The classic book The Railway Children contains several episodes that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern children. None perhaps are more shocking to the modern mind than the incident where some public schoolboys on a cross country run are directed through a tunnel on a working public railway. Unsurprisingly, this does not end well, with one of the boys – Jim – breaking his leg and almost being hit by a train.
We must ask whether more rules are always the right response to these kind of tragedies
If I remember correctly, there is little hint in the novel of anybody regarding the decision to let the boys run through the tunnel as a bad thing in and of itself, which is even more remarkable given that the author Edith Nesbit was a prominent and vocal social reformer. Jim’s accident is clearly regarded by the characters in the novel as just that, an accident, the kind of mishap that is regrettable but unavoidable in the wider context of training British boys to be fit, sturdy, persistent and self-reliant.
Very few people would honestly want to return wholesale to the days where a decidedly cavalier approach was taken to risk across society. In 1936, for example, five grammar school boys from South London died from exhaustion during a snowstorm in the Black Forest, in what locals came to call the Engländerunglück, or ‘English calamity’. The trip had been organised by a single teacher, who was the only adult with an ill-equipped party of 27 pupils. Likewise, industrial accidents due to cost-cutting and employer negligence took a terrible toll of workers in the Victorian era and the first part of the twentieth century. As late as the 1940s, according to writer Christian Wolmar, the number of railwaymen being killed in accidents at work was still in the hundreds per year.
All the same, it can sometimes seem as if the pendulum has swung a little too far in the opposite direction. This week it was reported that a group of parents of young people who died accidentally while on Scouting trips are calling for new layers of government regulation of the Scout Association and a public inquiry into the deaths. This follows the conclusion of the inquest into the death of Ben Leonard, who fell to his death from Great Orme in 2018. The coroner found that Scout leaders had been sufficiently negligent that the death amounted to ‘unlawful killing’.
While we can sympathise deeply with the parents who have lost children in awful circumstances, we must ask whether more rules are always the right response to these kind of tragedies. A friend of mine who is himself a Scout leader noted that the problem in the Ben Leonard case was not that the safety rules in place were inadequate, but that they had not been properly followed, as the inquest found. Notably, a proper risk assessment had not been carried out for the specific activity that the group were undertaking. It’s hard to see how additional layers of procedure would have led to a different outcome if certain individuals disregarded the existing regulations.
Scouting and similar organisations provide huge benefits to thousands of children and young people. None of that would be possible without the volunteers who run the local units. Like most community and voluntary organisations, Scouts are struggling to recruit and retain sufficient volunteers. Adding yet more burdensome regulations, more hours of training and form-filling, and the threat of public vilification or criminal prosecution in the event of something going wrong, is unlikely to improve this situation. Forcing the organisation to undergo a public inquiry, with all the attendant costs and reputational risk, might hugely damage its ability to deliver opportunities, for little clear benefit.
More fundamentally, we must find a stable balance between the demands of safety, and other competing social goods. It is important for activities involving minors to be safe. But it is also important for young people to test themselves, to push their limits, to find out just how far they can go. The acquisition of hard skills like rock-climbing and navigation, and the cultivation of virtues like endurance and courage, can be transformative for personal development, especially for boys. And yet without some level of genuine danger, these characteristics cannot be developed. I am currently reading a book called Into the Silence, about the early attempts on Mount Everest in the 1920s. The men who undertook those expeditions, often with equipment that would seem hopelessly primitive to their modern-day counterparts, had mostly been formed in the old Victorian-Edwardian public school tradition, of grit and pluck and stoic indifference to cold, pain and discomfort. That had its weaknesses and cruelties; it also enabled those men to perform almost superhuman feats of strength and perseverance in the most difficult of conditions.
If you read the biographies of men who distinguish themselves by physical courage, in war or other endeavours, one near-universal feature of their early lives is that from childhood onwards, they engaged in boundary-pushing behaviour. This might have been climbing drainpipes or enormously tall trees – like George Mallory, who came within 800 feet of the summit of Everest in 1924 – or swimming across fast-flowing rivers, or nocturnal excursions on to the roofs of their schools and colleges.
We cannot, and should not, eliminate all risk. That is not to argue for fatalism, or a return to the days of the ‘English calamity’, only for a sense of proportion in how we think about potentially dangerous activities. Humans make mistakes and misjudgements; sometimes these have terrible consequences. Young people make poor decisions, often in spite of the adults around them. There is much we can do to ensure that these are opportunities for learning, rather than tragedies. But it is literally impossible to anticipate every conceivable disaster, and pretending that we can do so through better systems is itself a recipe for losing a great deal of richness from the human experience.
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