Room at the
Chalmers Cursley, managing
director, De Vere Hotels
At the beginning of this year Chalmers Cursley became managing director of the Greenalls-owned group of hotels, for whom he has worked for 20 years. His path to the top has been a steady climb based on gaining relevant experience in a variety of different hotels which he still says is essential to anyone with similar aspirations.
Cursley is an unassuming man, who is happier as a hands-on operator rather than a high-flying wheeler dealer. Yet at 46 he is managing director of one of the hotel world's most steady performers.
Born in Wells in Somerset, his career began at the age of 15 when the self-confessed "non academic" spent several summers working in a hotel. He says it was, and still is, the variety that he enjoys about the industry; the fact that you can be doing something different each day.
Cursley took a two-year hotel management course at Western-super-Mare Technical College after which he worked in a Swiss hotel spending time in various departments. It was his time in Basle that instilled in him a sense of quality, attention to detail and pride: "It provided the basis for standards which I continue to seek to achieve in hotels now. Everything that was done there, was done properly," he says.
It was also his first spell away from home, which he says made him stand on his own two feet. "Living in another culture and working with a different nationality made me quickly realise where I fitted into the hierarchy - usually at the bottom," he remembers.
When he returned to the UK, he took up a position in front office at the 800-bedroom Mount Royal Hotel in Oxford Street, London, at a time when he says most London receptionists were male. "I learnt a lot about filling beds," he says of his year at the hotel.
Throughout his career Cursley has been conscious of gaining useful experience. "I was trying to look at things and ask what I could learn," he says. His next move was to what he calls a "quality" hotel - the 100-bedroom Londonderry, which had just opened. Here he did another spell as a receptionist, and then moved on to become front office manager at the Skyway Hotel at Heathrow.
Conscious of the fact that, although he had a liberal amount of front office experience he knew little of the food and beverage side of hotels, he then took up the post of food and beverage manager at the Castle Hotel, Windsor, whose receptionist he was about to marry. Feeling he had reached a crossroads with this position, he then decided to get out of industry altogether and accepted a lecturing post at Birmingham College of Food. "I enjoyed it, but at the time I was annoyed that there were a number of the lecturers who hadn't served food in a hotel before. I tried to put a lot of my experience across to students."
After this experience he joined the company for whom he would work for 20 years, climbing from deputy manager of the Lord Darsbury Hotel in Warrington to operations director and more recently managing director. "It was great fun to be involved with the beginning of a hotel group," he says. When the Warrington-based group bought De Vere Hotels in 1984 it gave the company national coverage, taking it to the South Coast with the Grand Hotel, Brighton. De Vere currently owns 26 hotels, making annual profits of £6.1m.
Cursley recommends anyone interested in a career in hotel management to gain as much hands-on experience as possible, and to always have a clear direction as to their goals. "I do believe that there are many opportunities in the industry for whichever sector people want to work in, but don't set your expectations too high, too soon."
Tony and Ruth Hadley, proprietors, The Cross, Kingussie
ACCORDING TO Neil MacLean, one of the judges of the Macallan/Decanter Scottish Restaurant of the Year, The Cross at Kingussie is somewhere "you could bet your semmit [vest] on and still defeat the cold".
The nine-bedroom hotel and 35-cover restaurant by the river Gynack at Kingussie was presented with the award earlier this year and has long been recognised as a beacon of quality and consistency.
Yet neither chef Ruth Hadley, a member of the Master Chefs of Great Britain, nor her husband and co-owner Tony had any catering training. She is a former housewife, while he began his career as a salesman with Ford.
The Hadleys had their introduction to the world of food and drink running a corner shop-cum-deli in Morecambe. Too tired to cook after a day's work, they would eat out as often as possible. Tony remembers: "So often everything would seem perfect: wonderful surroundings, lots of waiters dressed up to the nines, a menu that sounded good. Then they'd put the food in front of you. It was like putting a pin in a balloon - it just didn't live up to your expectations."
Convinced they could do better themselves, they sold the shop and set off in search of a restaurant. Instead, they found an empty shop on Kingussie high street, converted it and, in the summer of 1983, The Cross opened for business.
Ruth describes it as a "baptism by fire". Although a good cook, she had never catered for anything larger than a family party, and the most exotic ingredient to be had in the local shops was a green pepper. Tony's knowledge of wine, meanwhile, extended to telling the difference between red and white.
But the couple worked hard and learned as they went along, building both a network of suppliers and a loyal clientele. Having a background in sales management was, Tony says, "a big help. It gave me an understanding of the financial side of owning a business. Training is less important on the catering side - good cooking can come from a love of food - but from the business point of view it's almost essential, even if it's just a week-long course with a local enterprise company.
"From the beginning we approached the whole thing as consumers rather than people involved in the trade. We put ourselves in the customer's shoes and tried to create something which we would be happy with. Although always conscious of cost, quality has been our watchword."
In 1986 they won the first of many awards for food and wine, among the most recent was the 1992 Egon Ronay Cellar of the Year. Last year they moved to larger premises, a former tweed mill renovated to Tony's design.
Ruth uses only the best and freshest of Scottish produce - local venison, beef and woodland mushrooms, Ayrshire duck, Shetland salmon and West coast, diver-caught scallops - to devise a range of limited choice, fixed price lunches and dinners. On Saturday evenings she offers a seven-course "gastronomic menu".
"Chefs can get very involved and intricate in their cooking but I've found that some of the finest dishes come from quality ingredients sympathetically treated."
Despite the heavy workload, she has until now been alone in the kitchen - Ruth is currently looking for an assistant to train. She says simply: "It's just a question of organising yourself. It doesn't matter if you feel ill or don't feel like it, it's going to be done. Panic achieves nothing."
The mood at The Cross is comfortable and relaxed. "Many people have said the place seems French - in some ways it is - but it's not something we set out to create. It actually has an atmosphere of its own, a lot of it dictated by the building itself, the beamed ceiling and rough walls. Although we take eating very seriously we try to do it without pretension - it should be fun," Tony comments. o
