Twilight, speaker Margaret Thomas

The “twilight” meeting at the Red Lion Hotel on Tuesday featured an inspiring talk from Margaret Thomas, hospice fundraiser at the Sue Ryder Nettlebed Hospice, who has been in the post for two years. Her relationship with the hospice however goes back 17 years when a family member was cared for there.

She gave a brief resumé of the life of Lady Ryder, born in Leeds in 1924, volunteered at the age of 15 as a nursing auxiliary, and was assigned to the Special Operations Executive later in the war, mainly in Poland. By the time she was 19, she had been married and widowed, and a capacity for compassion had been instilled in her.  She later married Group Captain Leonard Cheshire in 1959.

Mrs Thomas explained that the organisation had seven hospices nationwide, as well as several neurological centres, in addition to community nurses, mentioning also the day therapy sessions, from which her brother David had benefitted.

She also detailed the work of the family support units, the volunteer befrienders and the respite care opportunities for hard-pressed family members. She herself was about to enrol on the volunteer befriender training course.

In addition to the 100 patients cared for in the community, there was accommodation for 12 in-patients at Nettlebed, she said, of which 67 per cent go home. She emphasised that a hospice is “not about dying, it’s about living.”

The organisation, which had received an outstanding Care Quality Commission assessment in the last two weeks, costs £8,000 per day to run. She detailed the various fund-raising events which it undertook, as well as raising the awareness of community organisations like Rotary.

Stressing that 79p in every £1 given goes to the patient, she concluded by saying that it was the happiest place she had ever worked. She was thanked for her talk by John Grout.

On Friday afternoon, 11 club members and four guests visited the BMW Mini plant at Cowley for a guided tour. They were impressed by the way that robots now carried out most of the building of the cars, with the final fitting on the assembly line being carried out by young humans.

They then repaired to the Chequers at Burcot, where, before an excellent two-course meal, Peter Thomson, the club’s president-elect, had organised a “Mini-themed entertainment.” This consisted firstly of a re-run of the iconic Mini car chase in the 1969 film, “The Italian Job,” followed by a talk by Peter’s ex-colleague, David Markby, himself a former member of Maidenhead Rotary Club.

David had recently returned from The Italian Job touring event charity run, when he and his friend Bob Piggin drove his 30-year-old Jaguar XJS (although most of the entrants drove Minis) through Europe to Imola.  A series of navigational events round the Italian countryside and a visit to Turin concluded in a lap of honour round the Imola racing circuit.  David and Bob personally raised £3,545 for Variety, the charity which supports sick, disabled and disadvantaged children.

President Maria Bunina thanked David for his contribution and Peter for organising the whole afternoon. Most participants arrived home by 7.30 p.m.

·      Vice-president Barry Prior reported that an acknowledgement of the club’s donation of £740 had been received from the Shelter Box charity.