When Elaine Bentley put a small ad in her local newspaper to advertise her secretarial services, she could not possibly have seen the bigger picture. “My children were young and I only wanted to work on an ad-hoc basis,” she recalls. As a result, she began working for trustees at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex, two mornings a week.

Four years later, Elaine was put in charge of co-ordinating a mammoth appeal for the gallery. It raised £10 million, which enabled a bold new wing to be added to Pallant House — a project which quadrupled the size of the original gallery and led to its closure for three years.

Today she is PA to Stefan van Raay, director of the state-of-the-art gallery, named Museum of the Year in 2007 and winning £100,000 from the Gulbenkian Trust in the process. Elaine was instrumental in that: “I’m responsible for putting the gallery forward for awards, and we’ve won several since building the wing,” she says.

“When we took Museum of the Year it was a wonderful, amazing moment. Stefan took six of us to the awards ceremony. He would have taken more, but we have to watch costs.

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“When we were closed, all my time was taken with fundraising, right up until opening week. In many respects it was hard because there was local opposition, as you’d expect.

“I think the new wing has worked beautifully, but we were adding a modern extension to a Queen Anne building.

“I can’t think of a better place to work. I organise private views and there’s a huge amount to do on the social side: we have four or five events each month and I mix a great deal with our volunteers. I also work closely with our sponsors, Bonhams and UBS, and the trusts that support us.

“Stefan has always been understanding if I need to take time off for family reasons, but equally I’ll work from home if I need to catch up.” Pallant House has become quite a family affair for Elaine: her daughter Jessica worked in the gallery’s restaurant as an A-level student, and her husband Bob is now an art handler.

Stefan recognises what matters in Elaine’s life: “She’s a mother and there have been moments when the children had to take priority. I always thought it important that she should be true to her family and her home. She is vital to me: she’s my memory and proactively gives me the right cues. She thinks for me and she generally spoils me.”

Stefan is a Dutchman who worked for a museum in Amsterdam before coming to the UK as art curator at Glasgow Museums: “There was a language barrier, and it wasn’t English but Scottish, so I used to talk a lot to taxi drivers and they taught me Glaswegian.

“I’d never worked for a local authority before, and while Glasgow was very nice, the local politics were difficult.

“Pallant House was a fantastic challenge: we were talking about putting on an extension to a Grade I listed building in a conservation area in a cathedral city. Getting planning permission was one of my challenges, as was having to keep going while we were shut for three years. We had outreach projects but it was difficult.

“When we reopened in July 2006 it was wonderful, and when we won Museum of the Year a year later it was an incredible boost. The judges described us as a jewel of a gallery. We have a fantastic collection of 20th-century art, including Peter Blake's Beatles and an image of when the Stones got busted in nearby West Wittering.

“The extension is exactly what I hoped for and we have 70,000 visitors a year. We need to find 80 per cent of our own funds, so we can’t afford to be free and need the entrance money. We are also reliant on our 4,000 ‘friends’ and our 250 unpaid volunteers, plus our shop and restaurant.

“I love this country and it has been very good to me. I would only go back to Holland for an interesting professional opportunity, but the quality of life in Sussex is incredibly high and it is very beautiful.

“I’m surrounded by friends and I work in a place where Elaine is part of the structure.”

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