The Midlands National AGM

‘It’s all change at the Top’

 After receiving the resignation of the long standing President Roy Jones due to health reasons the MNFC has been forced like the present Theresa May conservative Government to have a ‘reshuffle’.

I say reshuffle because by and large the personnel remains the same with Tony Whitehurst moving up from Chairman to take the Presidency and Geoff Spooner another long servant term taking the Senior Vice President role. The Chairman’s position is now to be filled by Peter Humphries with Gary Daykin taking on the position of Vice Chairman.

 The other positions remained as last year with the exception of the late Don Mackay and Eric Millner who will both be sadly missed with Alistair Ewart being added to the existing list of Vice Presidents.  The committee was bolstered by the election of four new members in the form of J. Wooff  A Seymour, G Jakings and S McCurry who replace Brian Smith and Jos Mee who both have decided to step down. At this point we welcome these new Committee people but I would urge more Western sided volunteers to step up to the mark to offer a more balanced number of delegates to represent the welfare of their sections because at the present time we have no Committee men/women from the NNW, West, NC and the ENE sections. It would be wonderful to see this matter redressed in the near future. So if you reside from any of these areas please consider if you can offer something to both your section and the Club over all because ‘YOUR SECTION NEEDS YOU!’

  The decision was made in recognition of the fine long term service of Roy Jones the outgoing President that the Committee have made him both a Life Vice President and Co-Patron of the Club alongside the present Patron Michael Massarella.

 Right now on to the 2018 AGM Propositions    

8. Failed   9. Failed    10. Carried   11. Failed   12.Failed   13. Failed   14. Carried.

The full voting figures will be on view at the Blackpool show.

  I must admit that I couldn’t help but have a little smile when I heard that the members wanted the leaderboard onto the website more promptly  in 2018 but then decided to vote for the verification time back to 60 minutes. Surely these two proposals fly in the face of each other!

2018 Race Programme

 Old Birds  Carentan, Fougeres, Ancenis, Bordeaux & Vire.  Commencing on the 19th May

 Young Birds Chale 25th August and Falaise 8th September. The Treble Chance race is to be flown in conjunction with the Falaise race.

Marking station change

     The marking station at Hucknall is no longer available for 2018 but talks are taking place to move to the ‘Tally Ho’ in Carlton. This will be confirmed ASAP.

2018 Racing

   Planned improvements for the Race results and Cheque Payments in 2018 are being put in place for the coming season and the passing of Proposal  2 to get the clock envelopes to the Race Secretary within 72 hours after the closure of a race should help the situation greatly because we can’t finalise a race when there are still envelopes AWOL. 

   I think that is about it for now, hopefully we will meet up with many of you at Blackpool next week where we will have the 2018 rings and Gold Rings available and the Loft Managers will be there to have a chat with interested parties and hand out entry forms and take your bookings. The places are selling very well but at the moment we still have places available.

Mike Lakin