The Rotary Club of Ascot

President’s Report to the Club at Handover Dinner 27^th June 2007.

1. Overview

Fellow Rotarians and partners, Members of Inner Wheel and Honoured Guests,

Tonight is an evening of celebration; celebration, but also of nervousness facing an uncertain future. We celebrate the departure at last of a man who everyone is pleased to see the back of; but we are fearful of his successor, a dour and grim man. But enough of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, tonight is our Presidents’ Handover dinner!

I am delighted to welcome you all tonight. There are two highlights of the Presidential Year, namely when he receives the chain of office and when he relinquished it! I remember a sign a friend had in his office, “Everyone who enters this office brings me happiness; some when they arrive, and some when they leave”. Suffice to say I was very happy and honoured to receive the chain of office, but I am also happy this evening to relinquish the honour and responsibility to Ian! I will briefly review the status of our Club, which is currently in a very healthy state, both in fellowship and financially.

2. Membership

We currently have 35 members, two of whom joined during the year and are already making their presence, Ian Kirkwood and Jim Dillon, while this year we lost two members. Pieter Oldewarris transferred back to The Netherlands, where he has joined a local Rotary Club, so we have successfully inducted Pieter into the Rotary movement worldwide. Past President Peter Ellison moved to Northampton to be nearer his family. He has a huge amount of DIY and gardening to do, and has not yet had time to join his local Rotary Club. He sends his regards to the Club and his many friends here, and he wishes Ian well in his President’s Year. Sadly also this year our Honorary Member Harold Collins passed away.

The Friends Programme remains a source of strength within our Club and of envy outside our Club. Peter Short continues as the driving force of this programme, and has rationalised the Friends group in recent months to retain a core of active Friends. We are, with Round Table and Ascot Racecourse Authority, embarking on a major communications, sponsorship, speaker-finding and recruitment campaign across 300-400 businesses in our area. This is an exciting initiative and will help us engage more with the local Business community – to ‘return to our roots, as Paul Harris envisaged Rotary should be’.

3. Organisation

I am indebted to the Council for their support and commitment throughout my Rotary year. The Club Committee structure engages every Rotarian in the business of the Club, and all four Committees have worked brilliantly throughout the year. I am very grateful to Secretary David Jones and Treasurer and soon to be Senior Vice President David Marshall. Without their attention to detail we would not be so clearly on top of our communications and finances.

4. Club Service

Club Service has become a large organisation with a heavy workload in the last year, and Ian has done a fantastic job in overseeing its many projects and activities.

The Club has five major fund-raising activities, as follows.

The Golf Day raised over £12,500 and was a great success. District also awarded us a £1000 matching grant. I take this opportunity to record the Club’s thanks to Uwe Weiler for Boehringer’s generous sponsorship of the Golf Day, and through this our support of CWSNF. This helped us purchase a specially-adapted minibus for Kennel Lane Special Needs School, which was handed over at a heart-warming ceremony in February. Tom O’Connor and Gordon Parris couldn’t be here tonight, but they also send Ian best wishes for his incoming President’s Year.

We raised almost £4000 for Club charitable funds through the Round Table Fireworks event. Through Peter Short’s proactive efforts, this year’s event will be simultaneously bigger, and more profitable, and simpler, being run in conjunction with Ascot racecourse!

We raised £1600 for Crossroads Caring For Carers at the Waitrose Christmas collection, with the generous support of David Jones and his band. David convinced jazz musicians to turn up to play at 9 am on cold December mornings! It is the presence of the band playing Christmas carols which convinces shoppers to give generously, not simply the presence of us tin-rattlers. Many thanks David!

We also raised nearly £4000 for Thames Hospicecare from Budgen’s Car Parking at the Royal Ascot meeting. This is a fun event for all concerned. It is just as entertaining to watch the human floor show outside the racecourse as the horse racing inside, and much less expensive!

We took over the Sunninghill New Year’s Day Wheelbarrow Race this year and raised over £2000 for the Ascot and District Day Centre. This is short of what we hoped and planned for, with far fewer entrants generated and little sponsorship monies raised. I will be following this up in the next few weeks.

I would also like to mention in dispatches Mike Lustig. Mike doesn’t normally attend our meetings, but he continues to pull his weight in the Club. He organised a stall at the Victorian Street Fair which raised £250, and he organised a very entertaining Quiz Night in January which raised £340.

Under the umbrella of Club Service also come the four major fellowship events of the year, all of which many members have told me were great successes and very enjoyable. Colin Corio organised our Christmas Dinner at Royal Ascot Golf Club; Ann and Neville kindly hosted Brian Millis’s Foundation Garden Party; Beverley as ever organised our visit to the District Conference at Eastbourne superbly; and Barbara I humbly claim did a great job in organising the Presidents’ Weekend at the Swan in Lavenham.

Club Service has also organised a whole raft of fellowship activities during the year. These included an all-weather barbecue at Ian and Christine’s home in August; John Smith organised a super bowls afternoon at Sunningdale Bowls Club; we had several jazz nights at Jagz Jazz Club at the Station, with David Jones’ Jazzmen and his full Vo-De-O-Do band; and Beverley organised theatre trips to Guys and Dolls and Acorn Antiques at the New Victoria Theatre in Woking, and to Evita it the West End. Ian organised a visit to the WEOS production of The Sorcerer at Norden Farm, and we enjoyed the IW trip to see Barefoot in the Park at The Mill at Sonning. The Five Clubs dinner took place at Bearwood Lake Golf Club, organised by the Rotary Club of Wokingham, where the guest speaker was the controversial Headmaster of Wellington and Tony Blair’s biographer, Dr Anthony Seldon.

In summary Club Service has delivered a raft of excellent fellowship and fund-raising activities throughout the year.

5. Community and Vocational Activities

Alan Penny and his C&VS Committee has served our Club well in filtering and choosing judiciously from the many funding requests we receive. They have conscientiously targeted our funds to well-deserved causes, including: new cutlery and crockery for the Day Centre, and donations to Thames Hospicecare, Windsor and District Driving group, Thames and Kennet Trust, Vitality Rehab and Ascot Heath Infants School, and the Service Above Self award to Charters School, Our donations are extremely effective. For example, we enabled the refit of the Falcon Adam narrow boat to allow disadvantaged youngsters to experience the disciplines and the fun of canal boating. Vitality Rehab has set up a local facility for exercise referral by local doctors; and we funded the first year’s fees for Ascot Heath School to use the Life Education Centre. Our money goes so far I think sometimes that David Marshall is printing it in his garage!

We do not only disburse charitable funds though, we give of our time as well. Our support for Youth Speaks and the Hexagon Children’s Concert is reaped a hundred-fold in the pleasure and experience it gives local children. Many Rotarians are involved with both of these initiatives, but I must mention Mike Leaman for Youth Speaks and David Jones and Bill Sheppard for helping with the Hexagon Concert. Mike has been responsible for Youth Speaks for over 10 years, and has built a tremendous relationship with local schools. We owe him a debt of deep gratitude. I should also mention Alan Keene’s contribution; although not a Rotarian he enjoys, and we and the children enjoy, his role as MC at the Youth Speaks heats in St George’s school. Our Hexagon Concert this year was a triumph, with great support from the Mayor, RBWM Education Authority, and of course some 400 children and twice that many parents. Oh yes, we will give some £750 of monies raised to local children’s music charities.

We have worked cooperatively with fellow Clubs in RBWM, the ‘Borough Plus’ forum. In September several of us visited the Hearing Dogs for the Deaf Centre, where we saw the excellent work done there in training dogs for deaf people. We have also donated £500 towards the purchase by the Forum of a dragon boat at the Longridge Aquatic Centre. This is the only centre of its kind in Britain; it provides water sports for all ages, but primarily for children. This is another example of local Clubs pulling together, where we can achieve a project together which is beyond each Club’s means individually. I would also like to mention Roy Bowles’ ongoing work for Book Aid. I get bumph from the District telling me how many boxes of books a Club has sent overseas for Book Aid, and at the same time Roy casually mentions that he has just collected the same number of tonnes of books for Book Aid! Well done, Roy.

6. International

Uwe and everyone on his International Committee have been phenomenally active this year. Uwe’s team organised three visits overseas this year, and three visits by incoming Rotary Clubs! We visited Mainz last summer, to get to know this part of Germany and the fellowship of the RC of Ingelheim and Weingut Wasem’s wines in particular! We went to Basel in February for Basel Fassnacht. Peter and Jane Short organised this superbly, and gave us the opportunity to experience a very special event not well known in the UK. If anybody ever suggests the Swiss are boring, mention Basel Fassnacht! Just last month the Club visited Reims, with a guided tour of the cathedral and a visit to the Ruinart champagne cellars. We in turn hosted RC Ingelheim in May with a fantastic programme, including Windsor Castle, Eton College, Hampton Court, Swinley Forest Golf Club courtesy of Geoff Cook, and dinner at Mill Ride Golf Club. Geoff and Ann cook organised the visit of RCs St Nazaire and Gulpen-Vaals earlier this month. As ever, Rotarians opened their houses and dinner tables for our visitors, and we were fortunate in that the Dutch were able to attend our Foundation Garden Party.

Boehringer organised three lecture evenings, run by national authorities on their subjects, on Strokes, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and Parkinson’s’ Disease. £2,300 was raised at these evenings, which was donated to the Stroke Association, the British Lung foundation and the Parkinson’s’ Disease Society.

The Club bought two Aquaboxes for £1000, two shelter boxes for a village in S America for £980, and, through Barry Moutrey, sponsored the education of three students in Nepal for £250.

7. Foundation

Brian Millis ran the Foundation Committee as efficiently as ever. We increased our contribution to Foundation to £40 per member, while Rodney Hobbis obtained a District Matching Grant of £1000 towards the Kennel Lane School minibus. The Garden Party of course is a highlight enjoyed by us all, and was generously hosted by Ann and Neville Avens. Brian invited two of the visiting scholars to talk at the Garden Party, which was a great success all round. Last summer we had a Friends’ meeting with the District’s Group Study Exchange Team which visited Australia; Brian, Ian and Chris Valentine attended the Farewell Rally in April for the GSE team departing for Hong Kong, while Uwe organised a visit to BI for the incoming Hong Kong team.

8. Summary

I would like to mention in finishing just what a high standard of fund-raising, and a high degree of fellowship in our weekly activities, we are now taking for granted. For example, it wasn’t so long ago that Peter convinced the Club to give the Friends programme a trial run. Since then 10 of the current 35 members have joined the Club through the Friends’ Programme, including me, Ian and David Marshall. Peter has organised an incredible 24 speakers for us during my Presidential year – 6 local speakers on the first Wednesday meeting, 12 professional standard speakers at our Friends’ meetings, and 6 member speakers at our 3^rd Wednesday meetings. The range of speaker topics is astounding. We heard John Webb, who sadly has now died, tell us about British and International Rowing, and we watched Thames Water taking it in the neck from us about

Hose pipe bans last year. Lindsay Nutbrown gave a super talk on etching and engraving, David Jones talked to us on ‘Ann Harbor to Varanasi’, John Smith on Life on a Steam Ship and Norman Smith on Running a Hotel. We had amazing talks on UK-NZ by Microlight – and sadly Owen Truelove has now died in a Microlight accident – talks on the Andes, PPFI, Mount Everest, The Origins of English, The Waterloo Campaign, a Life making films at Pinewood, Touring with Vintage Cars in New Zealand, and on throughout my year with consistently interesting talks.

I will finish quite rightly by repeating my indebtedness to my Council and to Ian in particular, who were supportive, dynamic and good friends all. The Club has without exception responded enthusiastically to all of our activities throughout the year. Ian, I wish you and your Council all the best during your year, and Hilary likewise as incoming President of IW.

Geoff Donovan, President 2006-07