First of all apologies that this column has not been updated for a while but
much has been going on and I have always felt it is more important to do
rather than talk or write about doing it.
One of the things I have not been directly involved with but it is important
that you know about is the we are working on achieving Accredited Museum
Status. This is because it does open a number of funding avenues which
would not otherwise be accessible. It is a bit of a chicken and egg situation,
as until we have the funding it is difficult to set up an actual Museum, but
until we do have a museum, it makes it difficult to achieve the criteria
accreditation we need to get it.
I thought the rejection of the development plan put forward by the Club
might put us back but it has not, in that the club is looking at giving us
another room in the John Trollope Stand where the access the club has
already given us to the John Trollope room means we do have a Museum
site. The problem of course is disabled access which, if not making
accreditation a complete no no, does lessen the strength of an application.
Moving on I want to make a couple of requests, float an idea and say a thank
you. Working in reverse, the thank you goes to Jim Turner who has agreed to
clean and tidy past players and officials graves at Radnor Street Cemetery.
If we had this done professionally it would cost at least £200 so is saving us
money that can help preserve other elements of the football clubs heritage.
It was a conversation between Jim and Andy Binks of the Swindon Society
that came up with the idea of Red Plaques. You are probably aware of the
Blue Plaques that commemorate where important people in the Community
lived. Harold Fleming and Sam Allen are people in the football community
commemorated in this way but the system is expensive and involves
considerable red tape. Red Plaques could enable more recognition of
Swindon people not only in the football field but others as well. It could make
Swindon an innovator as it has so often been in the past.
My first request is for old notices of AGM and Annual Accountants. While we
have a number of these from the post war period we only have a few from
before the Second World War. Such documents seldom give you answers
but do enable you to ask the right questions. The second if for assistance
with the tours and making them more child friendly. I would gladly show any
sixth former who supports the town around. Doing something like a guided
tour looks very good on application to University. The second request is for
old fanzines. Andy Cossens has done a brilliant job in working towards
getting a more or less complete collection of post war programmes another
thing we aim to put together is a complete collection of all the Town
Fanzines. These really do show the view of fans at the time and were very
much the social media of their day.