BLOG - BRISTOL IN FOCUS: Bob’s legacy of hope

There is an old Buddhist parable about a farmer who walks out one day and finds his horse has escaped.

His friends offer him sympathy: “Such bad luck, they say.

“Maybe ...” says the farmer.

But the following day the horse returns, and brings with him a few other horses.

“Such good luck!” his friends say.

“Maybe ...” says the farmer.

But when his son tries to ride one of the horses, it throws him, and he breaks his leg.

“Such bad luck,” the farmer’s friends say.

“Maybe ...” says the farmer.

But the following day, when the army arrives to conscript the son, they see his broken leg and pass him by.

“Such good luck,” the farmer’s friends say.

“Maybe ...” says the farmer.

The story goes on like this indefinitely. I was reminded of it when I interviewed veteran fundraiser Bob Woodward this week.

Few people can have gone through the kinds of personal trauma he has seen, but he has that great gift of being able to turn every tragedy that befalls him into something positive.

The day I turned up on Bob’s doorstep it was 39 years to the day that his son Robert was diagnosed with cancer.

They were dark days for his family. But rather than giving in to despair, Bob founded Clic – the cancer and leukaemia in childhood charity. When his son died in 1977, at the tender age of 11, Bob doubled his efforts to help other families going through the same sort of trauma.

By the time he retired from the charity he founded more than 20 years later, the organisation had grown into the UK’s leading children’s cancer charity.

But a second tragedy struck the family, when Bob and his wife Judy had another son, Hugh, who was born with Down’s Syndrome and a weak heart. He passed away after a heart attack at the age of four.

It was Hugh’s short life that inspired Bob to go on to devote his time to disabled children’s charities following his retirement from Clic in 1996 – notably his involvement in the Jack and Jill Appeal and the Children’s Hospice for Bristol Appeal.

Then 15 years ago he took on the role of administering the Starfish Trust – a fund set up by Bristol millionaires Charlie and Mary Dobson, aimed at helping disabled youngsters.

In 2010 Bob attempted to retire again, but another opportunity came up for him to help others, and it came after his family found themselves tested once again.

Bob and Judy’s only grandchild, Laura, was born nine years ago with an abnormality of chromosome 15 – leaving her severely physically and mentally disabled.

When he heard about the Starfish Pool appeal, which was trying to raise £1 million for a hydrotherapy pool for disabled youngsters at Claremont Special School in Redland, Bob felt a calling to come out of retirement once again.

“I’ve seen the pleasure Laura gets from her local hydrotherapy pool, where my daughter lives up in Derbyshire,” Bob told me. “So I know all too well how important it is to get a similar pool down here for the children in Bristol.”

Bob has had his share of health problems himself – he was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer in 2003, and last year also had to have a knee replaced.

But today, as Bob celebrates his 80th birthday, he is finally allowing himself a well-deserved retirement.

For a man who has attended the funerals of more than 300 children, he knows better than most, that the wise thing, like the farmer in the parable, is to not believe in good luck or bad luck – but rather to accept what life has thrown at him, and wherever possible turn it into a positive.

For Bob, who served as an itinerant Baptist lay preacher as a teenager, when times are tough it’s his enduring faith that sees him through.

“Emotionally, everything begins to take its toll after a while,” he told me. “But my faith is strong, and I believe the things that have happened to me have happened for a reason.”

Whatever your religious beliefs, you instinctively know that such faith has to be for the good. There's no "maybe" about it.

Feature writer David Clensy writes The Post's daily Focus features