Club Archive

Current President of Rotary St Andrews, Frank Quinault, spoke about his research into the club archive (lodged with the University's Special Collections) using the meeting minutes and the scrap books from 1977-2021 and carefully compiled in recent years by Ian Johnston.  The minutes begin in 1927 when the club was founded, and are more or less continuous until a ten-year anomalous gap from 1937-47 (of course this period includes the war years but by no means explains the full ten year period). The first minute agreed to form a club with the first lunch to be held on 29 November when the speaker was TW Davie from Dundee Rotary Club. Early speakers included Professor D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson and the then Edinburgh Fire Master ( a talk considered important enough that it appeared in the Scotsman). Accounts are included of ‘The Curse of St Andrews’ describing how children were too tired to work at school because they were errand boys for shopkeepers. Frank explained how the strict membership rules set up by Paul Harris on Classification, Residency and Attendance have changed over the years, becoming more flexible, and how the number of committees has grown from the original list of Club, Vocational, Community and International, to include many more egSport, Youth, Rotaract, Ways and Means. The club admitted its first woman member, Sylvia Donaldson, in 2001. There are some local activities that go back a long way: the ‘Christmas Tree of Goodwill’ each year in the garden of Holy Trinity; sponsored benches in the town; the Christmas lunch when overseas students are invited; the International Golf Week. Disaster fund relief is more recent, though a St Andrews Charity Box was established in 1948. The club has celebrated silver, gold and 75th anniversaries. Frank urged the club to be thinking about its centenary in 2027 and stressed the need for recruiting younger members. James Murray thanked the speaker for a fascinating talk.