Norry & Heather Ascroft celebrate at Queen’s garden party.
Ever been invited to Buckingham Palace for a Garden Party? At the Travel Village Group we don’t just celebrate our colleagues’ travel achievements… after all, we’re a family business, and we like to think that we encourage all of our people to follow their passions outside of work too.
Husband and Wife travel duo at Ascroft Travel (working under the Travel Village Group banner), Norry and Heather, were invited to attend the Queen’s exclusive garden party at Buckingham Palace, celebrating public service and people making a positive impact in their community.
Norry spoke of his shock of receiving the invite in 2020:
I was totally surprised when I received the invitation in the post as I didn’t expect it. I still don’t know who nominated me so I can’t thank them for doing so.
The day was absolutely amazing. Prince Charles and Camilla were there alongside some other royals and celebrities, although the people I found most interesting were the other normal people who had been invited.
I found it inspiring to hear about the amazing work so many of them have done in their communities.
Norry and Heather finally attended the party in May 2022, after in had been postponed for two years, due to the pandemic.
Whilst Norry may have had a career as a corporate trainer, before joining Heather as a homeworker (expanding their travel business), he also spent a huge amount of time supporting children’s charities. Variety Charity and, local Blackpool charity, Aiming Higher are just two of the deserving charities Norry champions.
His passion for helping people became a personal project for him, when he also decided to tackle the difficult topic of bullying. Norry wanted to work with schools to educate not just the children, but the teachers and parents too. Norry wrote a book “The Truth About Bullying“, and supplied 50,000 online copies of it for free to schools across the UK.
Motivated to Help
When asked what motivated Norry to write a book on the topic of bullying, he had this to say:
I was reading the newspaper one day and saw a devastating story about a teenager who had committed suicide because of cyberbullying, which was the third story I’d read where that had happened in as many weeks.
It really motivated me to use my human behaviour and development training to go into schools and speak to children, teachers and parents about bullying so I began doing assemblies.
I then created a digital presence and put together some basic video training for teachers and did a social media campaign highlighting the dangers of bullying, as well as wrote a book.Phil Nuttall, CEO of the Travel Village Group, sponsored my campaign which was amazing, he has been so supportive of my work.
I haven’t done all of that for the recognition, but it was lovely to receive the invite to The Queen’s garden party. It has motivated me to continue to try to help people.
