Early Life
Woodward was born in Ely in Cambridgeshire, the son of an RAF pilot. He started school at Corstorphine in Edinburgh and was later sent to the school ship HMS Conway, as his father disapproved of his ambition to play professional football. At Conway, he played rugby union at centre alongside fly-half Iain Duncan Smith, who would later become leader of the Conservative Party. According to Woodward, he was not selected to play for the Welsh Schoolboys side because he was English, but he was good enough to play rugby union for a Welsh school.
According to his autobiography, he applied to do a law degree at Durham University, but was turned down even though he was good enough and instead, he found a job at a London bank.
Read more about this topic: Clive Woodward
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyanswhich is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“He was a man of Spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupulous about his diet at your table, excusing himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and fare hard, as became a soldier, or one who was fitting himself for difficult enterprises, a life of exposure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)