October 1998
At the end of the month there will be a knock on your door and once more you will be asked to support the Poppy Appeal; and the vast majority of you will, thank goodness.
The Poppy Appeal exists to help all ex-Servicemen and women, and their immediate dependents, who sacrificed so much during the two World Wars and - most importantly - in the numerous conflicts since then. For example, we can help the widow and children of a soldier murdered in Northern ireland, or the family of an airman seriously injured in the Gulf. So where does the money you give actually go, and why do we so urgently need more of it? There are some quarter of a million war pensioners and widows. Many are elderly and frail, but were young at the time of their service and this is important: please remember that although many of the people we help may seem older, it is basically young people who serve in the Forces and young people who, unfortunately, get injured during their service.
The Royal British Legion, through your donations to the Poppy Appeal: Run seven residential country homes and three short term convalescent homes. Deal with thousands of war pension cases every year and by exerting constant pressure on the Government we have obtained extra cash for many war widows. Give sheltered employment or training to over 2000 people. We are the largest employer of the disabled in Britain. Support all ex-Service people; the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force.
The work of the Legion is entirely dependent on the thousands of unpaid volunteers who give up their time to collect the funds we so desperately need. This voluntary help is the reason why 92% of all the money you donate is spent directly on welfare work and not on administration.
Remembrance Sunday this year is on 8 November. Please join the Legion at the War Memorial on the Common at l0.55am and afterwards in St Paul’s Church.
Patrick Gardiner
Secretary, RBL, Chipperfield
NEW SPEED RESTRICTION
Hertfordshire County Council intend to implement a 40mph speed restriction on Chipperfield Road between Tower Hill and Bovingdon.
This is in answer to concerns from residents of Bulstrode Cottages about the speed of traffic along this stretch of road. The limit should come into effect this month, subject to the placing of the Traffic Order.
CHIPPERFIELD SCHOOL OF DANCING
Mrs. Gurney has been teaching ballet at Chipperfield in the Baptist Church Hall for six years, and in that period pupils have had the opportunity to do show work plus training towards their ballet examinations. Pupils who took their ballet and tap exams in July all passed with high grades. The school works hard to maintain a high standard. The next school production will be Peter and the Wolf and Coppelia, and the girls are all very keen to start learning the new dances.
Two new teachers, Ella and Kirstie, joined in September to take the girls for tap, modem and jazz. They have been teaching at Creative Dance and Drama, are both very highly trained dancers and now look forward to teaching in Chipperfield. The pupils will study the I.S.T.D. dance exams and there is a new jazz examination available for the older more mature students. Adult tap classes are also available. For further details, contact Mrs. Gurney on 0181 428 9906 or the secretary, Mrs. Jean Banks on 01923 400370.
ART GROUP
The artist George Sear will be demonstrating water colour painting at the Youth Club (opposite the Church on the Common) at 8pm on Wednesday 14 October.
Visitors and prospective new members are all very welcome at our meetings. Contact the secretary. Rita Musk on 01923 263525 for further details if you wish, or just turn up, introduce yourselves and enjoy the evening.
R.S.P.C.A. The house-to-house collection was in June this year and we raised £406.45. Thank you for your generosity and thank you too to all the collectors - your help is greatly appreciated. The flag day in Kings Langley on 27 June raised £81.78, making a grand total of £488.23.
Lucy Williams
Auxiliary Secretary
CHIPPERFIELD TENNIS CLUB
Another successful tennis tournament was enjoyed by everyone. Once again a high standard of tennis was achieved, particularly by the junior members.
Congratulations to the following:
Ladies Doubles
Winners: Doris Williams
Monika Mathieu
Runners up: Pat Bayliss
Sheila Simpson
Men’s Doubles
Winners: Luigi Landolfi
John Baxter
Runners up: Pan Panayi
Chris Blackmore
Under 14s
Winners: Thomas Goldie
Andrew Lock
Runners up: Thomas McGrath
Tommy Gray
We are going to have a busy year fundraising for our new floodlights. The first big event will be a Race Night at the Village Hall on Saturday 3 October. If you are reading this before that date and would like to attend, please telephone Martyn Dicker on 01923 262454 sot hat he can order your fish and chips, which comes included in your £5 ticket price.
HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY
Entries for our Autumn Show were a little down on last year but the judges were impressed by our high standards and we had a good turn out of visitors despite the showery weather. But as one season ends so another begins. The Society’s committee meets later this month to discuss the schedules for next year’s shows. Even if you’re not a committee member, your views would be welcome, so please let us know if you have any ideas on ways of improving our forthcoming shows. (You will find committee members’ phone numbers on the inside back cover of your schedule).
Similarly, although the gardening season is coming to a close, in some ways it is just beginning. The lawns will hopefully benefit from a good spiking and top dressing with sand this month before application of an autumn fertiliser, available from our garden shop. My lawns are small enough to do the job by hand but those of you with larger areas to cover might like to consider borrowing the Society’s lawn spreader, again available from the shop. I shall also be looking out for spring bulbs to plant this month. The Spring Show for 1999 is a little earlier than this year’s, so I shall see if I can spot some early flowering daffodils as my garden always seems to be later than those of my neighbours. Meanwhile, in the vegetable garden I shall be reorganising the raised beds I introduced last year and starting the autumn digging. Hopefully I shall have found somewhere to put the strawberry runners which I potted up last month and I really must do something about the garden shed, which is beginning to look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, before it collapses altogether. Yes, the gardening season may be nearly over, but it seems that the work is only just beginning!
A STING IN THE TAIL
As wasps do such a good job of collecting caterpillars from the vegetable garden, if at all possible we leave their nests undisturbed, but this year one queen seemed determined to build her nest just inside the shed where the door opens. Half a dozen times I drove her out and rubbed off the beginnings of her nest before she eventually got the message and went elsewhere.
A few weeks later, we noticed busy little female worker wasps coming and going under the roof of the bungalow by our son’s bedroom window, so I don’t think she went far. I think it’s quite incredible that a colony of wasps, which may contain over 3000 individuals, starts with just one fertilized queen. The wasps’ nest is a fascinating structure made from chewed wood mixed with saliva to make a kind of papier mache. The queen starts things off, often choosing an old mouse hole in a bank or under a hedge, though a loft or shed is also acceptable, and one or two species prefer trees or dense bushes, then lays eggs which rapidly go through the cycle of larvae and pupae to become adult workers. Then the nest really grows apace, with 3 or more layers of comb being formed in the outer casing. Although the adults feed largely on nectar and ripe fruit, the ever increasing numbers of larvae are mainly fed on flesh, which is where the caterpillars come in. By the end of August the new queens that the colony has produced will have been mated by the new males and will begin to seek somewhere well insulated, like our shed, to hibernate. It’s all downhill now for the rest of the colony as all will soon die. This is the time one is most likely to be stung, as I found out the other day, as the wasps seem rather dozy and bad tempered as the old queen dies and their social order collapses.
A friend phoned a few weeks ago to say he had seen a beautiful wasps’ nest hanging in the hedge on my morning dog run route, but unfortunately by the next day a badger had found it too, and all that was left was half the outer casing and some very cross wasps! Badgers love the young grubs, and we often find ground nests that they have dug out around the garden. It seems a few stings is a price worth paying for a tasty meal!
Wendy Bathurst
NEWS FROM BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
Carol is now living and working in Brisbane, where she spent some time in the 1980s, and has noticed the dramatic growth in urbanisation there. Her work has also changed: Having lived here permanently for a while, I miss the country lifestyle. Lucky for me that this is only a temporary transfer with my job! It looks as if I shall be on the move again in the next couple of months and I’m likely to end up based in Rockhampton (on the Tropic of Capricorn). Rockhampton is the ‘beef capital of Queensland’ so would be a very appropriate place for me to be.
I’ve also found living in Brisbane quite hard because of the work I’ve been doing here. My days have been spent sitting at a desk in front of a computer, writing! It seems a very long time since I’ve done any ‘hands on’ work with cattle, and I can’t remember the last time that I was on a horse. I’ve really missed that side of my work. Since being here I’ve been heavily involved in revising the system of animal ethics in the organisation for which I work. In Australia all research and teaching work which uses live animals has to obtain approval from an Animal Ethics Committee before the work is carried out. These Committees have members who represent the scientific community, animal welfare organisations and the general public, and they have to decide whether or not the work should go ahead. I am involved in developing training workshops for Committee members and all staff involved. This is a completely new area of work for me so is proving to be quite a challenge, but one which I am enjoying.
I’ve been away a few times: to Armidale in New South Wales in April, where it was cold and wet but wonderful to see autumn colours again. I’ve also had a couple of visits to Sydney, where most of the city is already suffering ‘Olympic Fever’ and is like a huge building site, with hotels and apartment blocks going up everywhere. The Olympic complex at Homebush is well advanced and looks very impressive. In spite of the building work. Sydney is still a stunning city and the zoo there must have the most spectacular views of any zoo in the world!
Social life in Brisbane has been pretty quiet:
mainly I’ve been doing some walking. The area where I live is pleasant as it borders the Brisbane River and there is a nice park nearby. I also try to get out bush-walking a couple of times a month. There are some fantastic National Parks within a 1 to 2 hour drive. It’s wonderful to get out to these places and walk for hours without seeing another person. and you can quite easily get up into the hills where there is no sign of human habitation and no human-made sounds at all. Just what’s needed after a week of sitting at a desk in the ‘big smoke’!
A NEW ORGANIST/CHOIR MASTER AND A NEW YOUTH AND CHILDREN’S WORKER!
Rather belatedly we welcome Stanley Carter to St Paul’s as our new organist and choirmaster. A secondary school teacher in Luton, Stanley has been with us since April. He has made a enthusiastic start and has already enlivened our services with his imaginative playing of organ and piano. His hope is to attract more youngsters into the choir, so if any of you have children with a voice, do bring them along to choir practice any Friday at 7.30 pm in the church. We’d love to meet them and see whether they would like to have a go! Alternatively, if any youngsters have instrumental skills we would welcome them into the St Paul’s Music Group which plays once a month at the Family Service.
Also in September we welcomed Andy Shiach as our new Youth and Children’s Work Co-ordinator. Andy has just come from a year’s training in Oxford, prior to which he did secular and Christian youth work as well as studying geology and training as a tree surgeon. (Is this why he wanted to come to Chipperfield?!) In the coming months he hopes to get to know village youngsters through the School, the Youth Club, the church and other village contacts and activities, so say ‘hello’ to him if you see him around. One of the things he will be looking at early on is opening a Sunday School-type Club and Creche on Sunday mornings to coincide with our 10 o’clock service. If you would be interested in sending your children to this would you please let Andy know on 07801 418267 as soon as possible?
At present Andy is living with his sister and her family in Radlett but is looking for self-contained accommodation in the village from the end of the year. If you know of anything available, please let me know.
Angela Butler
NEW DANCE AND DRAMA SCHOOL
A new dance and drama school opened in Bovingdon in September. Based in the Primary school, the principal is Georgina Heppell, who is offering classes for children aged 3 and over. Her main aim will be to produce yearly shows to raise money for local causes and charities, starting with Decades of Dance, to be performed in March next year. A drama production, Butterflies, is scheduled for the summer. The classes are for fun, rather than for formal exams. For more information,
telephone Georgina on 01442 832709.