Sebastian Wade
'You get a keen sense of your own worth when someone wants to ransom you for four AA batteries and a bag of doughnuts,’ says Sebastian Wade. He is recalling his experiences negotiating with Liberian rebels during the Sierra Leone conflict in 2003.
By his own admission,adventure was one of the main attractions of army life and during a sixteen-year career in the Grenadier Guards; he was seldom short of it. In Northern Ireland he dodged petrol bombs. In Sierra Leone he travelled unarmed into rebel territory. As a peacekeeper in Bosnia he rounded up criminals. In Basra he ran a prison with a hundred Iraqi detainees. Most recently he gathered intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Now he has left the army and is about to take up his first civilian job, in Dubai, helping the AbuDhabi civil service train its leaders. ‘I’ve come to be fascinated by the leadership and management,the psychology of large groups of people,’ he says.
It’s a fascination that began when he left Ampleforth and spent two months training at the then Guards Depot at Pirbright. Aged eighteen, he found himself in charge of twenty-four recruits. He was the third youngest of the group and one of only three without a criminal record. It was the most challenging experience of his life.
‘I went from boy to man overnight,’ Sebastian says. ‘But looking back, I think Ampleforth gave me a head start. The Benedictine way is a very generous, giving one. It makes you open minded, ready to look for attributes in others, ready to believe that everyone has something to offer – and that allows people to trust you. Though I don’t think I realised that’s what it was at the time.’
He went on to Exeter University where he read chemistry and played international level rugby for the Combined Services team, before entering Sandhurst and a career that has since offered him all the excitement he could have wanted. Though there are other aspects of army life that he found equally rewarding. ‘In Sierra Leone, for example, I really felt as if we were a force for good,’ he says. ‘One person like me, in a huge geographical area, could make a big difference by sorting out something like medical supplies. Here in the UK we’d have been strangled by red tape.’
Sebastian’s understanding of the way organisations work has brought him a new respect for Ampleforth, to which he returns quite regularly. ‘I love the place,’ he says, ‘the feeling of homeliness, of permanence. Yet it’s not stuck in the past. On the contrary, it’s very forward-thinking. It’s an unselfish place whose approach to leadership sits very well with the modern world. The sense of community makes it a really strong institution.’
He recalls a recent school reunion. ‘There were ten of us, all very different, all twenty years on in our lives. Yet I felt an extraordinary amount of warmth and mutual respect which had nothing to do with public school clubbiness. It was almost like an extension of the place itself. You can go away for decades and you’re always welcome when you come back.’