Category: Public Service

Considering the growth and reach of Josie’s Dragonfly Trust over the succeeding years since it was founded, in the year she died (2007), up until the present (this blog was created during 2022/2023), it was a privilege to have been able to help out in the earlier days, as this photograph of the big cheque from the Allendale Lions Club shows.

I’ve noticed that many of these photos of funding distribution seemed to have been placed in front of the Allendale Co-operative Society shop. Isn’t that so apposite, though, to reflect the cooperation among the Allen Valleys community in shared pursuit of a common goal.

Of the photograph, you just have to love the smiles, don’t you! Sometimes the Allendale Lions have been criticised for excessive self-congratulation, but on occasions when a big cheque was handed over, it felt like honest pride in our contribution.

Inevitably, as this archive of our social history is laid down online, in bits and pieces of blog entries, photographs and reminiscences, there’s a feeling of tristesse, of nostalgia for those times, which were so very good, so very innocent and earnest. That, at least, was how it felt, how it feels today, looking back.

One of the remits for this social archive, however, is the investigation of how organisations develop, how they mature and grow, and also how attrition affects us all, how such groups wane as well.

By the autumn of 2012, the club was embarking on its tenth year of existence, if you count its formative year from early meetings in September, 2003. The subsequent decade would test the capacity of the ageing members that remained.

We tend, I reckon, as a club to forget how much earnest effort and indeed funds, we’ve generated to put to good use. Even though we are also in the business of self-promotion and we have always tried to announce our philanthropic efforts with pride.

But some five years after the Calor Village of the Year invigilators visited Allendale, and exclaimed over our amazing colour schemes (both Deneholme and Allendale Village Hall had benefited from the interior design expertise of Maggie Shearer), the hall was looking shabby. I’d forgotten myself how it was that the Lions Club stepped up once again to fund the decoration and enhance the presentation of the hall. But minutes tend not to lie, and those of the Business Meeting in April, 2012, indicate how important the Lions’ contribution actually was:

Hot, it seemed, on the heels of funding another outside bin, I was asking the Lions to fund the entire re-decoration inside the hall. And of course, in times of need, and because everyone recognised the incredible resource the hall was, and how it needed to be presentable to be self-sustaining, the club agreed to the proposal.

Thank you, Lions Club of Allendale, for your very special support of this community facility!

Those photographs that Peter Aldcroft mentioned in the first Lions business meeting of 2010? The ones that featured our annual Carols in the Square? It’s likely that this photograph presented in the 2010 Tynedale Christmas Guide, a handy pull-out in the weekly Hexham Courant, was one of those. I do seem to recall that the Courant managed to be a year late on one such image, and it was probably this one.

If nothing else, this page from ‘the present’ of ‘the past’ proves that the events did take place, though it’s not crystal clear that this photo really is of the 2009 event. I’m intrigued too, to clock the carol sheets, which as might be self-evident from the squinting going on, were printed in quite the smallest font possible. I couldn’t wait to create an easier-to-read A4 on card, to facilitate better scanning! But that was to come at a later Carol session, further ahead in the future.

I wonder if I can find a pdf of that file for that later entry, and I wonder too when the bigger font came into play. But at any rate, we can be assured that the traditional Carols in the Square would have been among the very last events presented by the Allendale Lions Club in 2010.

So 2011 is just around the corner, as the ‘noughties’ finish and . . . and, what decade is this one coming on? Some publications will, by the time 2021 comes, call it the ‘Lost Decade’ but as we look ahead, it feels like anything but ‘lost.’

We have exciting times ahead, surely! We as a club will be only some seven years old, or eight during 2011, if you count the organising meetings in the autumn of 2003. But what is also true is that we are, each of us, getting older.

These photographs, carefully collated in Nigel Baynes’ exhaustive archive from these years, seem like a wonderful reminder of events held over a decade ago. Many of the folks in these pictures are no longer with us, but I hope this diary entry will be an important way to remember them, and the philanthropic efforts of the Allendale Lions Club.

Nearing the end of this odyssey through 2010, and noting the date of the Mystery Tour, I realise that I shall have to shuffle entries again in the blog so that events are presented in proper chronological order.

Of course, the autumnal Charity Auction, which would have elicited the funds by which the Allendale Lions could present a cheque to the Great North Air Ambulance Service, would have happened in late September. In the grand scheme of things, after my re-shuffle, that will be the next entry after this delightful series of images of another crucial philanthropic endeavour, the Mystery Tour.

It’s hard to look at these photographs, and to realise that so many beloved folks have departed from our company.

The Mystery Tour could not have been held without the benevolence and good grace of Baynes Travel staff, who also seem to have had a good time too. Of course, many staff members were also Lions Club members, to be fair.

I wonder if anyone can pinpoint where this Mystery Tour actually went? I can insert that designation, conveniently, or it could be noted in a comment to the blog entry.