CHAPTER 30:

THE PANDEMIC PART 1

As you know by now, a lot happened over the ensuing 18 months and I’ve tried to break it down the best way possible, hopefully getting the chronology in the right order.

By Christmas 2019 the business was growing, numbers were good, Apprentice success rates were at a record level and the private side of the business was buoyant. Whoever had been trying to ruin us in Ipswich had moved on and we looked forward to a well-earned rest over the holiday period.

Coronavirus was only just being talked about and was being compared to flu. There was no clue at that time of what was going to happen. By early January however, Coronavirus was the only topic of conversation. As discussed in chapter 28, Bonnie and I moved out of London at the end of January and were settling into our new routine. By middle of February ‘20, panic started to set in. Our industry was particularly targeted amongst the “where you can catch it” brigade and as such we immediately packed away our client gowns and replaced them with single use ones. We had already switched to Wear and Tear disposable towels and started a routine of hand washing, hand gel and disinfecting anything and everything. We changed rules regarding entering and leaving the school in London so that we could regularly disinfect bannisters and work surfaces. We also asked students to use one workstation only. March 2020 began much the same, but by this time the virus had hit Italy very badly & was creeping ever closer to us.

During the weekend of the third week of March, after a long conversation with Hellen Ward of Richard Ward Hair & Metrospa, Edward called me and told me that we had no choice but to close the Schools from Monday 23^rd March ‘20 to protect our Team, students and models. This literally floored me. We had survived IRA bombs, 9/11 & 7/7 and yet here we were closing our business down over a “flu” epidemic. Edward took a really emotional meeting with our Team early Monday morning and off home we went, promising that whatever happened we would continue our education program regardless. How it was going to work, pure detail, and the mechanics would come later. He hadn’t worked anything out yet! As most businesses at that time, what you did next was a seat of the pants job!

As it turned out, what was to happen was staggering. It was Thursday 27^th March 2020 that lockdown was mandated in the UK for the first time in history.