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Carole Goldsmith’s tale is one of resilience. She lived on her own, aged 17 with no money and, mid-HR career in 2016, she was thrown off a horse in a near fatal accident. When her consultant banned her from work, she simply brought her team to live with her. She is self-effacing and honest - ‘I’m rubbish with plants’ she says almost immediately and while potentially not green-fingered she is anything but ‘inadequate’ - she is the Director supporting the thousands of people that work across the RHS’ five unique gardens and deliver the world famous RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
Goldsmith’s early chapter was challenging
“I had quite a dysfunctional upbringing and I left school with very little,” she says. Goldsmith’s parents were divorced, and she was relentlessly bullied at school, she ended up living in a London bedsit on her own, aged just 17.
“I survived on toast and spent the next couple of years just getting through each day,” she says. Fortune eventually landed at her feet when she met her now husband, aged 25 – she had been ‘jobbing’ in various low-earning roles, but she wanted to ‘progress’ and by her own admission prove that she had half a brain.
The route into better pay was training and she undertook a course to give her basic office and computing skills. She didn’t want to stop there and the thirst for learning and to cut ties with her past was strong. “I wanted to go to university, and I got an unconditional offer from Southampton to do an HR degree,” she says. Her first year was a resounding success and she got incredible results – each summer she worked for Chase Manhattan Bank. It was the starting point for her fortunes turning and she gained a first-class honours degree and was also awarded the CIPD Undergraduate Prize of ‘Student of the Year’ in 1999 - a moment that she is rightly proud of.
We launched a management development programme and that’s when the magic started to happen – people started feeling more a part of Goodwood per se as opposed to being a racecourse employee or a motor circuit employee – ‘One Goodwood’
Freshly graduated, her first ‘pure’ HR job was working for a tech start-up. “I also studied for my Masters part-time while working full-time.” Her next stop was in an HR role at a chain of on-campus and professional bookshops, John Smith’s and Coutt’s. It was her first job of rank – she was Head of HR but as with life – fine plans were excitingly interrupted by the arrival of her daughter in 2005.
“I was heavily pregnant and working really hard on due diligence for the business because it was looking to buy another business – I didn’t stop working until the very week before I gave birth!” It was a perfect storm of happiness, newness and anxiety. Whilst away on maternity leave the business deal fell apart and instinctively, she knew it would be sensible to search for a new role.
