George Andrews was all set for a good summer at his small Moors hotel. And then foot and mouth struck, reports Stephen Lewis

GEORGE Andrews and his partner Ros Hawksby had had high hopes for the summer. Bookings were looking good, and it seemed their £40,000 investment in a new dining room at the Grosmont House Hotel, in the pretty North York Moors village of Grosmont, would pay off.

Then came foot and mouth. The impact was devastating. "Every letter, every telephone call we received, was people cancelling," George recalls. "It was absolutely devastating."

George, 65, had bought the business three years earlier. It had been the former publican's lifelong dream. Tragically, his wife Pam died of lung cancer just a few weeks after they moved in. But he had begun to find new happiness with Ros. Together, they had started to build up the little hotel's reputation as a lovely place to stay for walkers doing the coast-to-coast path, and for rail enthusiasts - it is right next to the North York Moors Railway's Grosmont station.

Suddenly, they found themselves staring into the abyss. George reckons 60 per cent of his business comes from walkers. Last summer, as foot and mouth turned the countryside into a no-go zone, not a single walker stayed at the hotel.

George laid off his part-time gardener, full-time waitress/cleaner, and part-time kitchen assistant - leaving just him and Ros to keep things ticking over. As maintenance of the half-acre gardens and the hotel itself began to fall behind, they tightened their belts and dug in.

A £2,000 grant from the Government's hardship fund helped: but by that time George reckons they were already £7,000 down on expected takings.

His bank was understanding, deferring half his mortgage payments until April this year - but even so, by the end of the year, he had run up an overdraft of almost £6,000. Takings were £15,000 down for the year on what he had hoped. He and Ros's total earnings for the year weren't even enough for them to have to pay income tax.

They survived: just. The year ahead is looking good, with many of the guests who cancelled a year ago re-booking for this year. "There are lots and lots of bookings for this summer," he says.

But even so, it will take the whole year to pay off his overdraft - and at the end of it he will be back to square one. "It is going to mean starting all over again," he says. "That is what it comes down to."

He's uncomfortably aware, too, that any repeat of what happened last year, and his businesses would go under. "There's no way that we could survive another year like that."

Updated: 11:49 Wednesday, February 20, 2002