Chris Patten - Early Life

Early Life

Chris Patten's father, Frank, a jazz-drummer turned popular-music publisher and his mother Joan sent him to a Catholic primary school, Our Lady of the Visitation, in Greenford, and later the independent St Benedict's School in Ealing, west London where he won an exhibition to study history at Balliol College, Oxford - the first member of his family to attend university. In 1965, Patten worked for the campaign of New York Mayor John Lindsay, where he reported on the television performance of rival William F. Buckley, Jr.. He worked for the Conservative Party from 1966, first as desk officer and then director (from 1974 to 1979) of the Conservative Research Department.

Read more about this topic:  Chris Patten

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    “Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
    —David Elkind (20th century)

    “One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.”
    —John Berger (b. 1926)