2015
August - Gillingham and Shaftesbury Show
Eight members of the club entered the show and everyone got at least one prize. The best news of all was that all four pieces of silverware were won by members of the club. The Walker Perpetual Challenge Cup for the most points gained was won by Theresa Kendall. The R. E. Pike Perpetual Challenge Trophy for the most points in the novice classes was won by one of our newest younger members, Catherine Doble. The Joyce Challenge Shield for the best pedestal exhibit was won by Jacky Goodwin and the Kathleen Drake memorial Perpetual Challenge Salver for the best in show was won by Krys Gigiel.
May - '65'
(See Gallery for more pictures)
Shaftesbury Flower Arranging Group has just celebrated its 65th anniversary! It’s a bit daunting to realise that your club is the oldest in the country. Presumably we are going to have to be pioneers in the way we celebrate for as long as we are in existence. Back last autumn our chairman, Penny Marsh, had already said that she would like to hold an event in 2015 which would not only showcase our floral talents but also act as an advertisement for our club in an effort to recruit more, preferably younger, members. We have nothing against older members, we love all ours dearly, but we do need some younger ones to help shoulder the burden of running the club and making sure it is there to celebrate when we reach 70, 75 and beyond.
Venues in the centre of Shaftesbury are few and far between. Our monthly meetings are held in the Town Hall and although we used it in 2000 for our Millennium Gold exhibition it’s not really suitable for the type of exhibition we wanted and anyway we wanted a different challenge. Fortunately The Grosvenor Arms, a recently refurbished hotel right in the centre of the town, was happy to let us use its function room and also to put some arrangements in the public areas. This was not confirmed until February and left us just over 3 months to organise everything as the dates we had settled on were 20 and 21 May. Five years ago we had allowed ourselves 8 months to organise our Diamond celebrations! But, undeterred, we organised a small committee under the chairmanship of Penny and appointed Jacky Goodwin as our designer.
We asked all our members if they wanted to be involved and in the event about 28 members added their names to the list and magically that seemed to fit in with the number of positions available for designs. For most designs Jacky’s brief was quite vague allowing us the freedom to ‘do our own thing’ although this did not apply to the public areas of the hotel. Here we had to submit photos of the sort of thing we had in mind which were to be run past the hotels owners. We decided to keep the majority of these exhibits green and white. They just wanted to check that what we were planning was appropriate for their establishment whereas in The Assembly Room we more or less had carte blanche. Most of the designers set about planning their exhibits but there were those, including the writer of this article, who although they knew roughly what they were aiming for more of less winged it to the end!
Set up day arrived and as usual there were flowers, piles of foliage and ‘stuff’ everywhere as is usual at these events. There were also one or two members of the committee thinking privately ‘have we bitten off more than we can chew in such a short space of time?’ But as usual come 5 o’clock’ish order had been created out of the chaos and everything looked beautiful. That’s not to say that we didn’t have a few problems along the way. Two of our members managed to fall while carrying boxes and buckets and one of those ended up with her leg in plaster! Also, our original plan had been to have two oasis ball trees outside the hotel and when the 4 girls went home having completed their work that was what we had got. It was however a very windy day and the hotel entrance was like a wind tunnel. One of the trees fell over and was so damaged that Jacky decided to put the rescued top part at the base of the other tree. This sounded like a good idea but while she was doing this the other tree fell on her head and was also damaged. We ended up with what remained of the two trees inside the lobby and actually they looked very pretty the only problem which we hope too many visitors didn’t notice was that the programme was incorrect!
The committee had decided that there should be party on the evening of the 20 May – a glass of wine, nibbles and of course a cake – to which we could invite Area and local dignitaries, sponsors and old friends of the club as well as members and their families, to help us celebrate. It was also an excuse to have the club archives on show and there were lots of comments like ‘didn’t we look young’ or ‘is that really ….’ This turned out to be a lovely evening with speeches from our Area Chairman, Rees McKay, our special friend (isn’t he everyone’s) Michael Bowyer and our own President Joy Murphy.
We had decided not to celebrate National Flower Arranging Day on the first Friday in May this year but to use the lonely bouquet idea to try and attract visitors to our show so on both the Wednesday and Thursday mornings we distributed small bouquets around the town. The attached note invited the finders to come to the Grosvenor Hotel and I personally was delighted to welcome one couple who were just ‘passing through’ Shaftesbury on their way home from a holiday in France.
As a club we were delighted with the results of the show although whether we have achieved our ultimate goal of attracting new, dare I say younger, members to our club only time will tell. As our club funds were reasonably healthy the main committee had allocated a maximum budget for the event and we were delighted that because of some generous local sponsorship the whole event came in well under budget. I think we can say a job well done. Let’s hope that we will be celebrating 70 glorious years in 2020 – now that is a scary thought!