Dragons Den star, Duncan Bannatyne features in The Dyslexic Edge

Duncan Bannatyne is a well-known entrepreneur thanks to his time on Dragons’ Den. The 75-year-old Scot is still the CEO of the health and hotel businesses that bear
his name, a job he says that consists of approximately two Zoom meetings a week from one of his homes in Miami, Portugal or Monaco. He now has a net worth of £500 million, yet when he was at school in the 1950s his teachers wrote him off.

‘They just thought I was stupid. There were something like forty children in the class and they couldn’t cope with any child that was different. But I knew I wasn’t stupid. Even when they gave us quite complicated sums, I’d always get the answer right, but I could never show them how I’d worked it out. I added up things in a different way to how we were taught. I always had the right answer at the bottom, but the bits in between were a muddle, and so they thought I was cheating.

I suppose I could have slowed down and been more thorough, but I just knew I had the answer so I didn’t see the point.’

This resonates with something I read while researching this book. Dyslexic people often don’t know their times tables, but that’s because they don’t need to. What the rest of the population learns by rote, some dyslexics like Duncan and me calculate faster than tapping the digits into a calculator.

Duncan’s dyslexia meant he didn’t enjoy school. ‘I hated it. I got something like seven out of a hundred on a geography test. I couldn’t memorise where countries and cities were. Strange names just didn’t stick.’

I experienced something similar when I took a medical qualification for a round-the-world sailing adventure. It was almost impossible for me to pass due to the scientific names of the drugs. Whoever came up with the word dyslexia – one of the most difficult words to spell and remember – must have been having a laugh. It’s not

a surprise that Duncan now says his dyslexia ruined his school days. He felt he got so far behind that he could never catch up and so just lost interest.

He even found making friends difficult. In his sixties, Duncan was diagnosed with prosopagnosia, or face blindness. He speculates now that part of the reason he didn’t socialise was because he simply didn’t recognise people. ‘I was by myself a lot. It wasn’t like I fell in with a bad crowd, I was just on my own.’

Duncan remembers seeing other boys in the school yard riding bikes. ‘I got this idea that if I had a bike, then they’d play with me.’ The problem with that plan was that his family was poor. Duncan grew up in post-war Clydebank in Scotland with six brothers and sisters. He lived in something called a ‘requisition house’ that had been bought by the council to house families while the area was rebuilt after World War II. The Bannatynes lived in the house with three other families, all sharing the same outside toilet. There was no bathroom, just a tin bath in front of a coal fire.

‘I remember asking for an ice cream when the van came into the street and my mum said that we couldn’t afford it. I asked why not, and her answer was that we were poor. I heard that answer so many times that my ambition in life was pretty simple: I just wanted to be “not poor”.’