Supermum How to go on holiday with nine children
Mother of nine, Dame Helena Morrisey tells Julia Llewellyn Smith how she achieves balance and why she never misses ‘cocktail hour’
Dame Helena Morrissey is sitting in the shiny head offices of Legal & General Investment Management, where she’s head of private investment, in charge of £894billion of assets, and describing her attempts to let the dog out that morning. “It was awful! The dog was desperate for a wee, and I couldn’t find the key to the garden anywhere. I was shouting, ‘Where is it?’ Eventually, I found it on top of a dusty shelf,” she hoots.
It’s not the kind of anecdote you expect to hear from the unofficial queen of the City. But, unlike many of her peers – afraid even to mention their families, lest bosses dismiss them as preoccupied with home, rather than work pursuits – Morrissey, 52, has never shied away from discussing not only her career achievements, but also her extraordinary domestic world as a mother of nine children, aged between 26 and nine, and now grandmother to seven-month-old Julian. “Being a grandma is so lovely,” Morrissey exclaims. “He’s a very giggly and happy baby, but if he whines at all you just hand him back.”
Julian’s parents are Flo, 23, (Morrissey’s second eldest) and her Mercury prize-winning musician partner, Benjamin Clementine. The pair are currently visiting from their home in Los Angeles.
“We had to dig out the high chair that was my nine-year-old’s, then I went through the old baby clothes and found him a pair of dungarees,” says Morrissey, who had her first baby aged 21. “It’s the circle of life.” Morrissey is good-natured about the natural curiosity that her football-team-sized family unit provokes.
“When we go on holiday, it’s like a travelling circus,” she admits. “People come up all the time and ask: are you Catholic, are there any twins, are you a blended family?”
The answer to all these questions is, no; she and her husband, Richard, who she met when they were students at Cambridge, simply “shared a romantic vision of the happy chaos of a large number of children”. Their dream was made possible by the fact that Morrissey could earn the requisite megabucks while Richard, disenchanted with his job as a financial journalist, went freelance after child number four, working around family commitments ever since, and now describing himself as a “spiritual healing adviser”.
“I couldn’t have done it without Richard,” Morrissey says. “Early on, he was the only dad at the school gates, but now my daughters say it’s not at all unusual.”
Warm and self-deprecating, dressed daintily in a lemon dress and nude stilettos, Morrissey has long been on a mission to improve life for working women. In 2010, she set up The 30% Club to put more women on boards and, earlier this year, she published her memoir A Good Time to Be a Girl: Don’t Lean In, Change the System. She’s a fervent supporter of The Telegraph’s Women Mean Business campaign, asking the Government to close the funding gap facing female entrepreneurs. Currently, they receive just 9 per cent of all venture capital funding given to new start-ups every year.
“Sadly, many people imagine gender equality is about being ‘nice’ to women,” Morrissey says. “But, actually, women are running things, and so The Telegraph focusing on the women who’ve set up great businesses, despite the difficulties they might encounter, especially around funding, is the best showcase for our talents – and provides great examples for other women.”
The daughter of two teachers, Morrissey’s own high-powered career was inspired by just such a good example – a talk at her Chichester comprehensive about the “miracle” of compound interest. “They put a grain of rice on square
one of a chess board, then doubled the rice on the next, until at the end there were billions of grains,” she says. “My children had the same talk and it’s made a big impact on them too. My 13-year-old is in his school investment club, and wants to buy some shares – though I’m not sure he’s investigated market conditions…
“Bea, my nine-year-old, is obsessed with making slime,” Morrissey adds. “She’s now buying ingredients in bulk, realising it’s more economical.” She laughs. “Finally! It took nine children to produce a couple interested in science and maths.”
Morrissey arrived at LGIM last year after 25 years at Newton Investment Management, where she was appointed CEO at just 35. She immediately launched herself into the company’s Own Your World campaign to engage people who have never invested before – especially women, who, the company’s research showed, made up just 1 per cent of “sophisticated investors”.
“Women’s pensions total just one fifth of male ones,” she explains. “People don’t believe me – they say you mean one fifth less, but I don’t.
“A lot of people find money very boring, but so much stress is related to financial worries that we need people to understand that it’s important to look after your finances, just as it is to look after your health.”
She does, however, think we can change things. Talking to Morrissey, it’s obvious that she’s driven by the intellectual satisfaction of the job, rather than materialism. Her salary is none the less huge (she’s estimated to have been earning seven figures since she became Newton CEO). They had a live-out nanny for 20 years (“We’ve never had people living in, our spirit’s very DIY”), but now they only employ “a mum who comes in the afternoons to help with ironing”. She travels to work on the Tube – “I’m a terrible driver” – and in their Notting Hill home, the children share bedrooms.
At weekends they decamp to a larger “but not grand” pad in Berkshire – but using only one car. “The second one fell apart and we decided not to replace it, for environmental reasons, now the children unofficially rotate who will go by train,” she explains.
Nor is she remotely a hands-off mother, leaving work promptly every day to eat their 6pm supper, which Richard cooks. “It’s important if you’re in the office all day to be parsimonious with your evenings out,” Morrissey says. “I hear male colleagues say ‘I never see my children in the week’. I think that’s very sad. It’s so important to make sure of family traditions. We have what Richard calls ‘cocktail hour’ – of course, it’s not cocktails, it’s raw veg and crisps at 5pm.”
On her four-month break between leaving Newton and joining LGIM (a split rumoured to be related to her pro-brexit views, something strongly denied by Morrissey), she relished walking Bea to school. “It made me realise how many conversations had been truncated because we’d all been rushing around,” she says. “If I have any regrets, it’s that sometimes the children wanted to talk and I missed the signals, but now I’ve learned to know when they seem a bit off.”
Are child-free days on the horizon? Two children have moved out, two are at university, one has just done her A-levels, and their youngest son is at boarding school.
“I still can’t see Richard and I as empty-nesters, going on cruises,” Morrissey says, chuckling at the thought. “The older ones are so often there – and now they have partners and there’s the baby, so there are often 15 of us, and that’s without including any friends and my parents. At mealtimes, we operate a stacking system, because we run out of plates.”
It’s clear she wouldn’t have it any other way.