Richard D North

Perhaps hero-worship is a bad thing. Is that why we now talk of role-models? Perhaps we really should prefer Gary Lineker, as a well-behaved footballer to, say, Nelson, a very badly-behaved admiral.

As a post-war child, I knew what debt we owed to heroes. But perhaps we already knew from Rattigan that their raffishness could tend, or be corrupted, toward caddishness. I remember not wholly admiring Douglas Bader, even when he squeaked on his tin legs down the school hall and gave me a prize for elocution.

Much later I got to know Leonard Cheshire VC: at least, I knew him in the way Tom Allen (Nelson's servant) knew the great admiral. I was Cheshire's driver - a position which confers the privilege of studying the warts in one's passenger, albeit in a rear-view mirror. I found myself trying to work out whether, as well as a hero, he was also a saint.

I know he read the Bible in Latin and that he was intensely devoted to the poor of the world. The paradox was that he was certainly an impatient, and in some ways, a selfish man. In the end, I concluded that the willingness to sacrifice oneself did not depend on selflessness. That is, by the way, why we should not be surprised or bothered that there may be egomania in Mother Teresa: probably it was there in St Francis, too.

I have spent Christmas reading about two heroes. Christopher Hibbert's "personal history" of Nelson is an excellent successor to the biographies of Southey, Oman and Pocock. But Hibbert gives demoralising evidence of Nelson's mawkishness, snobbery and vanity. Savingly, one reflects that the more you see the nature of the clay, the more admirable is the self- modelling.

Now that we all psycho-babble, it is impossible not to look for the deficiencies which go to build character. Elspeth Huxley's biography of Peter Scott is kind, but also unflinching about her subject. Because I love small boats, I am drawn to this hero of The Battle of the Narrow Seas (as he called his account of Coastal Forces and their Motor Torpedo Boats). Huxley is tactful in pointing out Scott's sense of his father's shadow, cast from the Antarctic where Robert Falcon Scott lost his life and became something of a modern Nelson. What shines out is that with a mother like Peter Scott's - creative, semi-bohemian, determined, and attractive - he would have turned out extraordinary anyway.

Peter Scott's really was a life with a thread, in war and peace, youth and old age: of mud, skies, estuaries, sea and birds. As artist and warrior he was no Turner and no Nelson. Even when he turned from shooting wildlife to conserving it, he did not have incredible vision. But he was one of the few who moved the natural world centre-stage. His hob-nobbing with the great probably saved more whales than Greenpeace's courage and charisma.

He once told me that when the World Wildlife Fund started in the 1960s, its founders realised that the poor of the world mattered and needed to be brought into the conservation equation. But, he said, the Western public would only have responded to fur-and-feather conservation, and so we had the panda and the pandering to the bunny-huggers. I am afraid I only half- believed him. Now, the movement he was such a part of in the 1940s can be seen to have blossomed in the 1980s, with arguments that seriously try to see people and planet as one. It all came right in the end.

People's flaws and myopia are as splendid as their virtues and vision. Even the best of us are three-wheeled carts. I shall stick to worshipping Nelson and admiring Cheshire and Scott. But don't trust me: Melbourne is my political hero, and Alan Clark is in there too. With heroes like these, who needs role-models?