GENERAL SECRETARY’S REPORT

2017 has seen lots of activity in the Guild and in the Central Council in particular to do with the WW1 projects and the Ringing Remembers campaign. This is still ongoing and is certainly gaining momentum with some sterling work being carried out by our Guild.

At the AGM a change in the Terms of Reference of the Committees was approved; a proposal was accepted to reduce the number of printed copies of the Guild Handbook by asking members in advance if they wanted a copy and a proposal was accepted to setup a Guild Ringing Schools committee.

Graham Cane, David Cooper, Roy LeMarechal, Rosemary Rogers and Valerie Williams were presented Life Membership certificates. Congratulations to them all.

In September a District Representatives’ Forum was held where the key topics of conversation were Child Protection and the date of the next AGM. There were some lively discussions and it was good to see some new faces attending. Can I encourage everyone to take part in this next year - it is another chance for you to have a say.

There have been many communications going out to our members. One of the roles of the Secretary is to receive such communications and cascade them to the district secretaries who cascade to tower captains who then cascade to members. This method involves many people and there can be quite a lot of delays in the communications being received and passed on. I will continue to do this but can I urge everyone to also make use of our website www.wpbells.org. Information is available on the website very quickly and any headline news is clearly shown on the home page. It also holds a vast amount of other Guild information.

In addition we can all join the Guild email which is win-port. Guild members can subscribe by sending a blank email to win-port-bellringers-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. It is a useful method of disseminating Guild information - an email sent from a subscriber to the list is automatically forwarded to all members.

It is so important that we all know what is happening in the Guild.

Finally thanks again to all the District Secretaries for assisting me throughout the year.

Heather Frazer