Twilight, speaker District Governor Joy Arnott

DISTRICT GOVERNOR VISITS HENLEY CLUB

Shiplake resident Joy Arnott has a significant position in the Rotary movement. A past president (twice) of the Henley Bridge Rotary Club, she is this year’s District Governor of District 1090, which covers 59 clubs in Berkshire, Oxfordshire, most of Buckinghamshire and parts of the old Middlesex.

One of her many duties is to visit all of the clubs in her district and on Tuesday evening, she made the short journey to the Henley-on-Thames club’s twilight meeting at the Red Lion Hotel. The club had been one of the sponsoring clubs at the formation of the Henley Bridge club back in 1982.

A three-line whip had produced an excellent attendance from the home club members, ranging from the oldest to the youngest. They were treated to a comprehensive review of the Rotary movement from international, national and local perspectives. Rotary has 1.2 million members in about 120 countries with about 35,000 individual clubs.

This year is the centenary of the Rotary Foundation, the movement’s charitable arm, and Rotarian Arnott thanked the Henley club for their continued support of this and for the “End Polio” campaign which had reduced the incidence of polio cases to only Pakistan and Afghanistan, although a recent outbreak had re-occurred in Nigeria.

Congratulating the club on supporting a lot of local charities and acknowledging its assistance with the Henley Half Marathon, she also thanked members for assisting with her district carol service at St. Mary’s Church before Christmas.

She emphasised the great importance of RYLA (Rotary Young Leadership Award), having visited one of their courses during her year and noted that a number of previous candidates had been sponsored by the Henley club. The two charities for her year as governor are the Alzheimer’s Society and Camp Mohawk at Wargrave.

Concluding by stressing that Rotary had continually to re-invent itself , she praised the club for doing its bit in endeavouring to recruit younger members. She was thanked for her talk by club president Lionel Scott.

Later, president-elect Maria Bunina collected names for the forthcoming Founder’s Night dinner at the Red Lion Hotel on February 21, at which members of both clubs, Henley Bridge and Henley-on-Thames, annually hold a joint meeting to celebrate the movement’s founder, Paul Harris, who started it all in Chicago in 1905.