Are all these people proof the secret of success is childhood tragedy?

That’s the thesis of a fascinating new book that shows how so many presidents, sports stars and billionaires share one surprising thing in common

THE multi-millionaire businessman Stuart Rose has vivid memories of one of his earliest birthday presents: a second-hand Dinky toy car. Down on their luck at the time, he, his parents and sister were living in a freezing cold caravan, where his father had dug a ditch to create an outside loo.

‘As he was digging, he found a Dinky toy,’ says Rose, now chairman of the clothing brand FatFace and the supermarket chain Asda. ‘I remember him repairing it with great care and I had it as a birthday present.’

Life turned round for the family when his father got a job as a civil servant in Africa, and in his early 20s Rose took his first steps on the ladder of his illustrious retail career as a management trainee at M&S, where he would later become CEO.

He recalls how, as a junior member of staff, he took particular pride in making sure the jumpers were neatly folded on the shelves. His life seemed under control and he was on a trajectory to a comfortable management role. Then, as he puts it, bluntly: ‘One day I woke up and my mother had killed herself.’

Yet the poverty and tragedy he experienced in his early years would shape the rest of his life.

WE HAVE been interviewing people for more than 20 years — prime ministers and poets, CEOs and chefs, actors and archbishops, Olympic sports stars and Nobel Prize-winning scientists — and what has struck us is how many of them have overcome bewildering trauma or loss in their early lives.

An astonishing number of these highly successful individuals lost one or both parents in childhood. Others have been afflicted by a serious illness, involved in a horrendous accident, or grew up in families riven by addiction, mental health problems or poverty.

When we first noticed the pattern, we thought it was a coincidence. Then, as the cases accumulated, we began to realise that a traumatic start can sometimes provide a catalyst for the talented, giving them an extra dose of selfreliance and ambition.

Far from holding them back, the struggle to deal with disadvantage or distress has driven them on.

According to one study, seven in ten entrepreneurs cite traumatic childhood experiences as a formative event. We started looking for examples and discovered James Dyson was nine when his father died of cancer. Apple boss Steve Jobs was given up for adoption as a baby and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos never knew his biological father.

The picture is the same across the world. Of the 45 men who have served as US president, 12 lost their fathers when young, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Herbert Hoover.

Bill Clinton’s died before he was even born, while Barack Obama’s left when he was two.

Nelson Mandela’s father died when he was 12. Napoleon Bonaparte lost his father when he was 16, was whipped by his mother and later said her brutality had led to his success.

While happy, stable childhoods typically lead to happy, stable careers and family lives, disruption can be the trigger for the astonishing creativity and innovation that catapults some exceptional people to the very top and prevents them from compromising their ambition because they have more to prove.

Of the 55 British prime ministers going back to 1721, nearly half had lost a parent as a child.

Herbert Henry Asquith’s father died when he was seven; David Lloyd George’s died when he was one; and Neville Chamberlain lost his mother at the age of five.

The pattern is repeated in more recent times. James Callaghan’s father died when he was nine, while Tony Blair’s dad suffered a stroke when he was ten.

Only child Theresa May also lost both of her parents early, within a few months of each other, when she was in her 20s.

The three current party leaders in the British House of Commons all experienced significant trauma as children; the same is true of many other senior politicians we have interviewed.

Boris Johnson’s mother, Charlotte Wahl, who died last year, was convinced his childhood ‘desire to be world king’ was born of a wish to make himself ‘unhurtable, invincible and somehow safe’ from the pain of her disappearance for eight months when he was ten, after she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Keir Starmer’s mother battled with Still’s disease, a rare and incurable condition that meant she could not speak for many years and ended up having a leg amputated. As a child, he spent hours sitting by her bedside in hospital high-dependency units.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey lost his father when he was four. Then, when he was 12, his mother became terminally ill and he was her carer for three years until her death.

The struggle to deal with their distress has driven them on

FOR Stuart Rose, the phenomenon can be described in medical terms. ‘Early trauma is like a vaccine,’ he told us. ‘It gives you the antibodies to fight future pain.’

His moment of inoculation with the trauma vaccine came in the mid-1970s with the death of his beloved mother, Peggy, aged 49.

She had, he told us, struggled with depression for years. As a child he would be told: ‘Mummy has a migraine.’ but he soon realised that ‘Mummy was depressed and didn’t want to get out of bed’.

It pains him to say that ‘today it would probably have been sorted out with a bit of therapy or a few pills. But she had a doctor who gave her more than a few — he gave her tons of pills: enough to kill a battalion’.

Rose had seen his mother on the Saturday before she took her own life. That Sunday, she had gone to bed ‘with a migraine’. Rose went to work on Monday morning, ‘worried about her, but no more than normal’.

He remembers thinking on his commute that he should ring her, but when he got to the office he became distracted by the busy weekly stock-take.

‘I didn’t think about ringing her until nine o’clock. She’d killed herself at 8.30am,’ he said. ‘She’d had a bath, gone into the kitchen, drunk a bottle of whisky, taken a pile of pills and she was dead on the kitchen floor.’

His father had come home and found her in the kitchen, and she was still there when Rose arrived at his parents’ flat that evening.

He went straight into ‘organisation mode’, ringing undertakers and coroners rather than bursting into tears.

‘My father was stupefied. My sister was very distressed. I had to do something,’ he explained. ‘I had a little mental checklist of all the things I had to get done. I kicked into “Right, someone has to take control” mode.’

He can’t remember ever crying after his mother’s death. ‘To be honest, I didn’t feel the effects of it until quite a long time later,’ he confessed to us.

‘I stuck it in a box, tied the box up, stuck the box under the bed and off I went. When I went back to work, no one mentioned it. There was, as there still is today, a huge [attitude of] “We don’t talk about suicide”.’

It was ten years later when what had happened really hit him, and the trauma eventually took an emotional toll.

‘It’s easy for me to make excuses, but I’m sure the subsequent breakup of my first marriage wasn’t helped by that,’ he said. ‘There was a lot going on in my head, but

‘My father was murdered when I was two: that shaped my entire life’