When the Foundation purchased Cluny Hill Hotel in autumn 1975 it came with one big caveat: to honor the coach parties who had booked the previous summer. Oh, boy! Peter was of course thoroughly game having served finicky coach party guests during his and Eileen and Dorothy’s management years of Cluny Hill in the 1950’s. The rest of us were initially somewhat alarmed but of course promised to be on our best form. Peter asked me to focalise Cluny Reception and I was soon joined by Joanna Walter (Cook) and Mary Stanton. We focalised as a team and were ready at dawn each day dressed respectably with smiling faces to answer the whims and what’s of coach party tourists. Turns out they were a genial crowd with a lovely mix of eccentricity and wit, kindness and skepticism, and only one or two complainers. Bacon and burnt toast pervaded the dining room and all of us pulled together to give them a five-star stay. The attached photo is of me on Cluny Reception desk taken during the coach party summer of 1976. That’s Australian Roger Mostyn in the back office. And that very same Sellotape holder is still on the reception desk, I noticed when I stayed there this past August.

Carly Newfeld