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12
May
Peter Banks: the man withdrawing from Rudding Park
Peter Banks is giving out books. They’re copies of one of his favourite novels, Shane by Jack Schaefer, and he’s milling around Rudding Park Hotel, dropping them off with various former colleagues as leaving gifts.
That’s because, after spending the best part of three decades creating Britain’s best hotel, he’s just called it a day. He hasn’t been on the payroll at Rudding Park for a couple of weeks now, but his bearing is of a man still in his own domain. It’s clearly hard to let go.
In an exclusive interview with the Stray Ferret, he told us:
If it sounds like a strong drug, perhaps that’s because Peter’s first ‘hit’ was so powerful. A self-confessed “gobby idiot” as a boy, his careers master – who despaired of his “scattergun humour” – told him:
Rudding Park
'An exercise in survival'
So following a “good education”, thanks to a bursary at Christ’s Hospital, the Tudor-era independent school in West Sussex, he left to become a management trainee at the Savoy in London.
He said:
The highs were offset by some alarming lows, though. Assigned to the meat department on his first day, within 10 minutes a “massive” butcher tried to strangle him in a pitch-black service lift simply because he didn’t like management trainees. On another occasion, he was kicked headfirst into a hot oven by a disgruntled chef. It was, he says, “an exercise in survival”.
But it also gave him a thorough grounding in every aspect of the business, and during his five years there Peter worked as a waiter, barman, chef, fruit-and-veg porter, switchboard operator, housekeeper, receptionist, cashier, maintenance man and even ‘carpet spotter’, getting burns and stains out of carpets.
He then took his skills to Scotland, working, "drinking and playing a lot of golf” at the Old Course Hotel in St Andrews, before moving back to London and the Hilton on Park Lane, which was, he says, “an absolute zoo”.
He says:
But it was there that he was told to “look after our guests as if they were your guests in your home”. He says:
It was an approach that he’d never forget and that would serve him well at his next posting, which he secured after seeing a small ad posted by a brand-new hotel in The Caterer. If the Savoy, the Old Course and the Hilton were ‘gateway drugs’, he would find his main fix in Harrogate.
Rudding Park Spa
Rudding Park
The manager at the Hilton had told Peter that moving up to Yorkshire would be the “death of his career”, so when he and owner Simon Mackaness launched the brand-new Rudding Park Hotel on April 15, 1997, he set out to prove him wrong.
Initially only in charge of housekeeping, bedrooms and reception, he soon started accumulating extra responsibilities, and within a few years he was in charge of the whole thing. Gathering the staff, he told them:
Commercially minded, he did leave for a stint to open his own boutique restaurant with rooms in Southwold, Suffolk, while still working for Simon Mackaness two days a fortnight. Sutherland House was the first in the UK to list food miles on the menu, and was already winning awards within a year of opening, but Peter got bored and came back to Yorkshire.
He said:
Returning to Rudding Park, he oversaw the most dramatic programme of expansion and upgrade seen by a Yorkshire hotel in decades.
An £8 million project in 2010 doubled the number of rooms to 90, which meant that staff numbers doubled too. In 2017, a £10 million scheme saw the launch of the spa, requiring a further 50 employees.
Under his management, Rudding Park's turnover grew from £2m to £28m, and staff numbers ballooned from 20 to 400.
Along the way, the hotel has collected scores of awards, including the “industry Oscar” that Peter says he’s proudest of – the Independent Hotel Catey of the Year in 2019, which marked Rudding Park out as the best hotel in the UK.
He says:
Highs and lows
He’s also welcomed some extremely high-profile guests. He’s taken President George Bush Sr (“a real gentleman”) for a golf-buggy tour of the grounds, had Archbishop Desmond Tutu (“a funny guy”) taking a turn on reception, and even caddied for President Bill Clinton. He says:
The satisfaction he takes from the Catey win is made all the sweeter by the fact that his time at Rudding Park has not been a uniformly easy ride: there have been hard times too.
In 2008, a couple who were regular customers were tragically killed when their helicopter crashed in the grounds, and in another incident, a colleague died on duty when struck down by a heart attack.
Then there was covid, which played havoc with the hospitality industry worldwide and forced many hotels and restaurants to close permanently. After a fortnight of tense uncertainty under lockdown, staff were furloughed and Peter set about keeping them active and engaged, as he recounted for the Stray Ferret in 2020. But although he acknowledges the wider catastrophe, his feelings are not all negative. He says:
That fleet-footed flexibility is a quality that hotel managers have always needed to have, but some things are not the same as they used to be. So just what has changed over the 38 years Peter has been in hospitality? He says:
He adds:
How is his soul?
But that’s not why he’s left Rudding Park. That has far more to do with wanting to spend more time with his family, whom he feels he has neglected for decades. He says:
Still only 55, he’s not planning on retiring completely. A second career as a hospitality consultant beckons, and he’s already got “nine or 10” projects to consider.
But for the time being, he’s taking a three-month break, and today is handing out those books. But why has he chosen Shane? He says:
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