Guardian of an ancient world

What’s your day-to-day like?

Skara Brae is a village that was once occupied by 50–100 people, and is estimated to be 5,000 years old. We can have 1,000 people a day coming to visit it, including many cruise ship passengers. Being a steward here includes everything you can think of. I’ll be selling tickets, meeting and greeting at the car park, or selling items in the shop. We also help to manage the flow of people so the site is safe for the public and for staff, and we try to answer people’s questions. And the downside – at the end of the day, we do the cleaning, which includes toilets, scrubbing bird muck off the paths, and litter-picking.

How’s the weather?

It’s very open to the wilds of the North Atlantic. We get quite high winds and occasionally need to close the site. In summer you have the lovely long days – you can be outside reading at 11.30pm.

Can you tell us about your first career?

I joined the fire brigade in 1977, signed up to the Fire Brigades Union on day one, and 11 months later I was out on the first national strike. In the latter half of my career I was a fire safety officer. I also ended up being a union learning rep for my final 10 years in the service. I retired in 2008.

How did you end up at Skara Brae?

When I retired my wife and I were making plans. We’d been to Orkney on holiday and said how nice it would be to live there. You often regret the things you don’t do, rather than the things you do. So we gave it a go, bought some land and built a house. After doing some lorry driving for a while I started working at a mansion house next to Skara Brae, then one thing led to another, and I ended up here.

What do you like about the job?

There’s a marked difference between summer and winter. In winter, we’ll get six to 20 people a day. The team is small and close-knit and we work a shorter day because it’s dark so early. I like being able to walk around with people, talk, answer their questions. I try to paint a story about how they lived here. In the summer, it’s so busy, we have to just manage people. Whatever the season, I enjoy the pleasure on the visitors’ faces. You hear people say they’ve waited all their life to come here.

How do you manage safety?

The paths are narrow and the passageway is more than six feet deep in places. So our main concern is to stop people falling and hurting themselves. I did first responder training as a firefighter and with HES we do first aid courses. As well as managing the flow we’re reminding people to take care of their footing, hang on to their children and so on.

With my previous career, it’s almost second nature for me to analyse a risk assessment. I’m the PCS health and safety rep, as well as the HES branch chair.

So you’re active in PCS?

Yes, I got involved when there were changes to managing fire safety at work. We have a very good relationship with the senior management; they encourage people to be union members. As well as representing members, I’m involved in working groups, including one refining the policy on union facilities time. Our three staff unions had success with a recent review of pay and grading – we negotiated a pay-related increase scale where the lowest paid received the biggest percentage rise. We’ve also just got agreement to go down from 37 to 35 hours.

My colleagues and I have worked hard to increase the number of members and reps. I tell people about the support we can provide and the practical benefits of the union. We also tell our seasonal workers about PCS, but recruitment can be trickier there. They perhaps won’t all commit now but later in their careers they might reflect on that rep that kept nagging them to join a union. It plants the seed.