February 2024 marked 40 years of our wee business - The Cadies. In the first of a three-part series, co-founder Robin Mitchell recounts the genesis and early days of the business.
I once asked my mum the meaning of the word "success". She replied, "getting a job". This was a perfect lesson in not getting above your station. We're all Jock Tamson's bairns, after all. It gave me the opportunity to try anything I wanted with the knowledge that, if all else failed, I could always get a proper job. Well, so far I've managed to avoid the routine rigours of "proper" employment; although, to be fair, running a walking tour company isn't always plain sailing.
It's impossible to capture 40 years in one blog, so let's say this blog is just the bare bones of four decades in business. To help fill a few gaps in our history, and to avoid this blog being 802 pages long, I have provided a number of links to previous blogs which will help tell our story.
When I set up The Cadies in 1984 with my then business partner Colin Macphail, little did we imagine that 40 years later the tours would still be in operation. It's amazing really, considering all the gaffes we made in the early days. The print run of our first promotional leaflet was a mere 400, because -- wait for this noteworthy reason -- we didn't want to be inundated with work. Really? To add to our universally youthful naivety, that leaflet carried a rather unusual direction to the reader. Our first base of operations was a small flat in Edinburgh (the owner of this flat, Ruari Mackenzie, wishes to remain anonymous) and on the leaflet we asked people to only phone us between 8am and 12noon, thus avoiding tying up Ruari's telephone line. Entrepreneurs? Could be debatable. Mind you, it meant most afternoons in our first summer were taken up playing football and cricket on Bruntsfield Links followed by refreshments at the King's Bar. The work/life balance wasn't the worst. Maybe there's a message in there somewhere?
I'd met Colin at Edinburgh's Napier College. We were studying a Higher Diploma in Hotel Catering and Institutional Management. We met in a college corridor, both queuing up to receive our matriculation card. I'm now thankful that the queue was long as we began chatting away, exchanging stories and jokes and very quickly we realised that our accommodation in Edinburgh was next to each other. This resulted in us visiting each other's flat and striking up what became a strong friendship. I remember we both attended a fancy dress party as Egyptian mummies. Not as elaborate as it sounds: we simply painstakingly wrapped toilet paper around ourselves top to bottom. [If you're wondering where a pair of cash-strapped students obtained several kilometres of toilet paper at short notice ... keep wondering! You never know who's reading this.] The paper dropped off within about twenty minutes. However, was this a prediction of ghostly things to come? Our conversations were always full of creativity, so it wasn't a surprise when we decided to start our own walking tours. Although to be fair, we could have started any type of business at the time and would have been happy. We just wanted to do something on our own.
Our college course was a remarkably varied and enjoyable course, with subjects as varied as accounts, economics, hotel booking systems, marketing, food preparation and food service. I used to call the course "Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None". The three-year course, certainly set you up to do anything - even hotel management. Some years later, when I was describing this backhanded nickname to a work colleague, he said the full saying was far more positive than I was making out: "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."
"Better than a master of one." I liked that.
One of the first things we had to do was to find a name for our business, so we chose "The Cadies". In days gone by in Edinburgh, the cadies (also variously spelt caddys or cawdys) were errand-boys with a comprehensive knowledge of the city who acted as guides. We couldn't have chosen a better name; or could we? There was one small unforeseen down-side: we received a number phone calls from visitors looking for someone to carry their golf clubs (between 8am and 12 noon).
Read more: What is a Cadie?
After several months researching local history in the Central Library's dedicated Edinburgh Room, our first scheduled walking tours were up and running by May 1984. The trip centred around the Royal Mile running down the hill from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyrood House. It was a lovely wee private tour with the size of the group limited to 4 people. We picked the visitors up from their hotel or guest house in a taxi, transported them to the Castle, traversed them down the Royal Mile, stopped for a whisky in a local tavern and handed over a little gift at the end of the tour. Nice!
Once we got up and running, we participated in two small business competitions sponsored by BP and Shell, becoming runners up in the Shell Livewire competition. Our success was spotted by the BBC who approached us requesting our appearance on the topical TV show 'Pebble Mill at One'. Many TV appearances followed.