After 45 years with the Bermuda Hotel Association, office manager Doronda “Dee” Francis has retired.

Ms Francis was just 26 when she was hired by John Harvey as an administrator for the Hotel Employers of Bermuda, which worked jointly with the BHA.

Her job was to take notes and prepare statistical analyses, including employee data.

“I kept a record of all article agreements and changes and produced final negotiated agreements for signature,” she explained.

Within two weeks of starting she was sitting at the negotiation table with the HEB and the Bermuda Industrial Union.

“It was intimidating,” she said. Ms Francis did not know who anyone was, so she drew a circle on a piece of paper to represent the table, then drew faces around that, adding details like, “this one is wearing a dress with flowers”. Later, she showed it to Mr Harvey so he could identify everyone for her.

Two of the people at the meeting were Ottiwell Simmons, president of the BIU, and Molly Burgess, general secretary, a divisional organiser and key negotiator.

She started just a few months after the general strike of 1981, when the aggression level during meetings was still high.

“Back then the union was fighting for something and the negotiations could get heated,” Ms Francis said. “Now, negotiations are more civil, with only occasional flashes of agitation.”

Meetings between the BIU and the HEB were long and intense, often running until 3am, pausing so people could sleep, then relaunching again at 9.30am.

“That would last for a few weeks,” Ms Francis said.

One year she clocked 200 or more overtime hours just from negotiations.

In the last four and a half decades she has seen Bermuda tourism change dramatically. She estimated there were 12,000 hotel rooms available in the 1980s compared to around 2,000 today.

One of Ms Francis’s early tasks was to call all the hotels on Monday mornings and find out how much space they had. She noted the number on a chart on the wall. When visitors called the BHA she could tell them which hotels still had rooms available.

There were times when there were none available at all, particularly in May during the Newport Bermuda Race.

It was a fun industry to work in for Ms Francis with a lot going on.

“There was a hotel to hotel road race that hotel workers took part in,” she said. “There was a Mr and Mrs Hotelier contest. There were awards for staff and staff barbecues at the different hotels.”

“Over time, I went from one hat to wearing two, then three hats as staff left and responsibilities were combined by the BHA, HEB and Bermuda Alliance for Tourism,” she said.

She noted that the BHA’s role itself has shifted, and the board is revisiting its mission statement to reflect the industry’s new reality.

Ms Francis, 70, has no idea what she is going to do in retirement.

“I have been watching tennis,” she said. “I feel really guilty about just sitting there.”

One of her sons recently showed her a job advertisement at the Southampton Princess.

“I told him I have been working ever since I was 16,” she said. “Before that I helped to raise my eight younger siblings. Then I got married and had three children including twin boys, and that was work. Whatever I do next, it will be for me.”