September 2025:
KC’s Log September/October 1985

2025 is the 40 anniversary of KC’s first season back in service in 1985. Based at the Historic Dockyard Chatham, which had opened for the first time as a “Living Museum” that summer, we hoped that we might be able to piggy back on that potential success and benefit from the visitors they attracted. However they got off to a very slow start. It is a massive site and of the relatively few who came to visit that summer they seemed to get lost in the enormity of it. Almost none of them wanted the add on of a paddle steamer ride. So we were really on our own trying to market KC in an arena which was then pretty much the antithesis of a honeypot.

However we were close to Rochester and that had some good and successful attractions including Rochester Castle, Rochester Cathedral and in the near vicinity Upnor Castle and Fort Amherst. We joined the local tourism association, from which I picked up quite a lot of handy tips. Being a member also helped to make me feel less alone in trying to market KC.

The initial business plan was to put on only a limited number of advertised public sailings including some afternoon trips, some evening cruises sometimes with a jazz band and occasional day trips. For the rest we ran only when we had bookings in advance in the diary for coach parties or other groups or charters. As the years rolled on, and we became better known, we expanded the number of advertised afternoon trips we offered and they became the bedrock of our business. They attracted the coach and group markets often in significant numbers and on a very regular basis.

Last month we looked at what we did in July 1985. Here is a record of what we did in September and October:

1985 was a difficult summer for us finding our feet, working out how to run a paddle steamer and trying to get ourselves established. Inevitably with the pressure of a commercial operation some of the volunteers from the past drifted away. A handful remained including Chris Smith whose role grew over the years to become such a key figure in the operation of KC. We were lucky to find others with real expertise with the arrival of Harry Quirk, Maurice Marriott, Joe Frame and later Jim Nuttall and Alan Beavan, whose professional engineering expertise sharpened up our engine room practices no end and from whom I learned so much.

We were also lucky to find a sympathetic Local Authority which had an interest in promoting local attractions and also paying for training for those who ran them. Managers from the other local attractions, including me, were encouraged to go on marketing and other courses sponsored, and paid for, by Rochester upon Medway City Council.

This opened up new vistas for me of SINKS (single income no kids), DINKS (double income no kids), Empty Nesters (parents whose children had left home) and a whole host of other individual market segments all enshrined within the principles of focused rather than scatter gun marketing. At the start of one course I remember the tutor going round the room asking everyone what they had had for breakfast. One had had toast; another a fried egg; someone else porridge; one a cheese sandwich and so on. It was a clever and memorable way to get us all thinking and focus on the idea that everyone is different. Not everyone thinks like you or me. Not everyone wants to do what you or I want to do. It is the trick of the expert marketeer to identify what market segments may wish to buy, and are able to afford to buy, the product they are marketing at the prices needed to be charged to remain solvent and to find innovative ways to target them.

So Rochester upon Medway City Council has its place amongst all the very many people and organisations who helped, advised and supported us over almost three decades running KC on the Medway from Chatham starting in this first season of commercial operation forty years ago in the summer of 1985.