Tim Owen – on the right – is one of the 3 Dads Walking, the suicide-bereaved dads who have just walked 300 miles from Cumbria and Norfolk and have raised nearly £750,000 for suicide prevention charity Papyrus. Here he talks of what he has learnt along the way and where they go from here
Tim Owen is recovering at home in West Norfolk, having just completed a 300-mile walk with two other suicide-bereaved dads who make up 3 Dads Walking. ‘It hit me yesterday, the tiredness, but I’m getting there,’ says Tim, who walked from Cumbria to Norfolk with Andy Airey, who is from Cumbria, and ‘Manchester Mike’ Palmer.
They were walking in memory of their beloved daughters: Tim’s daughter Emily, Andy’s daughter Sophie and Mike’s daughter Beth. Emily, who grew up in a small West Norfolk village and had lived life at a million miles an hour, had decided she couldn’t cope with life under lockdown and attempted to take her own life on March 18, 2020 – she died five days later in the hospital where she had been born 19 years earlier. The family’s whole world was turned upside down.
As well as raising awareness of Papyrus UK, the suicide prevention charity, Tim, Mike and Andy’s initial hope was to raise £3000 each for the charity.
It would be fair to say that they have exceeded that initial expectation. At the time of publication, the total on Just Giving stands at more than £566,000 and that doesn’t take into account the high-profile donations from Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman (£10,000 each). Tim says: ‘People like Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman and Lou Macari have donated directly to the charity.’ This week, another £10,000 has come in from anonymous donor. ‘The money is incredible; the money is unbelievable. We never thought we’d get that much.’
Plus, as Tim says: ‘We collected as we went along and carried a bucket with us. We collected a fortune.’
He recalls stopping outside a pub in Newark. ‘There were five or six guys outside, and these were hard guys.’ But once they knew what the three dads were walking for, they all dipped their hands in their pockets and emptied all the change they had into the bucket. ‘It was incredible,’ says Tim. ’99.9 per cent of the British public are lovely, I think.
‘Before we went on BBC Breakfast on Monday morning the charity said it was around £700,000 – it’s nearly £750,000 now.’
It’s a ‘bit bigger’ than they had initially hoped for. ‘It’s crept up and crept up’, says Tim. Not only that, ‘it’s started conversations, which is excellent. That’s the key thing.
‘We thought we were going to raise a little bit of awareness and it’s gone off the scale. We didn’t know how big it was going to be.’
Papyrus UK runs a 24-hour helpline, called HOPELINEUK. ‘Calls to that have gone up 20 per cent,’ says Tim, ‘and a greater percentage of dads are calling.’
The conversations between Tim, Mike and Andy and complete strangers on the epic walk were a revelation. It soon became apparent that people wanted to stop and tell their own story of suicide-bereavement.
‘The most recent one was less than three weeks ago,’ says Tim. The least recent? ‘Sixty/seventy years ago, when someone lost a father to suicide and hadn’t talked about it.’
He makes the point: ‘It was like we almost gave people permission to talk about their loved ones. That was incredibly powerful.
‘We would see a person, or a couple, or a small group and we could see by their faces that they wanted to talk.’ Some of the stories, says Tim, ‘were tragic – just tragic.
‘It brought it home to us that we were definitely not alone. You feel like you are the only person in the world going through this, but there are so many people going through this.’
When did they first realise that people wanted to stop and talk? ‘Literally, we’d gone half a mile, when we met our first couple – they had lost their daughter in August.
‘They handed us a copy of the funeral service – she was a beautiful, beautiful girl. I don’t know how old she was, but she was probably in her 20s. There were hundreds of people who stopped us and told us their story.’
Tim recalls the three of them being allowed through a building site as a footpath was closed. ‘One of the young blokes there had lost his best mate last year.’ Later that day they went to a pub and ‘the guy serving us told us how he’d lost his best mate. ‘So that was two people in six hours,’ says Tim. ‘Everyone knows someone or knows of someone.’
And he adds: ‘We had several people come up to us on to on the walk – mums and dads of young kids – saying, ‘you’ve given us permission to talk about suicide prevention’. It’s all about talking – it’s not rocket science.
‘The other thing that struck us throughout the walk was the humanity and kindness out there. We met people who just wanted to support us, offer us a flask of coffee or tea, cake or pork pies.’
They were even invited into people’s houses and back gardens. ‘The humanity out there in the British public was humbling.’
Tim, Mike and Andy walked through stunning scenery on the way. ‘From the beautiful hills of Cumbria and the Forest of Bowland into the urban sprawl of Manchester.’
They passed through the Peak District and then walked from Mansfield to Newark. ‘Newark to Sleaford was gorgeous,’ says Tim, ‘and Sleaford to East Anglia, following the waterways, was incredible.’
The finish line was in Shouldham, by the pub where Emily used to work. He says they were expecting ’50 or 60 people’ to greet them. ‘The whole of the village, around 600 people, seemed to be out there. I just felt as though everyone was behind us.’
Tim, Mike and Andy are still in constant contact. ‘The three of us had a meeting last night on Teams, and today I’ve spoken to the other two, individually, on the phone.’
And, having walked 300 miles, it doesn’t sound like they are going to put their feet up entirely. Tim says: ‘We are having a meeting with the charity on Friday to see how we can capitalise on this – it’s way beyond anything we ever thought.’
They would like to see a long-lasting legacy. Given the fact that suicide is biggest killer of those under 35 in the UK, Tim says: ‘We would like suicide prevention to be on the school curriculum – on the PSHE syllabus.’ As he says: ‘If it’s killing our kids in these numbers, surely we should be talking about this?
‘It was one of the ideas that came to them ‘as we were walking along,’ says Tim. ‘This was the sort of thing we were discussing.’
What has he learnt about himself on the way? ‘I can walk for 300 miles!’ says Tim. ‘The thing that struck me was how much I enjoyed engaging with people from all walks of life. I’m not a counsellor but I can listen.’
People have asked him if he gets upset listening to other people’s stories of suicide. Tim admits: ‘Your heart just breaks,’ but he adds: ‘I can’t be any more upset than we were as a family.
‘All I can do is empathise with people – that made the walk worthwhile. The ability to do that surprised us all.’
Visit 3 Dads Walking and Papyrus UK
Picture credits: Papyrus UK
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