A simple guide to putting on an event fit for a queen

With the eyes of the world on Her Majesty the Queen, who recorded the longest-ever reign by a British monarch on September 9th, the challenge was to make sure the event she was attending that day, the official opening of the newly constructed Borders Railway line, went without a hitch.

Although fog at Balmoral caused the Royal Party to be delayed by 48 minutes event organiser Stark Events had attended meticulous planning meetings every fortnight for a year precisely to ensure that any unforeseen occurrences could be handled with the minimum of fuss.

The company’s director and founder, Ann Stark, had prepared to such a level of detail, including measuring the width of the Royal Range Rover, that mere lateness was not going to derail proceedings in front of a global television audience of millions.

“Because of the nature of the event nobody was ever going to drop the ball on it,” says Ann, whose company is one of five rostered agencies for the delivery of public sector events in Scotland.

The Brief

In the summer of 2014 Stark Events successfully bid for the contract to provide events for two days of celebration around the opening of the Borders Railway following a public sector tender process overseen by Transport Scotland. The first day was to be a community event that would acknowledge and celebrate the input into the railway by local people. The remainder of the brief was deliberately left loosely defined, allowing Stark Events the creative freedom to conceive of an event that matched the ambition of its client.

The aspiration for the second day was that it would involve a member of the Royal Family, who would formally open the line with a steam train journey from Edinburgh’s Waverley station, through Midlothian and down to the end of the line at Tweedbank.

The Concept

The challenge was on the one hand to make sure no one felt left out of the events, but also to work within strict safety and capacity constraints which limited the number of passengers on the first three train journeys and on platforms at Newtongrange, Galashiels and Tweedbank stations.

As such Stark conceived of a Charlie and the Chocoltate Factory-style Golden Ticket Day, a concept the company had used before to re-open the Hippodrome cinema in Bo’Ness, near Edinburgh.

For this occasion, every school child in the Borders was given a bar of chocolate on the same day; upon discovering the ticket each lucky winner was able to secure a place on the inaugural journey. Local competitions also ran, with people able to nominate deserving candidates.

Design and Branding

Before determining the look and feel of the creative, Stark undertook fieldwork research, going to see stations and steam trains. “We thought that bunting was a nice and retro-y theme for the railway; if you think about your memories of train stations you think about bunting and little flags. It seemed very in keeping with that,” says Ann. The gold and purple colours – again a reflection of the Roald Dahl story – were incorporated into the branding.

Working with Royals

The hope was to have a member of the Royal Family attend the event, but it was by no means certain. Stark Events was given an early indication in April that a Royal was “highly likely” to attend but it only became clear later that it would be HM the Queen. Then, a rather unusual piece of choreography occurred. The original date for the event was pencilled in for Friday, September 4th, but as the penny dropped that the Queen would surpass the longest reign on Wednesday, September 9th, the date was switched.

“We understand that Her Majesty was keen to have a working day; she understood that there was a desire for the public to see her on that day and so as a result the Royal Household approached the Scottish Government to see whether that would be a possibility to change and it was felt that it was possible to do it,” said Ann.

Catering

Stark Events spent six months intensively planning every detail of the two-day event; from sourcing the Scottish Café at Edinburgh’s National Gallery as the venue for a VIP breakfast for 200 dignitaries, to finding the right caterers who could create menus that would reflect not only the essence of the new railway, but also local food producers along the line. They worked with Appetite Direct to that effect for the community event: Nigel Kennedy, the firm’s boss, had to ensure 1,600 packed lunches were not only delivered to eight different stations along the route on but also that they were of the highest quality.

There was no catering on board the train for the the Royal party – a couple of flasks were brought along for Her Majester however – and Continis, which had prepared the VIP breakfast, made some “really lovely little porridge bars”. Ann says: “If you see a picture of Her Majesty on the train she’s sitting in front of the Continis porridge bars.”

Stark also worked with Orde Catering at Abbotsford House, the venue for the lunch reception after the steam train reached its destination in Tweedbank.

Security

It might be expected that the security considerations around a Royal event would add an extra, unwanted dimension for a planner.

Not so, according to Ann, who says: “Because of the security considerations you know there’s absolutely no question of last-minute changes. From an events delivery point of view, it’s much easier to deliver something like that, compared to an event where you have fluid time-
scales or late changes to the running order. There was no question of that happening here. I couldn’t email the Royal Protection Officers down in London two days before to say we’ve changed the layout of the car park.”