In order to prove David’s match funding contribution, an independent financial evaluation was carried out, and confirmed that there was no financial gain for him as a direct result of the proposed contract with Sports Council, and that his contribution was adequate to meet match funding requirements. That in later years, the new and larger marina he built at the western end of the site, might have become profitable for him, was not relevant to our project. As it turned out, there were so many changes to the approach to construction, unforeseen snags in land purchase and transfers, his costs were far greater than he had bargained for, and he subsequently had to sell the new marina.
With the granting of the Secretary of State’s approval, an outline plan was put together, and a meeting with Brian and myself with the Chief Officer of the SODC Mr Butt, and another senior officer, Paula Fox, was arranged. They were clearly very supportive, and on their advice an outline planning application was prepared. For practical reasons, the application was submitted to SODC by David Sherriff as the major landowner involved. There were two major objections, one from the Sonning area who were concerned at the possible increase in traffic in an area already jammed at busy times in the day, but an even greater one from Eton College. They, who having had our support when they wished to create Dorney Lake, then sought to argue that they could offer the GB team all the facilities they needed, without building another course. A meeting was held with Rodney Watson their bursar who was the then chairman of the Dorney Lake Trust, and our team which included Di Ellis our Chairman, David Tanner, by then our International manager and others. With letters of support from some fairly distinguished old Etonians; the then Minister of State Kate Hoey; and other sportsmen and women, we finally made the Eton Authorities understand, that the training needs of the squad could never be met on a facility who’s priority was the needs of the school and the minimum number of commercial bookings needed to try to match the costs of running such a large facility.
When the objections of the Sonning Parish were satisfied by writing into the application, that the facility was for training only, and no regattas would be held, the traffic objections were withdrawn. Likewise, though I suspect with some reluctance, Eton withdrew their objections and planning consent was granted
One other objection resurfaced quite late in the day, for there had always been the Department of Transport’s aim for another river crossing. Theresa May the MP for the area south of the Thames put in a formal objection on the grounds that the Department of Transport should not have the option of a bridge, blocked by our facility. The usual discussions with departmental officials took place, and when it was clear that the presence of our course would not block a crossing, and that there were championship courses in the world with bridges straddling the course, Mrs May readily withdrew the Local Authority and Regional objections.
A trust was set up to act as the legal means by which the scheme could proceed, and which on completion would then lease the completed project to the ARA on a long lease. The sad thing was that by the time the trust was set up, Derek Casey the original CEO of Sports Council had left, and now what had become Sport England, had year by year, changed every officer who had been there at the start, and who had knowledge of the background of the project had left for other fields. We found ourselves dealing with officers who appeared to have no understanding of what had gone before, and failed, or refused, to recognise any moral obligation to our main sponsor David Sherriff, who had put enormous time and money into his long standing wish to do something great for our sport. Even worse, they looked on their dealings with him as purely a commercial matter, and he having agreed to assist them further in how they handled the financing of the project, found himself landed with an enormous tax bill for notional gains that he had never had. These new officers, just did not want to know, and left him with the bill, and a foul taste in his mouth, having genuinely tried to do the right thing by all of us. I very much regretted that we, the ARA, were in no position to fight his corner, caught between what we knew had been the original agreement, and effectively a new Sport England who made clear their attitude to what they now insisted was simply a commercial deal.
Sadly too, John Leivers retired from Lafarge, and his successor, just as with the changes at Sports England, felt no moral obligation to the project, and made abundantly clear his only concern was the commercial interests of Lafarge. This added greatly to costs, and caused no end of animosity between all parties.
We found too, that the Sailing and Canoe Clubs that had, what was understood at the time, casual use of the water, successfully claimed rights that in the end Sport England had to meet at considerable cost. Those clubs now have facilities as a result of the ARA project.
Such unintended costs inevitably reared their heads, and one of the biggest was the risk analysis. This great tome was supposed to cover every conceivable risk, but as I said to the consulting engineer, he’d left out the possibility that the San Andreas Fault under California, might just stretch across the Atlantic and wreck the course. He laughed and told me he did not feel he needed to go quite that far, but as I pointed out, he’d just about covered everything else. As necessary as risk assessments are, I cannot but feel that these things get out of hand with professionals covering their backs in case some totally and unlikely risk might come back and bite them.
At the scheme’s later stages I left the trust so that more qualified members Brian Armstrong and Mike Hart could now get down to details, and Brian and the architect did a great job on the training centre. At the time we thought we had provided enough car park spaces, 60 minimum as required by the SODC, but as time has gone on, the squad has grown, and the use of the centre has exceeded all estimates.
It had been suggested that the lake be named after David Sherriff, but he turned that down, and at his request it was named after our two great Olympians, Steve and Matthew. The Boathouse now rightly bears his name, for without his vision nothing would have happened. The facility was formally opened in April 2006.
This is not, and cannot be the whole story, for there is much that David Sherriff would be entitled to add, and much of the great contribution that Brian Armstrong made is confidential within the constraints of his role within the Sports Council. I have no doubt either that Derek Casey and many other officers of what became Sport England would feel that much of their efforts were undercut, firstly by the change of Government, and then by the total overhaul of the structure of Sport England that came just at the time when we needed some stability and continuity with the people we were dealing with.
However when I look back at the rise in British Rowing after the creation of Holme Pierrepont, and the quantum leap since Caversham has opened, I can’t help but feel proud of having been just a small part of these great projects.
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Chapter 8
LIFE IN POLITICS
I’d been elected to the Nottingham City Council, then a unitary authority, in 1968, but Harold Wilson brought in a change of qualification rules, that meant since I lived just half a mile outside the City boundary, I could not defend my seat and I stood down in 1970. The Heath Government changed the rules back again, and I was re-elected in 1976, and further developed an interest in Housing, Estates Management and Public Transport. These sessions on a local authority gave me an insight as to what was possible, and what as an individual I could achieve or at least influence. This as I indicated earlier gave me the background and confidence to try for Parliament.
In the early seventies I had been rejected by the pre-1979 candidate selection process, which consisted of three people, with whom if your face didn’t fit, that was it. The Party however agreed to let me fight the 1979 election as a local candidate, and Margaret Thatcher subsequently changed the system of candidate approval giving me a second chance to show what I could do. The new system was a two day event which gave candidates a real chance to shine, and of course expose any weaknesses to the team of sitting MPs and Party Officials, such that wha
tever the outcome you felt you had had a fairer deal than the previous star chamber system.
My selection for the new seat of Nottingham South, had been even more traumatic and stressful than usual, for often friends would be trying for the same seat, and you just had to take whatever the outcome, shake hands and move on. In this case a local senior Councillor had been appointed as the Party official to organise the three Nottingham selection panels that would ultimately hold their final meetings on three consecutive evenings. They would be in order of perceived winablity, South, followed by East, and then finally North. That Councillor, who had a considerable stake in who from the South constituency could attend, made it clear that although he had been a candidate in the past, he would not be putting his name forward this time, and hence was given the task of organising the panels.
My first election campaign, 1968. I was elected to Nottingham City Council with Don and Doreen
Having done so, and almost at the last moment, he had his name added to the potential candidates for the Nottingham South. Having been instrumental in setting up the selection panel, it was clear he thought his selection was a shoe-in, but for whatever reason, and it certainly wasn’t my selection performance, since I had a temperature of about 103, he didn’t win the vote. There had been four candidates on the final list, and we sat in a back office wondering why it was taking so long to announce who had won. Having eliminated two of the four, it transpired that he and I had tied in the final vote, and the chairman, Gordon Craggs, understandably did not wish, as was his right, to cast a deciding vote. On advice from Shirley Stotter the senior area agent supervising the proceedings, the options facing the selection committee were set out. The option of delaying for two weeks to allow the full membership to select was rejected, since East and North would by then have chosen their candidates, and that would have been grossly unfair on the unselected candidate for South.
The meeting agreed to a break of ten or fifteen minutes to talk it through amongst themselves, and they decided that they would vote again, to see if the deadlock could be broken. Apparently I won by a clear majority, and the conduct of the meeting was confirmed by the area agent as fair and correct under the Party rules. The Saturday following my selection was a celebratory dinner at Nottinghamshire County Hall with the Rt. Hon Cecil Parkinson MP as the principle guest. It was meant to be a celebration of my opponent’s selection for the most winnable of the Nottingham seats, and he sat on one side of Cecil, and his wife on the other. Needless to say, my wife and I were dismissed to the far corner of the banquet seating plan, but that was a small price to pay for what turned out to be the most exciting part of my life.
Such was my opponent’s disappointment and anger at what he felt should have been a foregone conclusion, he endeavoured to have the decision overturned by the Central Party. The following three weeks were a nightmare of uncertainty, even though I should have been confident of the outcome, given the assurance by the Party Agent that the outcome was the clear will of the members of the panel, and that the rules of selection had been followed beyond challenge. He finally withdrew his appeal some three weeks later.
Turning up for my first day in 1983, Michael Latham, the member for Melton, took me under his wing and showed me around. We finished up somewhere in the bowels of the palace, and even he who had been a member for some years, admitted he was lost. I was allocated a hook in the cloakroom, and saw the little loop of ribbon that was supposed to allow me to hang up my sword. Just one of the idiosyncratic customs that make the mother of Parliaments so fascinating.
The Sergeant of Arms office handed me a key to a locker for my personal bits and pieces. Now anywhere else, the lockers would be in a normal sequence, but since the number of members had grown over the years, no one had considered sorting them out, and it became a case of “seek and ye shall find”; yet another amusing introduction to the House. I suppose the feeling was that if you were clever enough to get yourself elected, you could find your own way about! I did get myself a desk and a comfy chair in an office above the Chamber of the House, shared with three other colleagues, John Maples, Humphrey Malins and Andrew Hunter. It was a far cry from the facilities enjoyed by the present membership.
We all got along fine, but our secretaries had an impossible task, for five of them shared a single office, each with filing cabinets, typewriters and all the rest of the paraphernalia a secretary needed. The photocopier was in a corridor and shared by heaven knows how many secretaries, and it was a miracle anything was done in a reasonable time. Frankly from what I know now, the present lot don’t know how fortunate they are ! It wasn’t long before I took the decision to scrap any secretarial services in Westminster, and set up an office in a barn conversion at our home in Barton, which until then had been the village hairdressing salon which my wife Sally ran.
When gathering up my office equipment ready to take back to Nottingham, I found that one of the secretaries worked for an old school colleague Nigel Spearing, a year ahead of me at school, and now the Labour member for Newham South. She was surrounded by boxes of mail, and I asked how on earth she could ever find anything. She smiled and said I should see the rest of the stuff at Nigel’s home. Those were the conditions back in the eighties, and clearly the changes in the nineties and following were long overdue and necessary if members were to do a proper and efficient job on behalf of their constituents.
Back in Nottingham, I found a first class secretary in Dorothy Pearson, who’s husband Peter was a Sergeant in the Nottingham Constabulary Vice Squad. She ran a tight ship, and we guaranteed to turn round correspondence within seven days, using a new small twin disc computer at the Westminster end, and one of the new fancy electronic typewriters at the Nottingham end. A computer with a laser printer came a couple of years later. Exchange by first class mail for letters for signing, and tapes for further correspondence, turned out to be much better that trying to run an office solely in Westminster. Dorothy was a gem, and I shudder to think how I could have managed without her. The allowance made it possible to take on an additional part time clerk, who transferred basic details of correspondence onto discs in another small computer. There was no such thing as internet or emails then, and for some colleagues, my little twin slot machine sitting on my desk was a matter of great interest.
Those stored details came in handy when plans to drive a dual carriageway though the Clifton Council Estate in my patch were published. Being the second largest Council Estate in England, it was a matter of major concern. I felt that at least every constituent on that estate, and the two small adjacent developments, who had been in contact with me on various matters in the preceding few years, were entitled to be given the facts, and I approached the Sergeant of Arms for permission to write to them. Back then there were strict controls on the use of Parliamentary stationary, and he was assured that I did not intend to write to all 12,000 households in that southern part of my constituency. On that assurance, he asked therefore how many I wished to write too, and I replied 5264, and if he wanted to check the figure, I would show him the details of correspondence on my little desk computer. He expressed surprise, smiled, and gave me the required chitty to draw the stationary for the correspondence.
Success at the 1983 General Election - Celebrating with the Armstrong-Jones brothers
Dorothy wasn’t just a good secretary, she was a first class personal assistant, and dealt with calls from constituents with great care and courtesy. It also gave us the occasional laugh. A lady called to tell us that her husband had died. Dorothy expressed her condolences and assured her that she would take her husband’s name off the computer records, so she would not receive wrongly addressed letters in the future. “Oh no me duck” she said, “I only wanted to tell you that having been married to that b****** for forty years, at last I can vote Conservative.” Sadly there were insufficient constituents like her came the election of 92.
Having taken a seat that was supposedly a Labour stronghold, and with no desire at fifty on
e years of age, to take on yet another mortgage, I booked myself in for three or four nights a week at the Carlton club. For largely business reasons, I had been a member of the Junior Carlton for some years, and enjoyed their political suppers, which gave me a chance to see and hear many of the senior parliamentarians in our Party. The most significant of these was Margaret Thatcher, who was the guest of the club barely three weeks after she had taken up the shadow portfolio for the Environment, following her years in Education. The chairman suggested to members that Mrs T might be allowed to speak to her old portfolio, since she couldn’t have had enough time to absorb the complexities of the new. Not a bit of it she indicated, and we were treated to a bravura presentation of her new role, indicating to all that this was a very special lady. So it was no surprise to me when she had the courage to stand for, and win the leadership of the Party.
Shortly after her election as Party Leader, she came to Nottingham to meet the faithful gathered in the large Mecca Ballroom. Major Rook as the Federation Chairman accompanied Mrs T around one side of the ballroom, and I as Vice Chairman introduced Dennis around the opposite side. If any of us had any doubts as to the worthiness of our new Party Leader, they were dispelled that evening. Some time before the 1983 election, she came again to Nottingham and met all the regional candidates and their officers at Belvoir Castle. After that election all the new members and their spouses were invited to No 10 to be greeted by her. As she shook my hand, she said “didn’t we have a great day at Belvoir Castle”. Those small things underlined the incredible recall she had, and it was no surprise to realise her fantastic ability to absorb vast amounts of information, way beyond most of us lesser mortals.
Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics Page 11