Last Thursday night´s annual prize giving evening was a huge success, our function room was full to capacity, Yvonne did a cracking job with the buffet, and his royal highness the Prince Of Wales kindly agreed to stand in for Syd little to hand out the trophies when Syd suddenly realized he was seriously ill. The Prince was on his way down to Marbella for a Polo match and had popped in for a livener and a game of snooker after his driver had taken badly with the “Two Bob Bits”. I reminded the Prince that this was actually the second time we had met, the first when he had opened a new disabled toilet at an engineering firm where I worked in the early seventies. On that occasion I had presented him with the scissors for him to cut the ribbon from around the ballcock, and he swore and then dropped them, - not surprising really as we had heated em up two minutes before with a blow torch.
It was a bit embarrassing really as we didn´t actually have any disabled employees at that time (we tested pogo sticks for the toy firm “Chad valley”), and when Charles insisted on seeing the facility in operation our foreman Charlie Pickering had to pretend to only have one arm, which meant that when he sat on the pot he couldn´t reach the toilet paper. I was delighted when the Prince remembered this and told him of our plight with the presentation night. He said he would be delighted to help out, just as long as I took him for a game of Bowls later.
Although many of our members were hugely disappointed that Mr. Little couldn´t attend, they were grateful that Charles took the trouble to step in, even though they didn´t recognise him.
Trophies were handed to the members of our Dominoes team who reached the play-offs by finishing in 8th position. Their plight was helped somewhat by the bottom 2 of the 10 teams in the league dropping out pending an inquiry into match fixing allegations. Also, hats off to our ladies football team who collected the bronze medal in the “St. Miguel Tri-Team Challenge”. Other notable achievements were the winner of “Guess how many pork pies we sell on Friday night” competition which was won by Bob Wickes (The Butcher), and Harry Snodgrass who won “The Worst Dressed Snooker Player Of The Year” when he played against the “Spread Eagle” B team wearing a vest and a bald cardigan.
