Entrepreneur Jamie Waller owes his success to the kids’ display team. Now he’s doing his bit…
Jamie Waller’s childhood wasn’t easy. Like many children growing up in East London, his future seemed to be a forgone conclusion, a lifetime living on the breadline.
That was until he joined the Imps - a unique charity-run motorcycle display team which sends kids aged between five to 16 not only all over the world, but also through rings of fire and over cars while riding in pyramid formation. With their military precision and age-defying professionalism, the Imps’ performances leave audiences awestruck wherever they go.
Now aged 45, Jamie is a self-made millionaire, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author who says he owes his success to his time spent at the Imps and the guidance of the team’s founder, Roy Pratt MBE. It’s because of this that Jamie’s now giving back to the team as their majority sponsor.
Eleven years an Imp
“I joined the Imps at age five and was there until I was 16,” says Jamie, who’s one of 2500 people who’ve ridden with the Imps since the team were founded back in 1970. “I grew up in Bethnal Green, East London from a typical disjointed family. My father was an alcoholic, my mum was at home, and we lived in a two-bedroom flat above a shop,” he recalls.
Back in the 1980s, Jamie and his mum, Sue, saw the Imps perform at a local fete and instinctively knew he had to take part. Sue approached Roy Pratt and Jamie embarked on his Imps journey.
“My biggest highlight was actually getting in,” says Jamie. “To become an Imp, you have to go on a selection course which was a week-long residential boarding school, where you would do things like PT every morning. It was about working out if somebody had the character to become an Imp and stick it through.”
Jamie excelled on the course, and in 1985 aged just five, he became an Imp. “For pretty much 11 years of my childhood, I spent every weekend and every school holiday with the Imps,” he says.
“I’m dyslexic, and left school without sitting any exams or getting any qualifications. But what I did have was this immense confidence in my own ability to deal with people. It made me believe that I could achieve anything.
“We’ve got ex-members that are professional footballers, bankers - all sorts of things. Some of them simply ended up better than they would have otherwise.”
But it wasn’t just the children that benefited from the Imps. “When my mother was going home and getting beaten up by my dad, the thing that kept her motivated was bringing me to the Imps and seeing me achieve. That gave her the confidence to become a chaperone in the team, and get away from my dad every weekend to help at the Imps, and she ultimately ended up leaving him. Ther
