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by one booking secretary, Kate Anderson, operating out of her own home in Wester Hailes.
‘This did not go down well, and it took a long time for Kate to win over the membership,’ said Doreen.
Kate became known to the travel trade whilst running the café at Holyrood and also later when helping Bob Motion a previous STGA booking secretary.
She was an obvious choice to take over this position and carried on until the STGA decided to consolidate all services in Stirling. Sadly she died aged 61 in 2002.
Sally Spaven said the early years for STGA were fraught with financial shortages and lack of manpower to deal with the million and one things to be done.
That included the complete overhaul of the guides training programme (not least the 700 or so letters which had accumulated from would-be guides, which had to be dealt with) and the new board’s desire for STGA to be given the recognition it deserved within the tourism industry in Scotland.
‘The Board were never in any doubt about the course we had to sail our ship in, but the membership needed a lot of convincing and our precarious finances at that time exacerbated a difficult situation,’ said Sally.
‘Many hours extra unpaid work, trying to make our limited resources spread ever thinly, many tubs of Marks & Sparks chocolate biscuits and countless cups of cold tea characterise those first couple of years in Stirling Jail.
‘We were chronically undermanned in those early days and Doreen’s workload was immense as we grappled with technology, public liability and professional indemnity insurance, standards of performance, codes of conduct, complaints procedures, marketing and training plans all had to be written. Yes, that’s right, none of them existed prior to 1996.
‘As if that wasn’t enough there was the dreaded Memorandum and Articles of Association and the members just waiting to trip us up. Business plans and budgets stretched like elastic as we struggled to make ends meet. Doreen really deserves a Gold Medal for endurance over that time. But she battened down the hatches and kept sailing on.’ Some time later the board conferred honorary membership on Kevin Connelly for his great contribution to setting up the STGA as a company and his work as Company Secretary.
The new decade also saw the first ever International Tourist Guide Day being celebrated in Scotland on February 21, 1990.
Cyprus Tourist Guides Association chair, Titina Loizides,
came up with
the idea at WFTGA Convention held in Cyprus the previous year.
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