‘This is a hard career, but everything’s hard. Work hard, be the better you and enjoy yourself.’
In 2012 White & Case’s global private equity co-head Ian Bagshaw lost his younger brother, Dan, then aged just 27. He died suddenly on the finish line of an ITU Olympic distance triathlon in Hong Kong. That same year, while Bagshaw was a partner at Linklaters, his family set up Dan’s Trust to raise money for research and to help the local community.
My brother had an arrhythmic disorder that affects a small number of people and is pretty devastating. It’s called Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. He was a very fit guy, was competing in a major triathlon in Asia and collapsed on the finishing line.
We set up Dan’s Trust to do two things: to further medical research into Sudden Adult Death Syndrome and to run our Make a Difference awards. We sponsor broadly 40 schools in the North West of England – there’s a large catchment of people there, about 5,000 people – to nominate talented kids every year for financial support to pursue their talents.
It’s not means-tested; it’s basically allocating resources to schools, which is enough to make some difference but emotionally makes a huge difference because it drives people forward. We do about 100 Make a Difference awards a year.
We visit the schools. Myself not as much as I would like because they’re in the North West but my mum, dad and brother do that. I deal a lot with the medical research at Imperial College. We’ve backed a couple of projects now where we’ve luckily had some real success.
We have a CEO in the business, we have myself and my other brother as trustees, mum and dad, and we’re bringing on board trustees from the medical profession as well as a couple of the headmasters in the catchment area so we get the proper input from these people.
It’s a complete distraction. It’s great to do different things, not only in honour of Dan’s memory but to give something back. The community we come from is not so affluent, 95% of schools are state schools and a lot of the kids have resource issues. It’s really rewarding.
I rode the Tour de France in 2013 in full. It was a cornerstone fundraising event for Dan’s Trust. We had a huge amount of colleagues, friends and family participating in that event in support of the charity. I’ve pursued lots of different interests. In part I see myself and other key partners as role models in the sense that we say: ‘Look, this is a hard career, but everything’s hard. Work hard, be the better you and enjoy yourself.’
My loss was acute because Dan worked with me at Linklaters and a lot of his friends in the trainee programme worked in my private equity team in London.
Grief and outside-life impacts are often very personal, but Linklaters was massively supportive to me and my whole family – everything from the time away from work the partners and associates gave me, to a huge amount of people signing up to do the Tour de France bike ride – which is a massive emotional crutch and a real focus to which you could channel energy – to the medical support at Linklaters, the in-house doctor, the senior partner.