Sophie Nightingale

Said the following about Susan Temple:

“Susan joined ScotRail 14 years ago as barrier staff at Paisley Gilmour Street. Following a brief stint on train she moved to Johnston Station where she’s stayed for the past 12 years.

Susan is well known and well liked in her local community. There’s very few customers who she’s not on 1st name terms with and there’s not an anniversary, new job or graduation that she doesn’t know about. Just a few weeks ago I watched as a customer came to her window not just to buy her ticket (which she could get at a machine) but also so she could catch up with Susan and thank her for her help sorting out a problem she was having.

It was in 2010 that Susan realised she could use her position to make a positive difference for her local community. Susan is on first name terms with the majority of her customers. It was whilst issuing a ticket to one of her regulars that they mentioned they volunteered as a ‘Street Pastor’ in their spare time. It was when Susan learned that the street pastors were struggling to meet the demand for scarves, gloves, hats and warm socks to donate to the local homeless population that an idea was formed. Putting a simple poster up on her community notice board she encouraged customers to drop off any warm items at the booking office and she was overwhelmed with the response.

Susan said her main challenge is that people want to help 52 weeks of the year and she only has a small amount of storage space. That’s why, about 3 years ago she was going to focus on a 4 week period to receive and distribute as much as she possibly could. With the help of her colleague, Janice Povah, 3 local charities were selected to receive support – Women’s Aid, a food bank and Rough Sleepers.

Susan is the 1st to admit that the food bank didn’t receive many donations, but the other two charities were a different story.

For Woman's Aid, she asked her customers to give a “gift for mum”, something that the children in the shelters could give to their mums on Christmas day. Susan has a way of encouraging people to put themselves in other people’s shoes and when asked about what donations were needed she’d ask, “if you suddenly found yourself homeless with nothing but the clothes on your back what would you need?” Customers really took this idea to heart and gave everything from pyjamas to beauty products, underwear, toothbrushes, chocolates and handbags. Susan was inundated with donations and was able to donate to not just one, but 3 local women’s shelters.

The same happened with the donations for the rough sleeper’s hostel, she found herself in the position of having more donations than the hostel could store so she spoke to customers who pointed her in the direction of Teen Challenge – an organisation that provide support for young people struggling with addiction, homelessness and young women who were trafficked into sex work.

Since then the station has started taking donations for Turning Point, a charity working young girls and women who have been victims of human trafficking and subsequently struggle with addictions. In 2017 she received a thank you card from the organisation which said that the service users broke down in tears because for most of them it was the first present they had been given in years. Susan made sure that all her customers understood what a huge difference they had made.

Susan is incredibly modest “I’m just in a position to be the middleman – I’m not a saint – I just use my position to help others make a difference” but that belies the huge heart and all the extra hours she puts in supporting her customers. One of her regular customers doesn’t remember the first 7 years that she knew Susan but now as a recovering alcoholic she has nothing but gratitude for her. Susan remembers the day she met her customer sober and has been her champion ever since. When the customer was given a house, Susan rallied her customers into donating bedding and furniture to make it more homely and comfortable. Knowing that she was coming up to 1-year sober, Susan and her customers put together a pamper basket of goodies to show how supported she was by the local community and how proud of her they were.

She’s been thanked more times than she can remember and is inundated with boxes of chocolates and bottles of wine as shows of gratitude, but rather than taking these for herself, Susan raffles them instead, raising hundreds of pounds for charity.

She has a fondness for her customers that goes beyond her job “you get to know the regulars… you get attached”. She would look forward to Willie’s 4 or 5 visits to her station a year. His daughter lived in Scarborough and he would ask for Susan’s help to get best value tickets. Then one year he didn’t come in for tickets, he came in to say goodbye. He’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wanted to tell Susan what a huge difference she had made in his life.

Susan says “it’s the small things that make a difference” but what she and her customers have achieved over the years is anything but small.“