Children in Need

November 18. I spent a large portion of the day at the baggage Reclaim area of Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport. No, I wasn’t waiting for my luggage to appear on the carousel, I was collecting money, not very successfully as it turned out. It was all because I had decided to support the Rotary collection at Heathrow for Children in Need.

Baggage Reclaim at Heathrow

Every year at around this time the UK public go crazy collecting money for the BBC Children in Need appeal.  The event gets massive coverage on TV and Radio for weeks beforehand, then on the day itself the BBC broadcasts a telethon during which £millions are raised. People do all sorts of things to raise money, including sponsored swims, runs, cycle rides, parachute jumps, baking cakes to name just a few of the more normal activities. Alternatively people can just phone in to the Children in Need telethon to pledge money. Pudsey Bear, the Children in Need mascot, is ever-present.

The Rotary collection has been going on for several years now, but it’s the first time our Rotary Club has got involved.  It was being organised by District 1090, not my own District, but I was attracted to it as Heathrow is local to me. Altogether 350 Rotarians were to work in shifts in all passenger areas of the airport, including the terminals (landside and airside) and even the trains that run shuttles to and from the departure gates at Terminal 5.

Collectors in Terminal 5

I travelled there with Ken and Min, as we were all working a four hour shift in Terminal 3, airside, from 10.00 a.m. to 2.00 p.m. Car parking was free for us, we just had to drive to the long term car park and ride in on the shuttle bus. It seemed quite surreal travelling in with all these excited holidaymakers heading off to exotic climes. I wondered how much it cost to park in the Long Stay car park, as opposed to the cost of a taxi to the airport. I must look it up some time.  Today none of this mattered , as the organisers were going to give me a free pass to get out of the car park when I left.

Shuttle Bus to Terminal

After a short ride in to the central area, we were duly dropped off at Terminal 3 and we presented ourselves to the registration point with 10 minutes to spare. Besides myself, there were some other celebrities present that morning, including the President of Rotary International in Britain and Ireland (RIBI) Eve Conway and also Paralympian Naomi Riches. However I never came across either of them during my 4 hour stint, and wondered whether they were worried about being upstaged by me.

Eve Conway meets Pudsey

We were duly checked in, given our air-side passes (with photos) and a group of about 12  of us were assigned to an airport worker (many people working at Heathrow were also volunteering today) who would guide us to our posts. We were also given a £5 voucher for our lunch break. I wasn’t confident this would go very far at airport catering outlets, and suggested to Min and Ken that we pool our vouchers for a bag of chips. Our guide took us through some security doors and to my surprise we came to a check point, where we had to show our passports. I had thought our registration earlier would be the only formality.

Volunteers get registered

At this point a rather extraordinary situation developed. I was just following another couple of Rotarians who I didn’t know through the security area when the chap in front of me got out his passport then stopped in his tracks, horrified. He said to his companion ‘I can’t go through.’ When asked ‘Why not?’ he said ‘ I’ve come out with my wife’s ex-husbands passport!’ This exchange left many questions forming in my mind, but before I could ask them, he was whisked off. He could still collect for Children in Need today, but would have to stay ‘land-side’.

That looks like me getting registered

Meanwhile the rest of us underwent the procedures of emptying our belongings into a tray and passing through an X-Ray machine, familiar to anyone who has travelled by air in recent years. Apparently all airport staff have to go through this procedure before they are allowed air side. As usual the machine beeped as I went through due to my replacement knee, and I consequently suffered the indignity of being frisked by a security guard. I was determined to remain cheerful, being worried that if I made a fuss the search may have become more intimate.

Ready to collect - Min myself and Ken

Once we were safely airside, we learnt that we had been allocated the baggage reclaim area in Terminal 3 for our collection activities. The reclaim area was quite busy, as many trans-Atlantic flights were arriving at about this time, and I spent some time deciding where to stand with my bucket in order to maximise the opportunities of receiving donations.  We were not allowed to rattle our buckets, but were encouraged to engage people in conversation. We also had some Pudsey bear merchandise to sell if the opportunity arose. Any currency could be accepted, whether notes or coin.

Ken and I are wearing our merchandise

To be honest, it didn’t go very well. The first thing that was apparent was that whilst Children in Need is a national institution in the UK, nobody from any other country knew anything about it. I consequently found myself trying to explain how people up and down the country would be raising millions of pounds for this cause today, to people who didn’t seem particularly interested. By far the most generous people we came across were British travellers, but then they knew all about Children in Need.

Min and me

I met some interesting people on my shift. ‘ Welcome to London’ was my usual chat up line as I approached them. The first family group I approached had travelled from Texas overnight. They weren’t leaving Heathrow, but catching an onward flight to Ukraine. A surprisingly large number of travellers seemed to be using Heathrow as a transit point, rather than staying. There were some, of course, who were staying in London, and naturally I gave them the benefit of my local knowledge in telling them the best places to visit. It was surprising how few people had heard of Craven Cottage.

Registration desk gets busy

Engaging people in conversation wasn’t easy, because most of them had been flying all night and were exhausted. They just wanted to find their luggage and get on their way. In hindsight, putting myself in their shoes, if I had just arrived at a foreign airport and whilst searching for my luggage some bloke approaches and asks for money, I would probably think I was the victim of some scam and would consequently refuse to co-operate. To make things worse, many who I did manage to speak to, told me that the flight crew had already persuaded them to part with any spare money as they were leaving the aircraft. I can certainly recall that happening to me as well.

Pudsey puts in an appearance in Terminal 5

Halfway through our shift, our group were given a 30 minute break for lunch, and we spent our £5 vouchers in Pret a Manger. I was pleasantly surprised that for less than a fiver I could obtain a good sandwich and a drink. I had a laugh with a chap from Gerrards Cross Rotary club, who had regularly been wearing the Pudsey Bear suit during the previous week, and he was telling me about some of the visits they had done to local schools. It was great fun, he said, being dressed as Pudsey, but sweltering hot inside the costume. He was wearing just a T shirt and shorts underneath but was dripping with sweat, and had to be helped in and out of the suit. Apparently the latest design of Pudsey Bear outfit costs about £800, and has a built-in fan to help cool you down. It made me think maybe we could share one with other local clubs and take it to our local schools.

Pret a Manger Terminal 3

After lunch it was back to our posts in the baggage area. On our way there we briefly passed through the Departure lounge. This is where passengers congregate once they have dropped off their luggage and gone through security. It occurred to me that this was where we should have been collecting. Everybody here had an hour or two to wait for their flight, and were just sitting around, shopping, or drinking coffee. We could have made a killing here, I thought, relieving people of unwanted UK currency, which was just weighing down their pockets. We’d be doing them a favour.

Departure Lounge Terminal 3

However, some other group had this pitch, and we couldn’t trespass, so back we went to baggage reclaim for the rest of our shift. It was more of the same for the rest of our time there, until I had the brainwave of talking to the people at Travelex, the Bureau de Change. They had 3 separate offices in the baggage reclaim area, and I reckoned they must be given a lot of coin that they have difficulty dealing with. So I had a chat with one of the staff there, she told me she gets loads of coins, and their policy is to throw them away, as it costs too much to exchange them. ‘Throw them into my bucket’, I said ‘We can deal with them’. So she opened her drawer and poured loads of coins in to my bucket, more than I had collected all day. I had a similar result at the next Travelex counter, although the third one claimed not to have any.

My bucket weighed quite heavy now, so I was pleased with myself at the end of my shift when I handed it over. I don’t suppose there was much value in it, but at least it showed I had done some work.  Back at the collection point I looked in vain for Eve Conway, but it appeared she had been and gone already. She will be disappointed to learn that she had missed meeting me. Min, Ken and I headed back on the bus to the Long Stay car park, from where we headed off home, having felt we had done something worthwhile today.  We later learned that the Rotary day at Heathrow had made over £32,000 for Children in Need, and the school visits a further £18,000. A decent return, I would say.