9 Apr 2011

Businessman’s £1m adoption mission

One of Britain’s best-known businessmen has pledged £1m to help adoptive parents overcome difficulties. Katie Razzall meets the man who has fostered more than 90 children and adopted two.

One in five adoptions fail; a bald fact hiding a lot of individual pain.

For some adoptive parents, no amount of preparation leaves them ready to cope with the reality of taking on such vulnerable children.

John Timpson, a multi-millionaire with a CBE, is trying to turn that around. He and his wife have pledged a million pounds from their shops to fund a programme that helps adoptive parents overcome the difficulties.

Mr Timpson is a man on a mission, by his own admission driven on and inspired by his impressive wife Alex.

With three children of their own, the Timpsons started taking in others in the Seventies, after Alex Timpson saw an advert in a newspaper.

Some children came just for a night, others several months, one stayed 10 years – and two never left – the first of those a little boy called Oliver.

Mr Timpson owns Timpson, the key cutting, shoe repairing, trophy engraving, photo processing (and so much more) firm that’s a well-known sight on many a British high-street.

He also – as Lynn Charlton, the Chief Executive of the charity After Adoption puts it – shows what modern philanthropy is all about.

The Timpsons have pledged one million pounds to After Adoption to help try to counteract some fairly bald figures, that one in five adoptions fail. For those involved – both parents and children – that is a tragedy, those numbers masking an awful lot of pain.

The Timpson fund will ensure that a training programme aimed at helping adoptive parents cope with vulnerable, neglected kids can be rolled out nationwide by 2016. The aim – to get that figure down.

After all these years of experience, John Timpson told Channel 4 News the key for new parents is “patience” – and an understanding that giving youngsters the confidence to build relationships with other people takes far longer if the early years of their lives have been blighted by neglect.

He is a man so determined that – eleven years after a boardroom coup – he bought back the company that had been in his family for generations.