Chairman’s Note
Welcome to the Spring 2025 edition of our magazine.
We are coming round to our next AGM and I need to be honest with all our members in that we are at a seminal moment for the Society. At the last AGM I made an impassioned plea for support for the Executive team. As a Society we organised the Beating of the Sea Bounds in the summer however we had little or no support to help organise or run the event and have had little or no support to run the Society throughout the year.
This was not the first time that support was requested and so we are at the point that the Society cannot progress as it is. Andrew Hawkes, our President, has had a desire to step back/down for a while and indeed I propose to step back at the end of 2025 after being Chairman for 8 years.
We have been an active Society, talks, a quarterly newsletter as well as being a spokesperson for the heritage and culture of the town. We have organised the 75th anniversary commemorations of VE/VJ day when we closed the Quay and had original historic Dunkirk boats and old military equipment as well as 40’s music, stalls and importantly Poole’s history and details of the town’s contributions during the war. We have also resurrected the Beating of the Bounds during this summer. In total about 17,000 people attended these 2 events and we raised £34,000 to do so. However these events and projects such as the Shore Road heritage lights were organised by a tiny team and this is not sustainable.
I passionately believe that Poole needs a civic heritage organisation and, as we have publicised within this magazine and at meetings, we have been working closely with Poole Maritime Trust (PMT). The proposal is therefore, if the Society cannot stand on its own, it formally joins with the PMT providing a land based element to their marine based perspective of Poole.
We have achieved 100 years of existence so perhaps it is time to rest, reset and join like minded people in a wider organisation. I welcome your thoughts directly or at the AGM but for sure there needs to be change.
Mike Pearce
Chairman
[email protected]
February 2025