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The Edinburgh Balmoral


Larger than Life

A five star hotel is both a fantasy and a factory. The fantasy is the world the guests enter when they step over the front door. In such a world champagne flows and the patisserie chef can spin spring flowers out of sugar: beds are turned down and lamps lit at bedtime, clean towels appear before each bath, the water is always hot, lifts always work and a boiled egg for breakfast is as perfectly cooked as last night's poached salmon.

"People like to be made to feel at home", says Jack Maguire who spent 40 years in what he describes as a kind of vocation. "They want to be cosseted. They want privacy and they want respect". What people like, head banqueting waiter Renato del Vecchio learned, is to be greeted by someone who knows what they like and exactly how they like it to be done. But whether the rich and famous want to feel at home or homelier bodies want to feel rich and famous - the illusion has to work.

Brigade de cusine: members of an underworld where everyone speaks French
Brigade de cuisine: members of an underworld where everyone speaks French

The factory is the extraordinary industry which creates this wonderful world of make-belief from an odd combination of advanced technology, thorough training, and sheer hard work. Breakfast is served for 300 or more because the breakfast chef started work at 3.30am. Should every guest in the hotel decide to have a bath at the same time water will flow from the hot tap thanks to the chief engineer, his maintenance team and a boiler room which would not have looked out of place in the Queen Mary. Out of sight the waste from guests' plates is compressed by machine and consigned to the deep blue sea. And if the rugby team stays up all night the general manager is thankful that his chief engineer decided to switch over to energy saving lamps.

A hotel is larger than life which means it has all the problem of home many times over. "Imagine a normal house", says chief engineer Ian Banyard, "then multiply it by 200 and you get some idea of what it takes to run this place". The North British was essentially a self-contained village which until the early 1980s still employed not only a baker, an electrician, a carpenter and a plumber but also a French polisher, an upholsterer and a slater. Ian Banyard reduced the hotel's bill for light bulbs form £7,000 to £5,000 a year by the simple means of buying better quality bulbs, transferring to energy saving lamps and persuading staff to switch off lights when rooms were not in use. He saved £800 a year alone in the huge Sir Walter Scott banqueting room where fifteen chandeliers burned fifteen 60 watt light bulbs each from 6am until after midnight as breakfast turned into a ceaseless round of catering until the last dinner plate and wine glass gave way to next day's breakfast cups again.

Ian Banyard arrived at the North British in 1983 when the hotel was being wound down for closure and refurbishment. Business continued for five more years with the help of cosmetic redecoration - "a little lipstick here, a little rouge there" as Banyard puts it. But the grand old lady had grown decidedly shabby and beyond the banquets and dinner-dances the veneer of glamour had worn very thin. "The wiring was frayed, the pipe-work was rotten, I was scared to take off the lagging in case the pipes fell to bits".

The boilers which had once pumped steam into the sleeping cars waiting at Platform 19 in the station down below the fourth basement, struggled to meet the demands of bathing guests. Old, outdates and installed in a way which defied access for maintenance, some of the water tanks contained a thick layer of silt which caused a rich, "peaty" flow from the taps when too many baths were run at the same time.

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