Train the Trainer

Posting this January 2018 after I noticed a mistake I had made on dating another 1970s Backblip. This led to a very worrying gap in my memory which is troubling me. I can't work out why my passport shows I was at the ferry port of Hoek van Holland in April 1975 and had collected £50 of traveller's cheques a few days before and then got a full refund a week later.

I must have been on the continent with my car and that would suggest I went to visit family in Germany. But I can't find anything to support this. No photos but perhaps that is because most of the photos with my girlfriend at the time were destroyed.

So have been digging around trying to find anything that might give a hint and came across this certificate from that period.

I had been studying at Norwich Tech for an HND in Hotel Management. This involved spending most of the summer term and usually the holidays too, working in a hotel. In 1973, I had done this at Norwich Post House Hotel, part of the massive Trust House Forte Hotel group.

That went well and the Personnel Manager of the hotel had been very impressed with my work. He moved to a THF hotel in London and just by chance in 1974, I wanted to spend time in London as my new girlfriend was a trainee nurse at the Middlesex Hospital behind Oxford Street. And as things so happen, the Personnel Manager was at the St. George's Hotel next to the BBC at the top of Regent Street.

Bingo, the hotel was just a few hundred metres from the hospital and more importantly the nurses home at John Astor House in Foley St.

I did my summer term stint at the hotel and was then asked to stay on as a full-time employee. It suited me perfectly and so from August 1974, I had my first full-time job. A note I have shows I earnt £18 a week but I suspect that may have been the "compensation" during the term time assignment and included free lodging in the company's staff lodgings in Talbot Square near Paddington Station. However, no contracts were signed and the promise to be put through the THF Trainee Management elite course was simply on a handshake. And as I was to find out the following year when the PM was sacked, not worth a penny.

A hard lesson learnt. However while still in office, he did try to push me and one of these measures was taking part in a "Train the Trainers" course held by the industry training board. I remember it being held at one of the hotels around Picaddilly but not sure which one. I think it may have been the Ritz!

Was the first of very many courses I was to attend with THF and then later with their rivals Grand Metropolitan Hotels. Basically here we were learning how to train new employees. One task was to get someone to look up a number in the telephone book. Easy you say. Indeed but you have already made a large number of assumptions - can they read, do they know the alphabet.........

So remember to get agreements in writing and assume nothing.