Housekeeping coach SIOBHAN CAINE firmly believes that you’ve got to have serviced hotel bedrooms to the highest possible standards before you can instruct others and she constantly urges her chambermaids: “Be thorough and take a pride in what you do.”

But then this 30-year-old from Finchley in North London readily admits that she was lucky to have Tracy Stoker as her tutor. Tracy, now a good friend, was her coaching predecessor at Trinity – the same lady who had made thousands of beds and cleaned as many rooms at The Lakeside.

“In fact I used to work with her at Lakeside and the amazing thing is that after she had left for an extended vacation I next saw her in New Zealand – we were working in adjoining orchards picking apples to supplement the cash we had saved making beds. It certainly is a small world,” says the one-time Sunderland University student who now lives with her husband Paul in Dalton, not far from his Ulverston birthplace.

“He has also done some bar work at The Lakeside – when I was making beds there – but he has a degree in Environmental Biology and is now working for a wood protection company in Barrow, so my life is lovely just now: let's just say I don’t miss London at all.”

She doesn’t miss anything either when it’s time to instruct her would-be chambermaids – and for that she again thanks Tracy Stoker and her famous checklist. Siobhan explains: “I had kept in touch with her and when I saw an advert in the local newspaper for a hotel assistant at Trinity House I applied for it, knowing that Tracy was Housekeeping Coach.

“I was working for an insurance company at the time, but travelling to Lancaster and back every working day was getting me down and although the job at Trinity was only for four hours in the mornings it just seemed the right job for me to take. What I didn’t know was that Tracy had handed in her notice to go travelling again – she and her husband Gary have spent months in places like Peru, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Bali, Thailand, Cambodia, Australia and New Zealand.

“The outcome was that I was offered Tracy’s job as Housekeeping Coach at Trinity – and that’s how I came to inherit her checklist, which is a typewritten sheet with about 40 jobs on it”.

Did she say 40? She certainly did and when you read the sheet and note that it covers everything from actually making the bed, polishing the furniture and dusting the picture frames to rinsing and drying cups and saucers, replacing toilet rolls and polishing the bath taps – and we’ve only just started – you start to wonder how anybody gets through it in the time allowed, about 25 minutes.

“You just work to the same routine, room after room, day after day. It’s the only way,” says Siobhan, who spent two weeks in February 2004 working alongside Tracy at Trinity being coached, as it were, into becoming a first-class coach.

“We worked to her checklist and I soon began to understand exactly what was expected in my role as Housekeeping Coach. I once worked as a housekeeper in an hotel in Grange-over-Sands and they thought their standards were pretty good, but they were nothing like as high as they are at Lakeside, where guests definitely expect the very best. And, believe me, they do get it in every one of the 80 bedrooms.

“When a guest walks into a bedroom it’s vital that he or she finds it immaculate with everything in its right place and everything sparklingly clean. The reason we train people to tackle each bedroom the same way is so that no job is missed, no towel or light bulb not replaced, no waste bin not emptied.

“It’s attention to detail right through the hotel that gives The Lakeside the tremendous reputation it deservedly has, and when new chambermaids start there after their training we know they understand exactly what is required of them.”

The question “Have you forgotten anything?” is the last item on Siobhan’s printed ‘CLEANING PROCEDURE’ sheet. And she can tell at a glance if they have!