Grin and bar it

A policy of zero tolerance and co-operating with the police has enabled Carmel Daly-Fletcher to turn the Skyrack in Leeds from a drug-dealing infested den into a money-spinning haven for students. Nigel Huddleston reports

Sometimes it takes more than a cheeky grin and a few flippant quips to keep your customers in order and create a healthy environment for decent people to have a good time.

When Carmel Daly-Fletcher took over the Skyrack in Leeds some six-and-a-half years ago, it was plagued by drug dealers and hooligans.

"When I came into this pub," Daly-Fletcher recalls, "I wasn't exactly a pussy cat but I was very soft and I'm very tough now. It's something I'm not entirely sure I like, actually. I don't tolerate fools at all, whereas before I wouldn't know a bad egg if I smelled one. I didn't have any street cred at all, but now I can see them a mile off."

Gaudy-checked fashion house Burberry has stopped making baseball caps, she muses, because their adoption by undesirables was damaging its upmarket image. Hats and caps are banned after 8pm in the Skyrack so that any troublemakers can be identified more easily on the CCTV.

But a policy of "zero tolerance" and not being afraid to ask for help from the police has rid the Skyrack of most of its problems, especially drugs.

"It's probably 99% better," Daly-Fletcher says. "I'm not going to say 100% because you'd have to be an idiot to think that. There's always somebody who's going to try to sell something in your pub. That's where we would make a mistake, if we thought we'd got it cured.

"We don't practice zero tolerance for the fun of it, we do it because we like having better money in our tills."

In the early days, Daly-Fletcher woke to find her tyres slashed three mornings on the trot after trying to keep what she calls "bad money" out of the pub. One time, she woke in the middle of the night to discover eight hooded figures in the bar. Luckily, she was viewing them on the monitors from the relative safety of the office. It was the third break-in in 10 days.

"It threw me a bit," she says with some understatement. "You get chances in life and if I were to wake up to a gun pointing at my face and survive the experience I'd treat it as a wake-up call and I'd be out."

These days, the customer base has shifted drastically towards sometimes-boisterous but mainly harmless students. Skyrack's offering (lots of space, pool tables and ­ possibly a pub first ­ one of those dancing machines you see in seaside arcades) reflects this. The queues start forming for the implausibly-cheap £1.95 lunchtime main courses just before noon.

It's a mix that's seen Daly-Fletcher transform the Skyrack into a business where each member of her bar staff can take an average of £1,000 a night through their till.

Daly-Fletcher trained in the hotel business in her native Ireland, but has now been in pubs in Leeds for a decade, aside from a brief sojourn down the M1 to Sheffield. She's also found time to work in an Icelandic fish factory in between spells in Israel, the USA, Hong Kong and Rwanda, among many exotic places. She was British Institute of Innkeeping Innkeeper of the Year in 1998 after only three years in the business and bravely took on the sporty Skyrack on the first day of the 1998 soccer World Cup.

Rugby league memorabilia adorns the pub walls. Leeds Rhinos' Headingley ground ­ which backs on to the test cricket arena ­ is a stone's throw away.

Daly-Fletcher's husband Paul played rugby for Leeds and is now on the club's coaching staff. Some of the players sometimes drop in for a drink.

"They're so nice, but they're not spoiled like footballers are with their salaries," she notes.

Her own preference for a night out is for a good restaurant over a pub, and aside from that she relaxes by going to the gym. "I love it. I get on my treadmill up there, and I plug in and off I go."

It's a necessary departure from running a pub no matter how much you love it, she says.

"It can be really good fun. If you've got a buzzing night with good music and good customers, it's not like work. But on the flipside there are times when it's so stressful, you feel like you're in a pressure cooker.

"Pubs are so much fun to run compared to hotels. Hotels are great for experience, but they used to have a rule that two cigarette butts was too much in an ashtray. You'd be forever changing ashtrays in my pub if that was the rule."

The Skyrack is run on strong teamwork rather than strict discipline. "I've been very lucky with the staff around me, which makes the job so much simpler. I don't feel the need to be the big bad boss."

The pub is a Greene King (former Laurel) managed house, but Daly-Fletcher says "I manage it like it's my own".

But you sense if she were to have a place of her own it might be somewhere where her person-ality allowed her to interact more with the customers.

"My first pub was like that. I'd see you coming in the door, Nigel, how are you? A pint of Stella?' Here we have a sea of faces, five deep at the bar on a Friday night. I miss all that."

How others see her

Jackie Mawdsley, bar staff

"I think she's great. She's very fair, lets her staff get on with it but always knows what's going on. I really didn't like Leeds when I first moved here, but she took me under her wing and looked after me. Now I love it. You can really talk to her if you need to, about anything."

Liz Mudd, assistant manager

"She's brilliant. I've worked here for two years and I think it's more like being part of a family. She looks after her staff and she's very loyal. She'll take us out for a drink from time to time and a meal at Christmas, which all helps to build team morale. Of course she loses it occasionally, but we like her all the more for that because we know she's human."