Saving the world
Apr 4 2009 by Angela Upex, The Journal
He’s a figurehead of one of the North East’s universities. But Professor Paul Younger is far removed from the stuffy image of academia, as Amy Hunt found out.
THEY’RE my heroes. I like heroes.” A triptych of Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Archbishop Oscar Romero stands on a shelf in the office of Professor Paul Younger, ready to provide inspiration if it should be needed.
But while he likes viewing others as heroes, Newcastle University’s pro vice-chancellor isn’t so keen on being seen as one himself.
Even so, he has devoted most of his 46 years to “saving the world” and helping people in various large and small ways, on his own and assisted by others.
From indigenous communities high in the Bolivian Andes to the good folk of Berwick upon Tweed, Prof Younger has helped improve lives in many ways, including securing vital clean water supplies.
It’s not bad work for the son of a Hebburn shipyard welder, who grew up in the shadow of the vast ships constructed on the banks of the Tyne.
Not that he sees anything special in it himself.
“I am grateful for the gifts I have, but none of them are down to me,” he says. “They are things I’ve found I can do well and it’s not for me to sit and congratulate myself, but to see to what good I can put them.
“I want to help solve people’s problems, big social, cultural and economic problems. What I don’t want to be is an isolated superhero, it’s not realistic. The real saving the world is done in collaboration with others. So as far as I make any contribution to improving the world, I do it with others.”
Born in Hebburn and raised a Catholic, young Paul lived with his family – parents and four siblings – in a shipyard house right on the banks of the Tyne. He went to St Aloysius Primary in Hebburn before his family moved to Jarrow and he went to St Matthew’s Junior School and St Joseph’s Catholic Comprehensive.
Grandad Younger was a miner at Dunston, while Paul’s mother was from a family of Irish immigrants who worked in the shipyards.
Childhood summer days were spent with friends hitching the ferry across the river to Wallsend and back for free, sitting on the roof and ringing the bell when it reached its destination.
“It was a really dramatic place to grow up,” he remembers. “It really hurts me to look at the river now. It’s so quiet. In those days, the 1960s, it was always so busy and noisy. But by the time you got to the 70s the wheels started coming off.”
