After fifty years running one of South Devon’s best-loved seaside hotels, William Ireland has turned his frustrations, triumphs and laughter into print.

At first glance, A Good Scrap I Fear, endorsed by TV hotel personality Alex Polizzi and actor Michael Cochrane, appears to be a charming, if slightly eccentric, memoir of life as a hotelier on the British coast.

William, the second-generation owner of The Cottage Hotel in Hope Cove, opens the door to his world.

Part memoir, part exposé, the book charts a lifetime spent at The Cottage Hotel, run by the Ireland family since 1973.

The book begins as a heartwarming love letter to the hotel industry. William writes with conversational, unfiltered warmth about the history of the property his family acquired.

He shares the kind of “you couldn’t make it up” anecdotes that only hoteliers possess: guests driving cars off cliffs (and surviving), kitchen porters gone rogue, and missing Christmas puddings.

There are warm tributes to long-serving employees, nods to loyal guests who’ve become family friends, and poignant reflections on his parents’ legacy.

Throughout, William’s belief in hospitality as a true vocation — a life of long hours, quick wits and unwavering optimism — runs clearly. His writing is disarmingly frank: at times indignant, often very funny, and always deeply human.

Yet beneath the chronicles of the weird and wonderful lies a burning dossier of frustration, with William alleging a decade-long campaign of bureaucratic obstruction.

For more than ten years, he has been embroiled in a planning dispute with South Hams District Council — a saga he says has cost him years of stress and hundreds of thousands in lost business.

Rather than pursue a costly legal battle, which he estimates would have cost him around half a million pounds, a judge friend advised him to write a book instead — a far cheaper form of catharsis.

The title — A Good Scrap I Fear — is taken directly from an internal council email obtained by William Ireland, which appeared to relish the prospect of a fight with the hotel owner.

William insists his goal is not to attack individuals, but to expose what he calls “a broken system” where ordinary citizens and family businesses can be worn down by bureaucracy.

He presents a narrative dense with what he claims is evidence: missing architectural drawings, shifting requirements, and allegations of personal bias from officials.

Alongside the humour and nostalgia, William draws parallels between his experience and the Post Office Horizon scandal — arguing that local planning departments operate without sufficient accountability, with consequences that can stifle the small businesses keeping rural economies alive.

This whirlwind of emotion and raw, candid writing may not always be the easiest to digest for the casual reader, but it offers an eye-opening journey into the life of one of the area’s most iconic hotel destinations.

A Good Scrap I Fear is available from Monday 8 December in print at The Cottage Hotel, local bookshops, and online. For every book sold, William will donate £2 to Hope Cove Life Boat and Friends of Hope Cove Harbour Wall.

He has also launched a website inviting the public to share their own experiences of planning departments locally and nationally: www.agoodscrapifearbook.co.uk.

The South Hams Gazette is now investigating several of the claims raised by William Ireland in his book.