After focalising Cluny Kitchen, I spent a wonderful year from 1977–78 working with Michael Worth, Ian and Sheila Campbell and the Foundation’s Performing Arts Group. As we made the transition from performing in the tiny Lollipop Theatre (now La Boheme café) into the massive but still unfinished Universal Hall, it became clear that the theatre lighting system in the Hall was unsafe and would need replacing at a cost of around £5,000. When I asked to look at the Foundation’s annual food budget, I saw extensive savings were possible. So it was agreed with Management and Accounts that if I could save £10,000 on the food budget in the following year, we could use £5,000 towards the Hall lighting system. So I sadly left the Performing Arts Group, took on the food buying and began working in management in both Core Group and Executive Committee.

This was around ’79 and people had already started to leave membership. There was a feeling that after the rapid expansion and ‘glamour’ of the ’60s and early ’70s, the party was now over. We had an overdraft at the bank of around a million pounds which kept going up and up, and this, along with the acquisition and maintenance of new properties like Cluny Hill Hotel, Drumduan, Station House, and the Hall had begun to challenge the idyllic vision.

I finally ended up as chairman of Executive Committee. Many of those people whom we had previously regarded as our guiding lights had left. It was quite challenging.

India and I had some previous experience of management – small theatre companies, hotels and restaurants including at Cluny Hill, but we had no formal qualifications. Our work background was theatre, with no business training. So I suddenly found myself in a new management role – trying to reconcile traditional business practices with New Age values of ‘abundance’ and ‘perfection’. Consequently, I had a lot to learn and so I began some research, particularly into the Foundation’s financial background.

Aerial view of Caravan Park with Universal Hall late 1970s

One of the first things I found was that the Foundation owned hardly anything at the Park. We actually rented most of our properties from the Park’s owner, Captain Gibson. I knew he’d originally lived in the Park House, which Pauline Tawse had bought from him and donated to the Foundation (including an adjacent piece of land on which we could build the Hall).

Captain Gibson then bought and moved to Cullerne House.

I also found out that every month somebody had to go down to Captain Gibson’s office next to the shop and pay him a cheque to cover all the rents. We were paying ground rents on the Community Centre, all the offices and the Sanctuary, the bungalows around there, the guest bungalows, and all the studios. We had a lease for Pineridge and a lease for the sanctuaries and paid ground rents on everything else. Roy and Muriel McVicar ran the (now Phoenix) shop and had a good relationship with Captain Gibson. This was to prove invaluable during later negotiations. Muriel was amazing! So I decided that I would personally go down every month and hand him the cheque, which was quite considerable.

Knowing our current unsustainable financial situation, I had to look for savings anywhere we could. Management meetings were held in the Park House and, in these pre-computer days all previous agreements and contracts were stored in cardboard boxes up in the attic. So I started sorting through them and looking to see what I could find about the rents.

I finally came across the original contract with Captain Gibson and it spelled out everything in black and white: how much we paid, and how much it would increase each year. It also made absolutely clear that when the contract expired in 1984, every single building that we had built on leased or rented land would revert its ownership and become the property of Captain Gibson. He had us over a barrel. To be  fair from his perspective, all he’d ever heard from the Foundation over the previous years were words of ‘Abundance’ and ‘Perfection’. Money would never be an issue for us as ‘God would provide for all our needs’. We were the Golden Goose funded by God that could continue to lay him Golden Eggs for ever.
I went quietly to the Trustees and said “Are you aware of this? In 1984, we will own nothing here except the Park House and the Universal Hall. From then on, Captain Gibson, to whom we’re already paying quite inflated rents, can name his own price, for us to buy, sell or rent and we will have very few grounds from which to negotiate.” I said, “I think we need to start discreetly looking at our other options. Could we all move to Cluny? Or anywhere else? Newbold?” Cally and Harley Miller had bought Newbold House just down the road from Cluny. So, at least there were options.

And then, what I still see as a timely miracle, occurred: I had quite a good relationship with David Morgan, the editor of the Forres Gazette. Every week or so he would call me up and ask “Any good stories, Ike? Anything juicy — what’s going on?” He needed to fill his pages, and the Foundation had certainly had its previous fair share of publicity – both national and local. There was also interest in any properties in the Findhorn/Forres district bought in association with the Foundation, and how this might socially affect the area. Around that time a lot of big estates all over Scotland were being sold to foreign (particularly Dutch) investors. There was one particular Dutch guy who had bought quite a few big estates over on the west coast, and also a few local properties including Blervie House – just down the road from Cluny Hill towards Rafford. The Scottish Government were concerned about the ownership of Scottish properties starting to move abroad, and had investigated this guy in particular. Feeling the pressure, he decided to sell Blervie House. Completely unaware of our difficult financial situation, and only seeing us as another local major buyer because of the many other Foundation-related local property purchases, he got in touch and said, “I think you might be interested in my place”. It was another option.

So, I think it was Harley Miller, Francois Duquesne and myself, who went to view Blervie House. After viewing, the joint feeling was, “Yes, we could do something here. If we were desperate”. But intuitively, this wasn’t the place. So that was that and we went home. A couple of days later the phone rang and it was David Morgan. Of course, the Gazette had been following stories about the Dutch guy’s local property ownership. So David says, “Ike, you were seen looking around Blervie House the other day. We can see the Foundation is expanding. Are you going to buy it?” And I said “Er . . . I don’t think so”.
So he said, “Okay, so can I write a story saying the Foundation is not going to buy Blervie House?” And I said “Well . . . you can’t really say that either. You know . . . it’s too soon to say.” David said “Well, listen. It’s a great story. So, I’m going to print it one way or the other – either the Foundation is going to buy it or it isn’t going to buy it.” It was at the point when I thought, “To hell with it – this seems like divine intervention!”

I said “David, do you want the real story? I’m coming down to your office.” So I went to the Gazette office on Forres High Street and said “Here’s the real story, David. The Foundation’s lease contract for the Park expires in 1984 – seven years’ time. Then everything we’ve built there will revert to Captain Gibson’s ownership and we’ll have no choice but to find somewhere else to live. So, right now, we’ve been looking at all options. And that included Blervie”. David smiled. He had a great new story. We sat down and put the article together to be headlined on Page 5 in the Forres Gazette. As I needed to maintain my good working relationship with Capt. Gibson, my name only appears in the article as a ‘Foundation spokesman’.

So next morning, Captain Gibson sits down with his cup of coffee, opens the Forres Gazette and reads:

 

He called me immediately and said, “You don’t need to move! Listen, why don’t you buy the caravan park?”

So that was the trigger point. The miracle for me was David Morgan saying “I’m going to print a story one way or the other” that made me realise that our salvation lay in going public and telling the simple truth.

Last year (2022), I found the actual edition of the Forres Gazette (June 1982) in Forres library, so you can read the original article, and the one the following month, that I think was contributed by Virginia Lloyd Davies.

 

Interestingly enough, Johnny Bichan, who ran the farm next to the caravan park, also read the article and called and said, “Why not buy part of the farm instead?” So we also had another option, that would later become the Field of Dreams.

After meeting with Core Group and the Trustees, Francois Duquesne, (whom Peter Caddy had recently appointed as Focaliser of Core Group) called a community meeting in the CC, and we presented the whole case for buying the caravan park to Foundation members and made clear “We must either buy the caravan park or leave. We currently have an overdraft of £1 million at the bank. The next step is a major form of fundraising.” Francois got closely involved with the whole fundraising plan and everything else that followed.

But the thorniest question now was ‘How much were we willing to pay for what we saw as our spiritual home?’ I asked Capt. Gibson for a figure. He gave me a valuation from his Inverness solicitor and estate agent for around half a million pounds. Checks with other property valuers varied wildly, because of course, this was no ordinary sale. Also, members would come with their own inner guidance, “The figure has to be this – Not a penny more, not a penny less!” God will provide everything.”. “Expect a miracle – Capt. Gibson will give it to us for free!”

Muriel was very much part of it. I would negotiate with Captain Gibson and then go straight round to Muriel and we would just talk through the whole thing. She was wonderful. But we still hadn’t arrived at a mutually agreeable price. One day Muriel said, “Do you know what Cappy (as she called him) is doing? Because he has no idea what value to put on the caravan park, he’s now counting the teaspoons.” Counting the teaspoons? She said “He’s going round the caravans and counting the teaspoons, because he thinks the only way he can arrive at a total price is by adding up the value of everything on the property – including each caravan and everything it contains such as its beds, chairs, plates and cutlery and so on.”

Things were becoming a little crazy. I had no idea how to deal with something like this, yet I couldn’t help thinking, ‘We’re at Findhorn – We must just trust things will work out for the best.”

Two things saved me. One was a book about negotiation called “Getting to Yes”, that suddenly appeared in Forres Library. Its basic premise is that both sides leave the negotiating table feeling they’ve got the best deal possible. So every night I’d read this book and go down the next day to negotiate with Captain Gibson, asking myself, ‘What does Capt. Gibson really want?’

Obviously a starting point was money, but not necessarily everything. I think Gibson saw his future as being a gentleman farmer, raising pedigree cattle with his son, Michael, on an estate somewhere in Moray. Not running what was locally regarded as a slightly downmarket caravan park inhabited by ‘a bunch of hippies’. So my feeling was that if he could sell the caravan park at a reasonable profit, it would finance his next venture.

The second thing was this. I’d recently completed a two year day-release course in cookery at Moray college in Elgin, and I knew that they had a Business School. So, one day I went to see them and said, “Listen, I have this problem. The Foundation wants to buy the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park but we have no idea how to value it as a property. Would it be possible to value it as a business, instead. Is there some kind of universal formula that people use to buy and sell a business?” They said “Of course there is. The price is based on the annual profitability.” So I asked, “Okay, what kind of return would you expect on a caravan park?” They said “Probably 20 – 30%, it would be somewhere around that figure”.

This was brilliant, I now at least had a formula. I could go back to Capt. Gibson and say, “Let’s look at what the caravan park is worth as a business instead. This would include all the rents and ground rents that we are currently paying you, plus the income from both holiday and residential caravan lets, plus income from the (now Phoenix) shop and everything else.” He liked the idea and said he’d put together the annual figures for the previous few years. I think he was relieved to move on from counting teaspoons.

A few weeks later he called me into his office and said, “I realise we still have a slight problem.”
I said “What’s that?” He said, “The problem is this that I don’t record all the income that actually comes in. So the caravan park as a business is worth an awful lot more than it appears on paper.” So I said, “I can appreciate that. Unfortunately, I can’t just take your word for it, I need some way of showing the Foundation’s Trustees and all our members what the correct figure actually is. Why not have the Foundation run the caravan park for a year, so that we can see what the actual income is. Based on that, we can use the business percentage valuation formula income and arrive at a final mutually agreeable price.” And he agreed.

So, Roy and Muriel McVicar ran the caravan park for a year and from that we arrived at the price that we finally paid for the caravan park, which was around £350,000. (Interestingly, very close to Eileen Caddy’s guidance estimate)

Basically, from that point on, we were running the caravan park, keeping the income, not paying rent on our own buildings and knew that the figures were solid and could build from that. Francois helped convince most members that if we raised all the money to buy the caravan park then £15,000 a year would be going back into the Foundation rather than out to Captain Gibson as rent.

So, we finally bought the Caravan Park in 1983 for £350,000, having raised all the money from donors all over the world. Eileen personally signed 10,000 letters. She and Joannie wrote a thank you to every single person who donated for the caravan park, even if it was only £5. Many other individuals in the community created fundraising activities of their own.

What a great story to have lived through!