The Other Railway Children, Chapter 7 (extract) "The Railway Ball"

In May 1998, Railway Children decided to fundraise jointly with the London based project for homeless youth, Centrepoint, through a Dinner and Ball at the National Railway Museum in York. One of our trustees knew that Centrepoint had experience in running such events and they promised to combine with us pooling their knowledge with our enthusiasm and contacts within the railway industry. Our trustee also negotiated sponsorship of a special High Speed Train (HST) with Virgin to carry our guests from London to York via Birmingham – GNER on the East Coast route at that time were not yet ‘on board’ with the charity.

I knew he’d fixed something special before departure from Euston and found I was to be part of a naming ceremony. An ex works High Speed Train in Virgin livery awaited us with a rostrum on the platform by the rear power car, 43098, and 1970 ‘Railway Children’ film star, Sally Thomsett did the honours with the Deputy Chairman of Virgin Trains, revealing a splendid nameplate with the charity’s logo, a brief description of what the charity did and its telephone number.

A year or so later, the charity office received a phone call from a group of ‘Rotarians’ from Bakewell in Derbyshire who regularly took day trips by train and were nicknamed ‘The Railway Children’ by their colleagues. They’d been photographed by the HST at Chesterfield during one of their outings and noticed the phone number when the photo was printed and rang to see who we were. They have been regular generous donors ever since!

The event was a great success – a school orchestra performed on the turntable in the main hall and dinner was served alongside the royal train exhibits. Guests danced amid the burnished steam engines and £60,000 profit was made which we split with Centrepoint, some of the funding going to a small refuge opposite Kings Cross station in property owned by the Peabody Trust.

At the end of the evening the Chairman of English, Welsh and Scottish Railways, Ed Burkhardt, presented the charity with a nameplate from a withdrawn EWS diesel engine, 47712 ‘Lady Diana Spencer’ for auction to raise funds. The following day I staggered home in a cramped diesel multiple unit with the 8 foot long nameplate occupying the seat next to me which caused a certain amount of wry comment from the other passengers. We arranged initially for a well known auction company to put the nameplate on its next auction list, thinking that it might raise some interest from the USA as well as the UK, but it failed to reach the reserve, so we tried again through Ian Wright of Sheffield Railway Memorabilia Auctions who managed to get a very useful £10,200 for us.

A couple of years later we felt we could use the experience we’d gained by running our own event for people within the industry. Another of our trustees had as Director, Railtrack Southern Zone, attended an Airports Authority charity dinner and ball as a guest of Gatwick Express, when the beneficiary charity – Save the Children I think – had received around £180,000. He and another of our trustees, a former General Manager of BR’s Southern Region, got together a committee of senior managers from the industry to plan the outline and Railtrack generously provided £20,000 risk capital enabling us to hire a professional events company to run the whole evening. Our first ‘solo’ Railway Ball was at the Intercontinental Hotel near Hyde Park and raised £110,000 profit for us.

The success of this event and the fact that this was the only social event of the privatised railway encouraged us to seek a larger venue the following year and every year since we have held the Railway Ball on the last Friday evening of November in the Great Room at the Grosvenor House Hotel, The occasion is organised for us by a Railway Ball Committee and a banqueting and event organising company and has averaged a profit of around a quarter of a million pounds annually – by 2010 it had brought in more than £2 million for the charity in ‘unrestricted’ funds. Income on this scale is of huge importance and it is unusual and increasingly welcomed as it is not tied to specific projects, but leaves us free to use it as needs and priorities dictate. Each year we manage around 1,000 dinner guests – some years we’ve been oversubscribed and run up a waiting list!

In the earlier years of the event it brought in some third of our annual income and caused me a few anxious moments as we relied so heavily on it. The problem was the risk of having to make a last minute cancellation should some dreadful national catastrophe happen days before. In fact, the train crash at Hatfield nearly caused such an eventuality and we debated with our journalist trustee whether we ought to cancel, with not just a loss of revenue but heavy costs to bear. He advised that few would begrudge an event raising money for some of the most vulnerable children in the world, but Railtrack managers who took a lot of ‘flak’ over the accident felt they could not be seen to be joining a social event at that time although they donated the costs of the tables they had previously booked.

As a result of this narrow escape from a damaging financial blow, we set up the Railway Ball as a separate company to donate all profits to Railway Children, safeguarding the charity’s funds should disaster occur causing the Ball’s cancellation. I’m pleased to say that this has not been the case yet. Whilst the core income comes from the sales of over 80 tables, there are many other fundraising opportunities including both a table and silent auction and various games and the railway industry has supported the event heavily by sponsorship, the donation of prizes and fundraising on the night.

The Ball Committee continues to have representatives of many train operating and infrastructure companies as well as suppliers of equipment and providers of financial and legal services. During the Ball, I have been able to say a few words about the charity’s work when I’ve talked about our partners in the UK as well as in India and elsewhere and have had excerpts from videos shot in India that have had television coverage. The Railway Ball is still an important annual fundraising fixture raising 10% of our annual income – significant but we are not now so reliant on it, having diversified our fundraising since in many directions.