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Amherst News
January 2005

Number 300

Editor Ron Adams

Wednesday Meetings
26 January A speaker from the Estonian Embassy
2 February Business Meeting
9 February Offered to Kent Air Ambulance
16 February An Amherst Evening
23 FEBRUARY ROTARY'S CENTENARY
GUEST NIGHT AND SPECIAL SPEAKER - BOB OGLEY

Service and Social Diary
10 February President of RIBI lunches at Hadlow Manor - Tonbridge Club hosting
19 February Joint Centenary Dinner with Sevenoaks, Edenbridge and Westerham Clubs and partners at Wildernesse Golf Club
26 February District Centenary Lunch and Service at Canterbury Cathedral
2 March Lunch visit from Roubaix Est Club
5 March Battle of the Bands at Walthamstow Hall

This month ..........
.......... we have the opportunity to break new ground. Thanks to our friend and former member Paul Topping, who now lives and works in Sri Lanka, we will support the Rotary Club of Columbo West in their efforts to help small businesses start up afresh in a stricken part of the country. At the time of writing it is hoped that Paul can be with us at a Club meeting early in February.

.......... and we clock up Amherst newsletter number 300. We celebrate modestly by giving some earlier Editors the freedom of our pages to reminisce on the good and bad old days of editing.

Tsunami appeal
"TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE ROTARY CLUB OF AMHERST.
To date the following amounts have been received:
Rotary Club Charitable Trust account £1,000.00
Sainsbury's collection £1,216.33
Donations from members to date £1,195.00
Total £3,411.33
Well done Amherst!
regards
Eric Matkins, Treasurer."

Stop Press: since writing, the total has nudged £6.000.

GORDON’S reflections

2004 ended with our Christmas Party. Derek put on a good night for us and our partners with drinks, the meal and entertainment. St Julians were well organised and we are grateful to them for providing the wine; they also gave us a cheque for £100 which will go towards the funding of our Centenary Project.

Further afield 2004 ended with a demonstration of Mother Nature’s awesome powers and tsunami has now been indelibly written in our vocabulary. The Club’s response has been given a focus through Simon’s links with Paul and the Rotary Club of Columbo West, Sri Lanka.

The latest news from Paul is that they are looking to ‘adopt a village’ and seek to use funds to enable people to resume their business activities. This was a basic principle of Vocational Service, as in the recession in America in the 1930’s, and is a concept which has lost its significance in Rotary’s activities.

Graham is in contact with District to obtain a matching, or other, grant; for which we are informed there should be a good case.

Approaching the Centenary of Rotary on 23 February, we are receiving invitations to functions. President of RIBI, Gordon McInally will be in the District in February. He will visit Tonbridge for lunch on 10 February, Rochester for lunch on Friday, 11 February, and Dover that evening. There will be a District service in Canterbury Cathedral on Saturday, 25 February. I have the details if anyone wishes to attend any of these events.

Our Centenary Project has been constructed and only awaits the installation of the security grill. We will be arranging opportunities to visit the Hollybush Centre to see the Kiosk . Arrangements for our Centenary Dinner on Saturday, 19 February will include the presentation of the Plaque commemorating our donation.

Points from Council 5 January

Another full house learnt or decided that

Simon Welham would be co-opted to Council as First Vice President for 2005-6, with immediate effect
Roubaix Est RC will be with us for lunch at St Julians on 2 March, and for the weekend of 2/3 April with their families
Bob Ogley will be our speaker at the 23 February Centenary Day meeting, and prospective new members should be invited to attend
More effort is needed to raise business sponsorship for the Sevenoaks News in Focus wrap to publicise the Rotary Centenary.
Club funds have benefited recently from selling the CAF laptop cases (£50), from members’ donations in place of sending Christmas cards to other members (£210), and from a charity gift from St Julians (£100)

Geoff

Introducing ……

JOHN HARLAND

I was born in Bromley and spent my childhood there, moving to Orpington in my teens. I started school at the local primary, moving to St. Dunstans in Catford when I was nine. I stayed there until 1958 when I followed my father into the merchant navy as a Deck Apprentice with Shell Tankers. This gave me the opportunity to see most parts of the world, albeit often solely from the end of an oil jetty. My apprenticeship lasted four years and led to me qualifying as a Third Mate on foreign-going ships.

During my time at sea I had the good fortune to call in at the company’s agents in Liverpool. I can’t remember the reason for my visit but I can remember a very pretty typist – now my wife, Valerie. We celebrated our Ruby Wedding this year and have two sons, Stephen and Ian.

One of the problems of the seafaring life is the long periods away from home, at that time anything up to 12 months, so I decided the time had come for a change of career and join a Bank.
I started work at Barclays in Locks Bottom, subsequently moving to Martins Bank after a few months. A few years later Barclays decided they needed me so badly they bought Martins (that’s my theory anyway) so I was back in the fold.

I worked for Barclays for nearly thirty years ending up as Senior Corporate Manager in Sevenoaks. Then about 12 years ago I was offered early retirement.

Since retiring I have had a number of part time jobs and treasurerships which have kept me occupied, although I have now reduced this down to one day a week as it was interfering with my leisure time. I play golf, bridge and indoor bowls and enjoy caravanning.

I have been a member of Rotary since 1988 and have held most positions at club level. I am also at present, Chairman of the District ICFR fellowship.

To mark newsletter number 300, some previous editors were invited to offer their thoughts.
First out of the blocks is Barry Edwards, Editor Number One

How much easier life would have been if there had been affordable word processors in July 1978, when I was asked to edit the first newsletters by Founder President Harvey Vallis.

At that time I had an old portable typewriter and had to produce the sides of A4 which were passed to Harvey for photocopying at Vallis and Struthers, close to where I worked in Leslie Warren.

The first edition was produced before Charter Night in the September and I was hard put to think of any content, since there was not a lot of club activity. Conning Harvey into writing a Presidential piece was a good start, and I’ve used that gambit ever since. The list of meetings for the month, along with a list of members of the Club Service Committee, filled the two sides which comprised the first edition.

By the second edition I had conned founder Vice President Ken Veryard into producing a piece on a wedding in Normandy which he had attended. What with that and the list of gifts to be presented to the Club at the Charter Night, along with a programme for that evening, I managed to double the size for the second edition!

In the early days of the Interim Club of Amherst (it was so nearly named the RC of Codsheath, after the mediaeval administrative unit, the Hundred of Codsheath which covered the district), I used to return after the Wednesday evening to be asked what we had done that night. The usual answer was that we had thought about who else we could invite to join. As far as Cynth could tell, that was all Rotary did.

Once we were Chartered, we started to develop projects, and the Club took off.

My final paragraph at the end of the second newsletter was that there were no prizes for spotting any typing errors, intentional or otherwise, and inviting anyone to submit an item to be rendered unintelligible by my typing. Not much has changed since then, except for the advent of word processors and their spell checkers These are not infallible as I found when I wrote a letter to a doctor about a Mrs Higham, which the spell checker suggested should have been a Mrs Hugeness. Similarly, when I wrote an article about RI President Rajendra Sabu it was suggested that I meant Rajendra Sambo, which was politically incorrect even in those days, and the word processor was American. The same spell checker rendered the American company Bausch & Lomb as Bitch and Lamb.

I’ve not seen a copy of the Amherst Newsletter for some time, but I’m sure it runs to more that four sides of A4 - and doubtless with photos too!

The Rotary Club of Senlac, which I joined on leaving Amherst, produces a booklet style bulletin on a monthly basis, complete with clip art, sometimes in colour, and photos, always in black and white. All of this is a far cry from 1978, when my Sinclair Oxford calculator could add, subtract, divide and multiply and cost £13.95. You could buy a hand held computer for the equivalent these days
(well, almost!)
That’s enough of the nostalgia, I wish the Officers and members of the club continued success and give my condolences to the poor old newsletter editor.

Thanks, Barry. The cheque’s in the post.

And talking of spell checkers….

SPELLING CHEQUERS

Reprinted from ‘Catford Rotary’, the Magazine of the Catford Rotary Club.

To those not familiar with Personal Computers, let me have a word in your ear. The following is clever, very clever, but probably unintelligible to those without a pea sea.

A spell checker is a smart cookie installed in my computer with a dedication to ensure that I only use British English words. If I transgress (i,e. mis-spell) it will immediately tell me. In the last sentence it has already told me that the word 'mis' doesn't exist and has provided me with a list of five words which I might care to use instead, including 'miss', 'mist', 'mass', 'mess' and 'mix'. I've told it to get lost. Now read on

“Eye have a spelling chequer,
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marques fore my revue
Miss steaks eye kin not see.

Eye strike a quay and type a word,
And weight four it too say
Weather I am wrong or write:
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee four two long.
Eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it,
I am shore your pleased to no.
It's letter perfect all the weigh.”

via Eric

Ron Pike’s memories of his time as Editor are similarly clouded by the technology.

The newsletter was much less slick than it is now, just three or four A4 pages stapled together. What I remember most is the photocopying at the Riverhead Branch (now no more) of Lloyds Bank. The copier was in the back office and noting my unfamiliarity with anything vaguely electronic, Ken’s very competent secretary Pam took me under her ample wing. Whilst I enjoyed a soothing cup of Lloyds Bank excellent tea Pam produced the requisite number of newsletter copies smoothly and efficiently.

I don’t remember how long we used Lloyds and I don’t recall ever thanking Ken (which I do now) for the unfailing helpfulness of his staff - and the innumerable cups of tea.

When Ken went to West Wickham, Graeme Gibson volunteered his copier. This was a much grander affair since it was used for plans and lengthy contract documents. The copier was in one of the drawing offices and I was sometimes acutely aware that the volume of copying I was doing was holding up much more important work. Occasionally I would interrupt the news letter so that urgently needed plans could be processed. Plans are a different size from newsletter pages so when I resumed I had the problem of getting back to A4 size. I was always acutely aware that I might foul up the machine and hold up work of importance. If Graeme and his associates had similar misgivings they never showed it.
I’m not sure I ever thanked FDKC, so if not, belatedly many thanks Graeme

USED POSTAGE STAMPS

With one hand I gave Don quite a large envelope of stamps collected in the Adams household and with the other I simultaneously accepted a paper reading:
“Please let me have your used postage stamps. I am grateful to members who have given them to me during the past three years.

They have been passed to charities such as those supporting Lifeboats and Leukemia and Kidney disease research, and the newest I have found which is accepting them – Leprosy.

I will pass on whatever you care to give to me.

Thanks in advance

Don”

Geoff has been Editor for quite a few years and writes…

I somehow kept the system going for the six years 1981-7, handed it over to Graeme when I became Club Secretary, then tried again 1993-5 before Ken Veryard took it on when I became President.

The second walkout had the additional advantage of letting someone with a mastery of the new technology into the job, and under Ken’s leadership our favourite publication moved into desktop publishing, and although it was still “broadsheet” it began to develop a style which led to today’s “compact/tabloid” (depending on your mood.)

By contrast, my first 1981 edition, no. 23, which welcomed President Brian Snowden into office, contained six A4 pages, lovingly typed on to a stencil and then reproduced single-sided.

Various club members and voluntary groups typed for us, and Christmas edition covers often carried the work of our in-house artists. Attempts to publish photographs rarely succeeded.

We chronicled the life of the club of course and, desperate for copy sometimes, revisited archival or “memory-lane” material from yesteryear, and even published extracts from the Rotary constitution. We nurtured the latent talents of those members anxious to write stories and set puzzles, and had an annual index to make it easier to check back on cherished articles. “All-colour” editions appeared occasionally, either printed on coloured paper to upstage the FT or using coloured type.

In those far-off days, Ladies’ Night at the Wildernesse GC cost £11 each. When I handed over the job at the end of Ron Adams’ year in office at edition no.186 it probably cost rather more, but you can’t (justifiably) blame the editor for everything.

So, ninety-six months in charge and ninety-six editions, including nos. 50 in December 1983 and 100 in February 1988. 150 came in December 1992, 200 was celebrated in August 1996, 250 in October 2000 and now 300 - not bad for a club only three hundred and sixteen months old.

Geoff

A LAST GLANCE AT 2004
We have reported that Amherst Inner Wheel made and presented us with two clown suits to wear at our tin-rattling fundraisers. Very good they are and very grateful we are - but what that says about Inner Wheel's opinion of their spouses we are not so sure.
At our Children In Need collection days the effect was immediate - we clocked up our best ever collection - £2864 -and at least one mother paid us to keep away from her little darlings in case we frightened them.

Bill Brickell and Jan Bromley spotted that once again Boots were giving vouchers for the splendid little Looney Tunes soft toys in the runup to Christmas. Thanks to Club members, their families, Sheila Cotton and Janet Oatley, we collected enough vouchers at ten vouchers per toy for 20 Looney Tunes which have gone to Roz Ward's children's project in Rumania. We heard that Jacqui and Harold were not above cornering unsuspecting members of the public in queues at the pay desk and persuading them to give up their vouchers in a good cause.