Page 50 - Microsoft Word - Guiding lights final version 0841 1007 big print.doc

control police-training vehicle from Tullieallan College and I exited the coach rather spectacularly through the windscreen. You can imagine how relieved I was when BBG Doreen Boyle who had been a director since 1996 stepped into the frame and after interview took over the starring role of Administrator in late 1998.
With a Swiss mother, Dutch father and born in England, Doreen came to Edinburgh shortly after she married a Scot from Glasgow. She had never lived anywhere in the UK more than five years at a time, but then stayed thirty-seven years in the same Edinburgh flat.
‘When my two sons were small I was conscious that I knew very little about Scotland and with my European background and languages, becoming a guide presented an interesting challenge,’ Doreen said. ‘I qualified as an STGA guide in 1995. After a short time teaching French and Economics at Gracemount Comprehensive, I was involved in setting up the UK sales office for an American company producing nuclear pipework and precision forgings in Livingston. Subsequently I helped set up Edinburgh offices for two stock-broking firms.
Alongside these very demanding jobs, I gained a degree at Edinburgh while my children were small and later was funded by my employers to complete an MBA, again at Edinburgh University. After this I thought the guide training would be easy – it wasn’t, but I loved it!’
Sally continued: ‘Doreen was still guiding at that time and I do remember coming back to Gleneagles one afternoon when we were working for a major corporate event, to find Doreen ensconced in a King size bed in a suite with a potential broken arm. We can laugh about all this now, but it wasn’t very funny at the time!! She had fallen down the stairs in Argyll’s Lodging and was taken off to Perth Royal Infirmary by Rosemary Thomson, where the broken arm was plastered, leaving me alone to work that evening at Blair Castle. Doreen missed a £600 dinner, complete with the Black Watch Beating Retreat and a day at the Open at Carnoustie with champagne the next day.
Doreen said Stirling Jail provided ‘a super address’.
‘It was good for marketing – but what was it like to live there? I say ‘live’ as it did sometimes seem as though I was living there as we spent many evenings and weekends there with a stock of M&S biscuits and coffee just trying to keep up with the work involved in setting up a new company and running it single-handed with the amazing help of our Board and one or two willing helpers. It was a hard time for the Board as the membership were largely against all that we were trying to do, and we had to go through two Extraordinary General Meetings in the first year! Each of the Branch Organisations had had a booking secretary and it was decided to centralise this function and have it done externally
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