Category: Club Meetings

Tonights speaker Wolverhampton business man Henry Carver has made quite an impact in the City over the last year.

Frustrated by the failure of the Summer Row development Mr Carver called  on local businesses to join together to fight back against what he saw as obstructive Council policies and red tape which he believed to be blighting the City.

Over 300 people attended the first meeting with Mr Carver called in February leading to the formation of the Wolverhampton Business Group which aims to develop pro-business, pro-job policies and to encourage and support the City Council to enact those policies in order to create a more vibrant local economy in which there are more and better paid jobs.

Following lobbying by 
Wolverhampton Business Group and other interested parties they believe that there has been a “sea change” in the Planning Department following recognition by the Council of the urgent need to send out a “pro-business, pre-development message” but Mr Carver urged the business community in Wolverhampton to remain vigilant and to maintain consistent pressure on the Council to keep up the good work.

We were joined this evening by Trevor James who gave a talk on the English origins of the Olympic Games.

Trevor is the Honorary Secretary of The Historical Association a charity which supports the study and enjoyment of history.

He explained to the Club how the history of sporting competition in this country stretched back to at least 1614 with the Cotswold Games and the sporting competitions which followed it helping to generate huge public interest.

By the 1850s these had developed into recognisable athletic meetings and Trevor argues that it was the success of events such as this which formed the template for the modern day Olympic Games.

Its always great to welcome a new member to our Club and this evening President John had the pleasure of inducting Roger Lewis into the Rotary family.

Roger, a legal executive specialising in debt recovery matters, lives in Bobbington with his wife and three children. The son of former professional footballer with Birmingham City Roger is a keen sportsman and we are looking forward to him teaming up with a couple of the Club’s more recent recruits to mount a serious challenge in the District Golf competition.

All Rotary members are asked to give a life talk after joining our Club – it’s an opportunity for them to give fellow members an insight into their past and to learn a little bit more about them. This evenings talk was given by John Whitten and with the words ‘I learnt a lot about life in the slaughter house’ we knew that we were in for an interesting evening.

A master butcher trading from premises on Tettenhall Upper Green John explained to the Club what had been involved in his training and the ups and downs of his life as a butcher. With some truly horrifying stories of initiation ceremonies which have been meted out to him over the years its surprising that John remains so level headed.

John’s first contact with Tettenhall Rotary Club followed the theft from his shop of an Air Ambulance collection tin. When the Club heard about the loss we stepped in to make good the money that had been stolen and in the process gained John as our youngest member.

Since the formation of the first Rotary Club back in 1905 the Rotary movement has shown how local people can join together to pool their resources and talents to help serve communities in need and to achieve some truly remarkable results.

Roy Stallard, a retired local nurse with a special interest in the history of healthcare, talked with the Club this evening about how the local people of Wolverhampton have worked together in the same way over the course of two hundred years to improve local healthcare and in the process to develop one of the top two none teaching hospitals in the country.

In the days before the formation of the National Health Service provision of local health provision lay mainly in the hands of local people themselves through voluntary contributions. Roy traced this proud history from the opening of the original Queen Street Dispensary in 1821 through to the glory days of the much missed Royal Hospital. You can learn more about the history of the Wolverhampton hospitals by following this link to a site maintained by Roy and his colleagues.

The history of the development of Wolverhampton’s hospitals is a perfect example of what local people can achieve by working together and is one which we and the other Rotary Clubs of Wolverhampton are following today in our continuing support for Compton Hospice. You can help us to continue this tradition by supporting our fund raising events in November with the Big Band Concert at the Perton Community Hall on the 11th and the Auction of Promises at Patshull Park on the 20th.