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Introduction
Little did I know when I started researching the history of the Scottish Tourist Guides Association in October 2018 that a year and half later it would be facing one of the – if not the – biggest challenge in its history. Back in 2018 Scottish tourist guides were celebrating one of their busiest years ever and Scotland was the place to visit for millions of people. Then in 2020 the Coronavirus crisis struck the tourism industry across the world and literally closed down countries including Scotland.
As I write we do not know when we will see a recovery in tourism and all guides are currently out of work. But before that wherever you went on holiday in the world you were very likely to come across a tourist guide at some point. There are thousands of us across the globe and our job is to educate and hopefully also entertain tourists so they get the best possible experience. Guides come from a huge variety of backgrounds and their ages range from teenagers to octogenarians.
This book is mainly about one particular group of guides, The Scottish Tourist Guides Association, which is probably best known because of the Blue Badge our members wear. The Blue Badge depicts a Saltire, or St Andrew’s Cross, and a thistle which are the national emblems of Scotland. But, as you will find out, we have also had huge global influence playing major roles in the World Federation of Tourist Guides Associations (WFTGA) since it was founded in 1985.
In the 1950s many tourist guides in Scotland were teachers earning an extra bit of money during the Easter and summer holidays. If you had a language then you could earn even more. But there was no organisation which brought the guides together until 1959 when the Scottish Tourist Guides Association was founded. It was originally formed to educate new guides, a large proportion of whom were bus and coach drivers. Full time tourist guides were rare until the 1980s when Scotland was starting to see growth in tourist numbers and today many guides make a good living out of their profession. In some parts of the world guides can only operate under Government licensing systems but in Scotland and the rest of the UK anybody can set themselves up as a guide.
One of the purposes of the Scottish Tourist Guides Association was to create ‘professional’ guides who not only learned about Mary Queen of Scots but who also knew how to make sure a large group of tourists didn’t get run down when crossing a busy road. I came to the world of tourist guiding quite late in life but that is not uncommon in my new profession. Many of my fellow trainees on the course that led to me becoming a professional ‘Blue Badge’ Tourist Guide had also had previous careers. Two were former head teachers, one was a retired navy commander, another a retired senior army officer and we even had the former British Ambassador for Uruguay. There were some younger trainees including a St Andrews university graduate with a talent for acting.
So why did we all want to become tourist guides? I can’t answer for everyone but my motivation was being fed up sitting in front of a computer all day in my job as a journalist and wanting to divert my talents for story telling on paper to speaking to a live audience. Like all my colleagues I am a people person and get a kick out of the reaction you get from guests to what you have to tell them about Scotland. And there is a lot to tell! On the Blue Badge guide course we studied art, architecture, geology, geography, history, literature, wildlife...the list goes on. But the key thing we were taught was to talk about what we could see around us and explain to our guests what they were looking at. On the course many of my lecturers were qualified guides who taught us the ropes including how to handle challenging situations which inevitably arise when you take people on a tour – be it a half day walking tour or a 12 day extended tour on a coach.
This history tells the story of how our association was formed and the challenges it met over the years. We tell you about how guides are trained and relate some of the many amusing things that have happened to us doing our job. There have been a lot of people involved in helping me to put together this history. Particular thanks go to Ros Newlands whose
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