WILTS & BERKS CANAL TRUST

Hi Boy's and Girl's its been so busy here in Swindon that I almost missed the deadline for this quarter.

First lets talk about the shop near the Town Hall in Swindon. The response to our opening it has been wonderful and to those that work in it regularly very rewarding. A big thank you to the 10 members that have helped out regularly but we still need new volunteers and Saturday's seems to be the hardest to recruit help for which I thought would be the easiest, big learning curve this shop business.Doug Small and John Minns turned up on day one with a completely new set of pictures for us to exhibit which is a set of A1 posters each one showing a different branch, you can just see them on the inside cover of the last Dragonfly 107.
John has now made a second set and we have put them onto a set of display boards which any branch can come and collect if they have a display to go to. (contact Ann at the office if you need these and she will book them out) then phone me to arrange collection and return dates.
Keith Walker's son has built us a huge display stand for these posters in the shop out of solid wood and piano hinges so that it will all come to pieces when we do leave the shop.The public response is overwhelmingly pro canal with about 90% of people that come into the shop congratulating us on what we have accomplished so far and over 20 new members have signed up in the shop. Keep this up and we could win the pickaxe for the first time at the next A.G.M.

Also the sales of our D.V.D a journey through time in Swindon has taken off like a rocket in the shop and Richard has now made 370 copies, (we said we would make 20 at the start a year ago)

Next item to talk about is our open meeting that we have at the start of each year. This is a chance for many of our members to come along and meet us without all the anorakic approach that many see our formal meeting to be. Yet again this year it was bigger and better than ever before mainly due to the high volume of work put in by Jan Flannagan. Over 150 members turned up to participate in a fun filled night of games and laughter. We had our Human Fruit Machine working and as no one had won anything in the first half I announced that the One Armed Bandit jackpot would be doubled in size and the prize would now be £10, hardly had the words left my mouth when out came TIC TAC TOE to everyone's amusement.We also had two games of Irish Bingo which always goes down well and also a raffle with 15 prizes most of which had been donated by members.

Along with speeches from Canal Trust Officers, my silly jokes, and a film show showing a canal being built using gunpowder it was a fun packed evening.
The ladies doing the food as usual missed almost everything in order to make sure we all had plenty to eat and drink So a big thank you to them and all the others that helped on the night 19 in total everyone doing exactly what they said they would and not one hiccup all night.

Keith and I gave a talk and showed the D.V.D to the Highworth History Society on the 25 of February which went down a storm with them so more Brownie Points for us there.

Our attempts to get the canal put back through the town centre are causing quite a stir as you can imagine and we are taking a lot of incoming fire from all sides but this is to be expected with such a huge project costing over £50 million, the up side is I do not think there is a person in Swindon that has not heard about the Wilts & Berks Canal now and does not have an opinion on the subject. Nowadays the local paper rings me instead of me ringing them and so do the local radio stations.

Well better leave it there otherwise Richard will be editing my report in the same way that the press do to me.

Roy Cartwright