HEALTH & LIFESTYLE
A Handrail to Life in
A
thick mist hangs over Lake Windermere as two rowing boats slip into the water at dawn. Aboard, ten
Servicemen and women pull at the oars as part of a weekend intended to change their lives.
All ten were attending a four-day course organised by the charity Remount who design courses to help Service personnel adjust to a new life in Civvy Street. Few on the course that day had had a clear idea of what was in store for them at Brathay Hall, a resplendent mansion on the shore of Lake Windermere. One marine brought a bivvy bag, unaware that Brathay Hall is more ‘Hilton Hotel’ than ‘Salisbury Plain’. They’d been encouraged to attend by Unit Welfare Staff in the hope it would help them on the road to a new future.
Trainers provide the practical and psychological tools to handle the changes required when leaving the Forces. The programme includes teaching, personal tutoring, discussion groups, career guidance and outside activities with a mix of kayaking,
climbing and walking. Subjects included discovering latent talent and abilities, managing stress and depression, and finding a new purpose.
Remount is the brainchild of former officer Neville Barton. He devised a curriculum and started fundraising. The staff at the Brathay Trust are true experts in providing a mix of activity and classroom learning to help develop life skills, confidence and motivation. Their usual clientele are disadvantaged children or business leaders.
Brathay’s lead consultant George Sharpe said: “In some ways, Service personnel are similar to the other people who come here. The key difference is that Remount Service personnel are successful people – they’ve succeeded in very stressful circumstances.
“What Service personnel struggle with is getting to grips with that success and then finding a way to apply it outside the Armed Forces. Remount opens the door to understanding their personal resources
Civvy Street Anita Syvret looks at the benefits offered by Remount…
and refocusing. Some come here quite distressed. They do have the building blocks to carve a future, but they are not always aware of it.”
It was just such a sense of uncertainty and loss of purpose that motivated Neville Barton to set up Remount in 2007. He said: “Most Service personnel have been used to a life of total commitment and reliability. At the same time, the economic side of their life has been taken care of. But when they leave the Forces, they find a world of acquisitiveness and self-interest.
“Personnel do not always have a community to go back to – many of them signed up to get away from their home life. It’s no wonder so many of them take to alcohol and end up in prison. When the unit gates close behind them, Service personnel lose their identity and their career in one fell swoop. They face isolation and it can be just like a bereavement*”.
“It’s a wake-up call,” said Richard Wilson, Course Director with Remount and based at the Infantry Training Centre at Catterick. “The future is not what it was for any of the individuals on the course. Everything they knew is taken away. The Services provide a very successful handrail: a structure, reasonable pay, three square meals a day. Then individuals lose everything, including their rank and status. Many of them find themselves floundering. Remount provides a replacement handrail, a first step on the ladder of independence.
“The Government sells resettlement as the pill to cure all ills. It does a reasonable job, focusing on the practical side of getting a new job while Remount challenges the mind, the body and the soul, aiming to be the mortar
28 Envoy Autumn 2011
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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