1974 autobiographical notes

 1974 Age 35/36.

My team at the English Tourist Board consisted of Bill Richards, Caroline Gillies, Jean

Ashton, Pauline Martin, Jean Cuthbertson and Michael Dewing.

This year I wrote a little booklet called The Mini-conference Market about, believe it ornot, mini-conferences at hotels.

I think I also started the survey of the Wild Service Tree following a Botanical Society of

the British Isles conference in Brighton.

South East England was in the grip of a drought at Easter and there were many fires in

places like Ashdown Forest during the school holiday period.

In May I went to the Spalding Flower Festival with Margaret Blake on some sort of

tourist board business. The town itself was very boring, so I borrowed Margaret’s car

and went off on my own to a CAMRA pub down a remote dead end road leading into the

Fens. When I arrived there at lunch time it was deserted and I had to call for service. I

sat in the corner with a ham sandwich wondering how such a place had earned its

CAMRA reputation. Eventually a few customers trickled in, mostly local trades people

like butchers and bakers on their rounds. There was some congenial conversation and

more people arrived. By 4pm, long past closing time in those days, the place was

bursting at the seams and the ale flowing far too freely. It was very late when I left full

of beer and wild tales from the Fens. My notes on the day illustrate the situation well:

7½ lb potato has been entered for the Guinness Book of Records. Came originally from 

Quadring Fen. Variety = Pentland Crown. Very good land accounts for this.

David Swan. Cockle boats from Sutton Bridge. Sprotty Lineham shot himself after ITV

film on his seal-culling activities. Fosdyke village, where he came from, has a curse on it.

Sprotty’s suicide means that all the old people will die.

Forty ducks in one shot. Harold Pearson – Cowbit. Aged 87. Still bikes to the Dun Cow.

Holds the record for the number of ducks shot at one go. (Cowbit pronounced ‘Cabit’) Gosberton Gala. Spring Bank Holiday, Surfleet Donkey Derby. Wash Fodder – A kind of cattle food cut off the marshes.

Let's Go now being designed by Derek Forsyth

I travelled much: to the Isle of Wight, to Exeter, to Buxton, to Bosham and Emsworth, to Bristol, to Lincoln, the Isle of Man, Maltby, Broadstairs, Cambridge, Abingdon, Skegness, Cleethorpes, the Lincolnshire Wolds, Peterborough, Hove, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Symond's Yat, Scarborough, Halifax, the Ribble Valley. 

 I did quite a bit of work for the Isle of Wight Tourist Board with Ewan Brenchley and it was he who gave me the slender, blue glass, ornamental bottle that we still have. It was on display, as a locally made item, in a shop in Newport. Many years later (1997) I heard it claimed that the celebrated film director, Antonio Minghella, who came from the Isle of Wight, did more to promote the place than the local tourist board had ever done. Ah, well … 1st 

 Ibsorted out the new Miniguide series for use in Tourist Information Centres throughout England.

On one occasion David Jeffries and I had lunch with Simon Jenkins, then editor of the Evening Standard. He drank white wine and soda water and maintained his customary superciliousness throughout the meal. He later went on to edit the Times and to all sorts of glory, but my recollection is we all envied him for being married to the film star Gayle Hunnicutt rather than for his reputation as a journalist.

In the garden at South View we constructed a vegetable patch and engaged in a war of attrition with the rabbits.

I plodded round Sedlescombe filling in plant lists for "my" tetrad.

In late autumn I went of to Ross-on-Wye for a Coverdale Course, one of the things that had a marked effect on my subsequent development and approach to life. It was Pat Cook, the chief executive of the English Tourist Board, that was so keen on them. 

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