| Mailshot continued DISABLED FACILITIES
As all London taxis must be wheelchair accessible by the end of the millennium and as DAC,
together with the cab trade in general, have happily used the Marriott Hotel on many
occasions, Call Sign thought the following letter from Bernie Silver (G8) merited
inclusion in the mag together with the reply from Stan Bruns, Senior Vice
President for the Marriott Hotel group (United Kingdom, Middle East & Africa) …Ed
Dear Mr Bruns
On Sunday 16th November I attended a function at the Marriott Hotel,
Grosvenor Square. Accompanying me was my 20 year old daughter who uses a wheelchair.
About 40 minutes after our arrival, she needed to use the toilet. When we enquired at
reception where the disabled toilet was, we were informed that they did not have one. We
were very shocked to be told that a 5 Star Hotel in the middle of London's West End, does
not have any disabled facilities.
We must commend your staff for the help they gave us. We were allowed to use a guest room
on the first floor and although we were unable to get her chair into the room, we did
manage to get her to the toilet.
We feel very upset and concerned in this day and age that an Hotel of this class has no
disabled facilities: Even my local pub has a disabled toilet.
We await your comments with interest.
Yours sincerely,
Bernard V. Silver
Reply to Bernie Silver from Stan Bruns.
Dear Mr Silver,
Thank you for writing to me concerning the unpleasurable experience you and your
daughter had at the London Marriott Hotel, I can understand your concern. While we have
taken some temporary measures to improve this situation, the most suitable solution
requires major renovation. The present plan calls for adjusting one of the lifts to stop
on the restaurant floor and create a second opening to allow access to both the restaurant
and public toilets.
As I'm sure you are aware, there are many other adjustments that are
necessary and we will be planning them in to make our hotel completely accessible. We are
planning this process to start in 1998.
Thank you again for expressing your feelings and giving me the opportunity to let you know
it is a priority for us.
Stan Bruns
Senior Vice President
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Thanks for the Christmas issue of Call Sign. I have been busy recovering
from a heart attack and operation in July and it is great to catch up with all the news.
Wishing all at Dial a Cab a prosperous new year.
Geoff Dixon (Ex-T38) |
Nice to hear from you Geoff and thanks for your good
wishes. I hope that 1998 is a much healthier year for you and that we will see you out and
about very soon…Ed REQUEST FOR HELP
I wonder if any of our drivers could assist me, I hasten to add that it has
nothing to with cabbing or any appeal for money or time! It would however please me if
there was the slightest chance that my request could ring a bell with someone.
For sometime now I have been endeavouring to trace a number of my old shipmates whom I
served with on a light Fleet Carrier called H.M.S.Vengeance during the period of her first
commission, 1944/46.
A reunion is held each year for all those who served on her from the commissioning in 1944
until 1952, but as there were at times up to 1500 men on board, and although its a very
jolly good get together, most of those attending came after my time.
However, I have managed to find 7 from my time on board. Two were traced through the good
offices of The Pam Ayres Radio Show on Sunday evenings. I was reached through the V.J. get
together in August 1995, and the other four through a series of publications in the Navy
News.
Of course many of the men in those days were in their late 30's and indeed 40's so it
would seem that the advancing years had taken their toll and most, if not all of that
group have ‘completed their watch’ so to speak. But there were guys like myself
in their late teens and early 20's. I did manage a reunion of sorts with a lunch in August
97 and it was absolutely great that six of them made the effort. They came from the Isle
of Man, Wakefield, Chester, Bury St Edmunds while two were local (Windsor and Eltham).
Only one was unable to be with us living in South West Cornwall. We vowed to repeat the
exercise in 98, all being well and this where my fellow drivers may be able to help.
I’m looking for five guys who would today be in their early 70s. They could be
relatives, neighbours, family friends etc. Their names and last known living areas when
they were de-mobbed are as follows:-
Johnny Johnson (Carshalton), ‘Dicky’ Bird (Hampstead), Bob Woodroffe (Stoke
Newington), ?.Yates (cant remember the first name) Woking and one other, Graham Hemming,
who though originally from Great Yarmouth, settled in the south. There were of course
others but I’ve concentrated on London and the Home Counties.
Although the odds are very much against, you never know, and if anyone has information I
would be most grateful because there ain’t that many years left for us oldies. I can
be contacted through Dial a Cab or Call Sign or by phone - the office will give you my
number.
My grateful thanks to everyone and have a healthy, happy, and prosperous New Year.
Sam Harris (ex-F24J) |
DO WE DESERVE THIS BOARD
This is a Board that tried to rush us into a PLC without giving us any
safeguards as to our working practices and with a plea by the Chairman to ‘trust us'
and ‘I give you my assurances’ no less than three times when he was asking us to
virtually sign a blank cheque. To my knowledge, never in this society’s history has a
Board: proposition been debated for over two hours during which time not one member from
the floor spoke in favour of the proposition. Taking us into a land that most of us know
nothing about, except that by doing so we would suddenly find ourselves short term
dubiously, financially a little better off, but at what, cost? The cost of losing control
and with the cost of having a Board of directors instead of a Board of management. A Board
of directors that are very much able to do as they wish (or one could say as the
Chairman wishes). For if the EGM was anything to go by, the Chairman was making all the
running and the rest were sitting there as if devoid of the power of speech. So much for
their solid support of this proposal.
That is until David Clegg was persuaded by the members to explain his position which he
had maintained since his article written in Call Sign on this matter a couple of years
ago. The result was an abject apology for not sticking to his original opinion. This in
itself was unique but certainly honest and we should be grateful for it. To parody an old
saying "to err. is human, to apologise is divine". It is unbelievable that the
Chairman should take a vote on whether or not a Board member should be allowed to speak to
the membership. What kind of society are we being led into? He should have demanded that
David Clegg spoke- what was he afraid of?
The Board are elected to do their best for the members and if they don't, then we must be
grateful that we have a society where we can throw out any unpalatable motion. We may well
have lost it all, but the membership were not taken in by what they heard and drew their
own conclusions as to what was behind the proposal. The trouble is that this Board has
shown its’ true colours by petulantly stripping David Clegg of all his duties on the
grounds of ‘no confidence’. It appears that this vote, taken after the AGM, was
an act of malice and revenge on their part. David Clegg was given a massive vote of
confidence at both the EGM and the AGM and they dare not have tried it in front of the
members. Do they not realise that the rejection of the plc motion was in fact a ‘vote
of no confidence’ in the Board and particularly the Chairman whose position is now
untenable. With the exception of David Clegg, whose views were upheld by the vast majority
of the votes cast, they should have resigned en bloc. The Chairman stated that a plc was
the only way forward but how can he now sit in office managing a co-operative system that,
by his own admission. he does not believe in? We have managed for over 40 years to build
up what we have today. With the right management and the right beliefs we can do it for
another 40 |
