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Another early Blue Badge Guide was a chap called Bryant
Peers. When City & Village Tours first started up in 1988
Bryant was very well known among British groups and
coach drivers and had a reputation for brilliant guiding and
a rather formidable style. If anyone talked on the coach
he would threaten to leave! In the early days I spent a fair
bit of time reassuring organisers that our guides wouldn’t
trounce off in a fit of pique! Bryant was still guiding in
1994 at the age of 82 but not long after he was forced
to retire due to ill health. I had contacted him to see if I
could interview him for our 10
th
anniversary but his wife
told me he was too poorly. She had heard of us though
and subsequently would give our contact details to group
organisers who rang to book a tour with Bryant.
In 1980 the Association of Professional Tourist Guides
was formed as a trade union for tourist guides and in 2002
the Institute of Tourist Guiding took on the examination
and registration of guides. Katrine Prince (1939-2004)
qualified as a Blue Badge Guide in 1974 at a time when
ladies were still required to have cut glass accents and
to take their exams in a hat and gloves. In 1983 she was
appointed Director of Guide Training for the London
Tourist Board. Under Katrine’s watch students from all
walks of life were now welcome with the intensive and
erudite course becoming ever more practical.
I met Katrine when she was my practical examiner on the
City of London guide course in 1987. She chose me for
the Best Practical guide prize and I got to shake hands with
1987’s Lord Mayor, Sir Greville Spratt, at the Mansion
House. Katrine generously promised me a guaranteed
place on the Blue Badge course for which, then as now,
there was enormous competition. I was keen to go but first
the £3000 for the course had to be raised.
City & Village Tours is a child of the 1980s Enterprise
Allowance Scheme which paid would-be entrepreneurs
the princely sum of £40 a week to keep them out of the
workhouse while they found their feet. To qualify you had
to deposit £1000 in a business account for long enough to
show up on a bank statement as more a test of initiative
than a bona fide investment. I collected together my
entire extended family’s holiday money to deposit at the
Midland Bank where it spent a very brief holiday of its
own before being taken down the Co-op. Thus was City
& Village Tours founded on 6 June 1988. I know it’s not
The grim face of 1950s
London and opposite the new
colour and life of the Festival
of Britain 1951.
14
The Kettle
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Middle Temple 1920s