'Chef' - the life of an unsung legend of the catering industry

Most people won’t have heard of the name Dave Boland but if you ask any of the top chefs in the country, they will probably have heard of the man, and will testify to how much he has done for the UK catering industry. With 44 years in the trade as a chef, teacher and fellow of the Academy of Culinary Arts (ACA), Dave Boland – or ‘chef’ to everyone except his wife – is the very definition of a behind-the-scenes legend. The Staff Canteen caught up with him in the hope of distilling some of his decades of culinary wisdom.

I met Dave Boland in a makeshift ‘office’ in Bournemouth and Poole College where he is the senior lecturer for the ACA’s Specialised Chefs Course and where he has taught cookery for more than 30 years. I say ‘office’ in quotation marks because it could pass as a cupboard in other buildings with barely enough room for a desk and two chairs. In many ways though this unprepossessing space is fitting for a humble man who counts culinary legends like Michel and Albert Roux, John Williams and Brian Turner as his close friends, but who can’t understand why anyone would want to interview him.

“It’s not that interesting,” is the first thing he says about his life when I ask him. He is wrong. Dave was the co-founder of one of the country’s most prestigious culinary courses. He has been a fellow of the Academy of Culinary Arts for 25 years. In 1996 he was one of six chefs chosen to re-create a trans-Atlantic Escoffier banquet for the legendary chef’s 150^th anniversary. He has been personally recommended for jobs by Albert Roux and once turned down the position of Royal Chef at Buckingham Palace.

One of Dave’s friends, celebrity chef and president of the ACA, Brian Turner said of him: “It is very much under-estimated what Dave Boland has done for the industry. You may have a great football team and it’s the guy who puts the ball in the net who’s the great hero but it’s the people behind the scenes, like Dave, who have done all the background work.” Dave looks young for his 59 years and speaks in a softly-spoken but engaging Mancunian lilt that you imagine can’t have lessened much in the four or so decades that he has lived away from the city of his birth. He was born in Crumpsall , a suburb of Manchester in 1954 and grew up on a council estate in Heywood near Rochdale.  

Leaving school as a 14-year-old working class lad in 1960’s Manchester, there weren’t many options open to Dave other than plumbing, construction or engineering. Instead he decided to try for a chef position at a local gentleman’s club. He was successful and was soon on a working apprenticeship with a day release to Hollings College, Manchester’s then state-of –the-art catering college. On graduating, Dave, who had originally wanted to join the merchant navy as a chef, found himself stuck in a rut in Manchester. That was until one night when he saw Judith Chalmers on the Travel Show extolling the virtues of ‘sunny’ Bournemouth.

He went to the pub later that evening and asked his friends if anyone wanted to go. “I didn’t even know where it was,” said Dave, “except it was south of Manchester.” Seven friends took him up on his offer and they all came down in a battered Ford Cortina. By pure fluke they rocked up near where Bournemouth College is today. As they parked the car, the gearstick came off in Dave’s friend’s hand. “He looked down at the stick in his hand,” said Dave, “then he looked up at us and said, ‘there’s no going back now boys.’” It must have been fate. Except for a three-year sojourn in Jersey where he received his advanced cookery qualification, Dave has lived and taught in Bournemouth ever since. He started working as a lecturer at Bournemouth College in 1980.

In 1987 he became a member of the recently created Academy of Culinary Arts. Two years later, alongside fellow Academy member Peter Taylor, Dave set up the first Specialised Chefs Course at Bournemouth College. The idea was to give young, inexperienced chefs working  in London’s big hotels, a greater support system. “We were losing a lot of 18 to 20 year olds from the industry,” said Dave, “so we set about addressing the problem. The idea was that we would have a team of people there behind the scenes to help and support them through the difficult period from college to work.”

The Specialised Chefs course has been going strong ever since. John Williams calls it “the finest apprenticeship in the country”. It is the ACA’s official apprenticeship scheme with chefs taken on as under-19 year olds and placed in top catering institutions like The Ritz, Claridges, The Savoy, Buckingham Palace and The Dorchester. Trainees spend 9 months of the three-year course in college and two full years in their chosen establishments where they are constantly monitored and supported. It’s also the only course in the country where the students are paid a weekly wage by their establishments, even during the periods when they are at college. Hywel Jones, Michelin-starred executive chef at Lucknam Park, is one of the chefs who has been taking Dave’s students for many years.

He said: “What amazes me is that when they first come to me, they’ve only been at Bournemouth three months but during that time his input must be massive to turn them into the well turned out, polite, disciplined young people that arrive here, and they’ve all got so much respect for Dave.” The respect that Dave commands is a recurring theme from all the people who talk about him. The words’ father figure’ are also often mentioned. Both Hywel Jones and Brian Turner speak about the presents that Specialised Chefs graduates club together to buy him. The gift from last year’s graduates gives some idea what they think of him. It was a meal at Koffman’s at The Berkeley and a night at Claridges. A great teacher, chef and person, that is the impression you get of Dave from everyone you speak to, but what summed him up for me more than anything – apart from the modest office – was the reason he gave for turning down the position of Royal Chef. “I would have had to move up to London,” said Dave, “and my children were of an age where I didn’t think that would be a good thing. Also you had to be away six weeks of the year at Sandringham and six weeks at Balmorel and I didn’t want to be away from my family that long.”