Some years ago I started a travel company in New York sending Americans on group tours to Europe. It was a great success and after four years I sold it.

I believe that the principal reason for its success was that all the tour directors were undergraduates from Oxford (and some from Cambridge) on their long vacation and some graduates who had just finished at university. It was lucky for me that the first tour director that we hired was about to go up to Oxford and I asked him to find tour directors for us. Over the course of his first year he found several people whom he thought suitable and they were almost all a tremendous success. The following two years that he was up at Oxford he found many more until after three years we had 80 guides.

Most tour guides are bored with seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa fifty times and this boredom is picked up by the tour members. What our guides lacked in familiarity with the places that they showed to the American tourists (and of course they were very well briefed by us and they had learned all about the sites that they were going to) they made up for by their fine personalities and enthusiasm. One our tour directors gave a party recently for all the tour directors that had worked for us over the years and so many of them went on to outstanding careers; one of them even became Lord Chancellor of England.

One of the tour members wrote in a questionnaire that we gave them to fill in at the end of their tour "Alistair is one of the finest men that we have ever met in our lives" and it was probably not an exaggeration. The character and personality of the tour directors was what made the company and helped it to grow so fast. Not the hotels - most tour groups use much the same hotels - but the tour directors.

It is exactly the same with Tutors from England: we have scouts at Oxford and Cambridge that we know and trust to find suitable tutors for us - fine people who are motivators. It is easy to teach children, it is much more difficult to motivate them. GN