G.D.S.F. Sunday 2017, Miniatures Etc.

[meyrick]

If I run a factory making cheese, it has costs and it has outputs and it runs at a profit. If I run a show, it has costs and it makes entertainment Royal Tournament GDSF etc, The bands get paid and all the rest. Likewise Eavis and his Glastonbury pop festivals.

Other rallies are no different but the scale may be less. They have to hire loos, rent the ground, pay bands and the medics, so they have costs just the same, which have to be recovered each year. Every show is a commercial venture - if it runs at a loss, eventually they have no float to fund next years show and it goes under.

GDSF pays haulage for many of the attractions, it pays attendance money, it shipped engines over form New Zealand in the Mac benefit year. But it wants me to give up 5 days plus 2 days home and back for free.

Its a private limited company - of course it has shareholders, and one or two of them are earning a great deal of money.

So the difference is where the money goes in the end. And that is one of the 3 reasons I now decline to enter, though it is a great one for spectators.

Next you have a very restricted running area compared to other shows running on the same weekend. Personally I was bored to death after five days of going round same postage stamp.

Then there was the chronic lack of organisation for miniature entries (unless it has changed just recently, but I have no need to find out). You used to put in early in the year, got told you were on mid year, so if you were turned down - which you weren't told, so the only way you knew you weren't going was eventually you realised your documents hadn't come. - at which point, late in the day you found you had a weeks useless holiday booked, and saw empty spaces if you visited. (You can cancel holidays - but in many places which only allow one person away at a time, it is difficult to reschedule).

Yet it is so easy - you have a database, respond by e-mail. You even send your car passes by email. You have 100 slots say. You allocate your hundred slots, (weed out the hangar queens whose engines spend 5 days pumping water - which implies that as a steward I have actually left my tent and got round 3-4 times each day so I know who is doing what). As the entries come in you can respond and tell them they are on within 24 hours. Anyone who comes in after the 100, you tell them they are in the short notice reserves. Anyone cancels, you call forward your short notice people in order. They may or may not be able to come, but they knew they were reserves from day 1. Everyone knows where they are - it really isn't that complicated. Yet GDSF miniatures stumbled though its entries at snails pace.

It was just a masterpiece. Doubtless it is better now.