That best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love
WORDSWORTH
LIVES OF LEADERS are not without record of such small acts of kindness. For the ambitious and scheming Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play – as for all Machiavellians – the kindness she sensed in her husband she sees as a weakness. ‘Yet I do fear your nature,’ she tells him. ‘It is too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.’
Kindness is the quality of being interested in the welfare of others, sympathetically concerned for their well-being and compassionate for them when they fall into need, want or any other affliction. In other words, it is the humanness or the humanity appropriate to man as a rational, social and sensitive being. And, like a mother’s milk, the ‘milk of human kindness’ is warm when it is served: touch, warmth, food.
In the context of the Three-Circles model, the quality of kindness most often appears in relation to the Individual Needs circle. In normal circumstances an individual’s needs are met – in one way or another – by participation in Task and Team. But individual persons are ends as well as means. That is the reason, incidentally, why the Individual circle appears as the same size as the Task and Team in the Three-Circles model.
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A captain who served with Admirals Nelson and Collingwood describes them as being ‘as hard as their rudder posts, men who regarded a hail of round shot as if it had been a shower of snowflakes’. But, he added, ‘They are as tender-hearted as schoolgirls.’ And Collingwood in turn said of Nelson, ‘In private life he was kind.’
One day, for example, Nelson had himself rowed over from his flagship the Victory to a frigate at anchor nearby where two poor fellows, suspected of shamming madness in order to secure an early discharge, were lying secured in iron chains after both had attempted to commit suicide. Nelson sat down beside them and listened to their stories. He then offered to pay £50 out of his own pocket (the equivalent today of £4,000) to send the younger seaman, whose mental illness he thought might be curable, to a hospital for treatment. Both men he discharged from the service on compassionate grounds.
On another occasion Nelson went out of his way to help the wayward son of one of his closest comrades, a recently discovered letter reveals.
Three weeks before the Battle of Trafalgar, on 29 September 1805, Captain Charles Tyler told Nelson over dinner on the HMS Victory that his son, Lieutenant Charles Tyler, had run off with a dancer from Malta. Nelson wrote the next day to the captain, reassuring him ‘we shall get hold of [your son] before any great length of time’.
Lieutenant Tyler was tracked down to a debtors’ prison in Naples, and Nelson wrote to a contact, Captain Frank Sotheran, asking for his release. Nelson paid the lieutenant’s debt with his own money.
As both these stories illustrate, Nelson exemplified yet another one of Shakespeare’s ‘king-becoming graces’ – bounty or gracious liberality. Such a warm-hearted generosity often walks hand in hand with compassion.
In public – on the quarterdeck – leaders such as Nelson and Collingwood wear the mask of command. Both officers and seamen observed a social distance, a disciplined adherence to roles that made friendly intercourse possible but forbade the ease of address we call familiarity. It was a lesson of leadership which newly appointed officers learnt by example – good or bad.
As a young lieutenant in the Royal Navy in the days of Nelson, William Dillon experienced this kind of familiarity. On one occasion, for example, he saw two or three seamen enter the captain’s cabin on his frigate ‘with as much freedom as if in their own homes and spoke to their Captain in the most familiar tones. He seemed to encourage all that, as he styled them Tom, Jack and Bill. My plan of proceeding’, continues Dillon, ‘was diametrically opposed to this. There is a certain deportment which, regulated by firmness and moderation, never fails to produce its object. Upon that principle I avoided abusive language, but never failed to rebuke the negligent.’ He finished his career as Admiral Sir William Dillon.
Collingwood, like Dillon, avoided abusive language and he insisted that his officers and warrant officers did likewise. He insisted that they address seamen by name or as ‘sailor’, refrained from swearing at them or striking them with a rope’s end or cane. On his ships mutual respect was the order of the day.
In my service in the Scots Guards, incidentally, I found much the same. Discipline of the nature that Dillon describes actually creates freedom – freedom for a certain friendliness off duty which carries no danger of familiarity. There is a good example from the Brigade of Guards in the Crimean War (1853–6).
On that campaign Colonel Hood of the Grenadier Guards reprimanded his young adjutant Captain George Higginson on more than one occasion. Once, for example, when Higginson had provided food for the men and left them sitting down to eat, Hood told him off because he had not waited to see if they had had enough to eat.
A few days after that particular incident the Grenadiers were manning the trenches before Sevastopol; a Russian cannon ball struck Colonel Hood in the chest, instantly killing him. That evening Higginson took up his pen to write a letter of condolence to Hood’s widow:
We have lost the man whose firmness and calm leadership were so conspicuous at the battle of Alma. … Though of reserved nature, he yielded it freely at times, to a love of friendly intercourse. I had lived on terms of the greatest intimacy with him, and although he treated me in all matters of duty with a sternness approaching severity, his kindly bearing and language while we were enjoying our simple meals together confirmed my early belief that in him I had found a true friend.
That same note of warm friendliness pervades a letter of Captain Alexander Schomberg (1720–1804), commanding officer of the thirty-two-gun HMS Diana, written while he was on station in the West Indies. It is addressed to a seaman called William Page, who lost a hand in an accident when firing a cannon. While recovering in England, Page had written to his captain requesting a warrant from him so that he could become a cook – the post traditionally occupied by seamen who had lost an arm or a leg while at sea. Schomberg replies:
My lad, I have received your letter of the 28th of January and take this first opportunity in answering it. Get your petition written out and specify your accident in it and send the enclosed letter to Mr Cleveland Sec at the Admiralty and I make no doubt that your business will be done. I am going to sea the first wind that offers and I shall be glad to hear that you are provided for. I am, my lad, your friend and well-wisher.
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One unintended consequence of such ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love’ is that word somehow or other gets around about the inner character of the leader in question. And, as we are reciprocal beings, it evokes a like response. That British fleet that sailed into action at Trafalgar, for example, shared in common a love for Admiral Lord Nelson.
As Plutarch said in the first century CE, ‘evidence of trust begets trust, and love is reciprocated by love.’ Sixteen centuries later, the English divine Richard Baxter echoes his words:
I saw that he that will be loved must love; and he that rather chooses to be more feared than loved, must expect to be hated, or loved but diminutively. And he that will have children, must be a father; and he that will be a tyrant must be content with slaves.