Lord Runciman laughed when a "Daily Mirror" representative told him his son's remarks about the timidity of parents. "I think the boy of today is generally just about as enterprising as when Walter was a boy,'' he said. "The younger generation that is coming along now is showing evidence of enterprise, but at the same time it is quite true that there are tens of thousands of young fellows who are making for indolence and ruin because their parents are nursing them.

"Much depends upon the enterprising spirit of the schoolmasters and fathers and mothers. It is up to them to transmit inspiration to the children. Create an atmosphere and your children will be all right. I was seventyfive when I developed a new business, and eighty-seven when I started another!"