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