Assembly Insights Blog : A New Challenge
Assembly Extract from Mr Alex Frazer, Head at Bancroft’s
Presented on Wednesday 4 September 2024
Over the summer, I’ve been thinking about what it is to face a new challenge. If you are starting your Bancroft’s journey today as a pupil or a colleague, you might have been having similar thoughts.
Most people think it’s sensible, if you have the time, to approach your new challenge by doing a good amount of preparation—both mental and practical—but it’s also true that at some point, you have to let go, accept that you can’t control everything, and step into the new space.
To illustrate this point, I’d like to tell you a story that goes back 50 years to the summer of 1974. The scene is New York City, specifically the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center, whose construction of the upper floors was just coming to an end. Here’s a picture of the completed towers as they looked in those days—much higher than anything else around, towering over the older New York skyscrapers.
On the morning of 7 August 1974, French performance artist Philippe Petit conducted a 45-minute high-wire walk on a cable that he and his associates had rigged—illegally and in secret—the previous night between the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, 400 metres above the ground.
It is difficult to describe or imagine what the visual impact would have been, so here is a clip from an amazing documentary film called Man on Wire, which was made about this incredible feat.
Once people on the ground realised what was happening, many of them stopped their daily routines to watch. Wouldn’t you if you saw that? People were drawn to the jeopardy of the situation as well as the artistry and skill— any misstep, after all, could be the performer’s last.
The police reacted with horror and officers ascended the towers, attempting to persuade Petit to return to safety. They even considered using a helicopter to pluck him off the wire. Eventually, partly due to the rain, Petit surrendered to the police and was taken into custody.
Initially, Petit faced serious trouble, but public appreciation for his achievement led to all formal charges being dropped on the condition that he perform for children on a wire suspended over a lake in Central Park—which he did later that month.
What Philippe Petit accomplished was an extraordinary and novel challenge—remarkably risky, too. However, he didn’t just decide on a whim to string up a cable and go for it. He was meticulously prepared. In fact, he spent six years preparing for this very moment from the time he first set himself the challenge. Petit discovered the idea in 1968, when he was 18 years old, already a skilled tightrope artist, reading a magazine article about the planned World Trade Center while in his dentist’s waiting room.
With the financial backing of a renowned German juggler, Petit devoted years to honing his skills, practicing in places like the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia—both high, but neither nearly as high as the Twin Towers. He studied the effects of wind and weather, learning how they would impact the cable nearly half a kilometre above the ground. He assembled a team to help him plan and execute the task of sneaking into the World Trade Center and rigging a 61-metre-long steel cable weighing 200kg across a 42-metre gap, 400 metre up.
Petit was exquisitely prepared. But at some point, he had to let go, trust what he knew, and accept the risk—pushing himself into that uncharted, scary space to discover what he was capable of. That’s the magic moment when something new, something bigger, can be achieved—a lesson we can all apply in our own lives, meeting our challenges, succeeding, and growing.
To close, I’d like to share an extract from one of my favourite novels, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. The novel uses Petit’s walk as an anchor for the main action, which unfolds over a few days in New York City in the summer of 1974. In this extract, people going about their daily business near the Twin Towers become aware of something extraordinary happening above their heads and wait anxiously to see what happens next:
“It was falling, falling, falling, yes, a sweatshirt, fluttering, and then their eyes left the clothing in midair, because high above the man had unfolded upward from his crouch, and a new hush settled over the cops above and the watchers below, a rush of emotion rippling among them, because the man had arisen from the bend holding a long thin bar in his hands, jiggling it, testing its weight, bobbing it up and down in the air, a long black bar, so pliable that the ends swayed, and his gaze was fixed on the far tower, still wrapped in scaffolding, like a wounded thing waiting to be reached, and now the cable at his feet made sense to everyone, and whatever else it was there would be no chance they could pull away now, no morning coffee, no conference room cigarette, no nonchalant carpet shuffle; the waiting had been made magical, and they watched as he lifted one dark-slippered foot, like a man about to enter warm gray water.
The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.
Out he went.”
