The bulk of the rota was completed by the time of our pre-season meeting, when some more vacancies were filled. The briefing included a reinforcement of my wish that we should cease to be a forbidding property, where the stewards were supposed to glower at everyone, suspecting allcomers of malicious intent. This was against orders from above, but neither I nor my team of helpers could bear the thought of giving up our time with the express goal of making everyone miserable, including ourselves. I gave a guarded instruction to be willing to give information, but not too willing. In other words not to force information on guests, but to respond favourably to requests. In reality there were infinite numbers of ways to interpret this direction, and not everybody entirely followed the spirit of my intention, but it was still better than assuming everyone was a thief.
An important part of the briefing was the tour of the garden, showing all the volunteers what we had been up to over the winter. Those who knew the garden gained a lot from that, but I was surprised by how many of them had never been encouraged to look round before, and for whom the improvements meant little, however significant they were.
Part of the way the property had run, as we had no tea-making facilities for volunteers, was that they each slipped out for quarter of an hour in the afternoon, according to a system whereby they were relieved by another spare helper, hence seven stewards for six rooms. They would take tea in the public tea-room and were allowed a piece of home-made cake to boot. This was a ritual I was very keen to perpetuate, as I felt it helped with the integration of the disparate departments. I also included the garden staff and the admissions team from our entrance kiosk. This allowed us to sit together and build up a property-wide feeling of togetherness. We were all in the same boat. It was also very good for the visitors, as they were able to join us if they wished, and talk to us on a more informal footing, which had great benefits in building up support for what we were doing.
I suppose I was a bit of a maverick, and I remember having long arguments in years to come, when this policy no longer fitted in with target-driven management (i.e. once we had made the place lively enough to excite interest from those who would have written us off a few years earlier).Tea-rooms were run by a separate profit-making enterprise which covenanted its profits back to the property at the end of the season. So according to my understanding, the end result was an enhancement to the bottom line of the property, and this was all that mattered. This was not how the commercial side operated. They wanted me to start paying the going rate for the tea and cakes. This would involve me taking money from a budget I didn't have, paying it to them at three times cost price, so that the 200% profit made could come back to me later. I baulked at this. I could not see the sense of the profit-motivated arm charging a charity with severely limited resources, and making a profit out of it at the expense of non-existent funds, if the money was going nowhere in the end anyway.
I did a quick calculation. If we included seven Room Stewards a day, one Garden Steward, Three Gardeners and two Admissions Staff, at an estimated rate of £2.50 per head, that would amount to a total of no more than £1700, over the period we were open. Bearing in mind that the actual cost of a drink was little more than some hot water and a tea-bag or some coffee grounds, and the cakes were costing at the time no more than 50p each to buy in, the actual costs were considerably less. More like £400, in fact, but that's the nature of things. By separating the profitable from the charitable, as required by law, you make departments with incompatible thinking streams. Profit is maximised by achieving targets, and to reach those, you must make profit on every element, even from the one you were set up to support. My logic never won the argument, but my stubbornness forced a compromise. At first we got our teas for free, until they caught on to that. Then I paid 50p per head. Finally it went up to £1. None of the money people was ever able to comprehend the non-financial benefits of team-building and interaction with the public that the system brought. And of course, our unfortunate Tea-room Managers were under pressure from their own superiors as a result. It is a poor world that only strives to be rich in gold.
I'm not going to go on for ages about volunteers, except to say that generally I really enjoyed working with them. I made many good friends, and I learned a lot about people-management through trying out my errors on them.
I was allowed to select a prescribed number of staff and volunteers to attend Buckingham Palace for our Centenary in 2005. The group I chose came from all areas of involvement. I drove them up to London in a hired minibus on a scorching hot day, and everyone had a marvellous time. As a thank-you gift they clubbed together and gave me some cash, with which I bought an electric typewriter. I got it to write my novel on, but didn't have time to get started. I did write a short story on it eventually. Interestingly, at this time, I don't think we had a computer at work. We had only recently got a word-processor. Prior to that, I hadn't even had an office. All my paperwork, coach-bookings and the like had been done at home and hand-written. I used to carry my entire filing system to and from work in an old orange box. Why I bothered to take it to work, I do not know, as there was no chair to begin with, and certainly no desk. Still more of my administrative filing was kept in my head, which was at that time still capable of such feats of memory.
On the road to Royal approval. I've told you about some of these people already. And I was too busy to shave.
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