As it happened, the kids were more than on board. Tristram describes their elder son Patrick, who has helped out at refugee camps in Calais, as the most socially aware of their children. ‘He said: “Dad, this is fantastic. You do realise this is socialism at work, right? Do you think that Uncle Jerome has worked that out yet?” I said: “It’s not socialism, Patrick; it’s stakeholder capitalism.”’
Talking to the Mayhews over the course of a morning, you get a sense of how they complement each other as a team: he is the sails and she is the rudder. There are the flashes of the good-natured, low-level quibbling of any long-married couple. At one point he says: ‘We’re 53. Well, Becs isn’t.’ She points out: ‘I am, actually.’ And when he says they have had about 15 million customers visit their UK sites, she says: ‘It’s actually more like 13 million. You’re exaggerating again.’
They have clearly poured their hearts and souls into the business and reinvested the vast majority of profits. The house we’re meeting in is rented, as are two moorings within sight of their bedroom window. Tristram describes these as the ‘only smart property deal I’ve done in my life’.
The Mayhews sold a flat they owned in Clapham in order to build their first Go Ape site in Thetford Forest on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk in 2002. Nowadays they have an outsourced call centre; back then they were running the business from their kitchen table with a mobile phone number and an A4 diary.
At the time, the couple, who first met at Edinburgh University, were both working in London. Rebecca enjoyed her jobs first in ad sales for a magazine publisher and then marketing for the cancer charity Marie Curie. But Tristram had left the Army and hated his job. ‘I realised I wanted to be around treehouses, teepees, windsurfers, bonfires, mountain bikes and the beach. But, of course, you can’t get a job doing that.’ Instead he went to work for the massive industrial conglomerate GE, which he says was ‘full of 28-year-olds with MBAs playing God’.
Following the birth of their first child, he was also looking for a better work-life balance. His own father, Sir Patrick Mayhew, served as minister for the whole 18 years of the Margaret Thatcher and John Major governments, including five years as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. ‘I was incredibly proud of my father but – this is going to sound like free therapy – he was never around because he was always working.’
They realised the only way they could be at home for breakfast and supper with their children was if they worked for themselves. So, having seen the high ropes park in France, realising there was nothing like it in the UK, they commissioned the guys who built the French venue to build one for them in the UK. They then sold up in London and moved to Suffolk. ‘We purposely burnt our bridges as I didn’t want to do it as a side hustle,’ says Tristram. ‘We didn’t do any market research because I don’t trust it.’
