Page 67 - RADC Bulletin 2019

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GATES OF BRONZE
Philip Holmes
At the end of 1998 my career in the Corps seemed to be progressing very well; I had adopted a twin-track approach balancing non-clinical posts (I was on my second posting to a staff appointment at MOD) with clinical development (the MGDS diploma in 1995 followed by an MSc in Endodontics
in 1997). To an outsider, my wife Esther and I must have seemed the epitome of professional fulfilment. For Esther’s part, her career as a lawyer
within the Dutch civil
service that had involved
a ten-year-long weekly commute had culminated earlier that year in her appointment as a Judge.
But everything was far
from rosy, for Esther was
in the depths of misery
and fatigue after battling
against depression
throughout 1998, a
depression that seemed to emanate from our failure
to have children. On 4th January 1999 I returned
for lunch to our quarter in Church Crookham to find
her body hanging in the hallway.
As you might imagine, this tragedy whipped up a range of emotions, but in the midst of these was the realisation that the Army and dentistry, good as they had been, would no longer be enough for me. Above all, I had to respond to that one-line suicide note in which Esther had written “life without children is unbearable for me”. Within days of her death, I had resolved that I would
set up a registered children’s charity in her memory and that the charity would work in Nepal. The latter choice fell out of nothing more than having had Gurkha neighbours
in Church Crookham. If truth be told, I was terribly underprepared for what lay ahead.
I knew nothing about charity, I had never been to Asia, let alone Nepal, and of course I had never had children. In HR terms, all the ticks were in the wrong boxes. Nevertheless, my mind was set on this change of course
Gates of Bronze is Philip Holmes’ inspirational and moving memoir of personal and professional triumph against the odds, of enduring love, written by a man who looked death in the face and vowed, “I will not give in.”
and I took a leap of faith. So began a journey that was both physical –
taking me to live in Nepal between 2004 and 2012
– and very spiritual. My memoir, Gates of Bronze, documents 20
years of child rescue and rehabilitation. I
can now reflect on work that has resulted in over 1,000 innocent Nepalese children being freed from prisons in Nepal, from slavery inside Indian circuses and more recently from Dickensian Indian “children’s shelters”. Remarkably as a small charity, we closed down not one but two cross-border child trafficking routes. And through a second charity that I founded in 2015, Chora Chori (the Nepali word for children), we are now leading the fight against child rape in Nepal. Esther would have been so proud to know that one of my staff in Kathmandu is a young lawyer who is supporting the conviction
of child rapists, herself a child trafficking survivor whom we rescued from an Indian circus as a ten-year-old in 2004.
A friend told me that my former tutor at the Eastman, the wonderful Professor Kishor
Gulabivala, commented on my leaving the Army with “What a waste”. Maybe not.
When Philip’s first wife, Esther Benjamins, took her own life in January 1999 he refused to be overwhelmed by grief and despair. Instead, he turned his back immediately upon a promising career as a British Army officer and set up a charity for Nepalese children to perpetuate Esther’s love and burning sense of social justice.
So began a remarkable spiritual and physical journey that took him to living in Nepal – a country of which he had no prior knowledge – in his bid to rescue hundreds of children from prisons, the streets and modern-day slavery.
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