Gifts of Generous Members

The District Club has generations of generous members to thank for its furnishings. Over the years, big-hearted benefactors have saved the club thousands of pounds by digging deep into their own pockets to buy much-needed items.

The list is longer than most members realise: honours boards and clocks, snooker scoreboards and garden benches, a trophy cabinet - and even a barometer.

Take a look around the premises, inside and out, and you will start to spot them: small brass plates, screwed beneath the things they paid for. Some carry a year. Some carry the office the donor held at the time. Together they amount to a second roll of honour, one that nobody set out to write.

Read them alongside the presidents' boards and a pattern emerges. The same names come round twice. Kenneth Wilcox, whose trophy cabinet was presented in 1989, had been President twenty years earlier. D. Drummond's plate records him as President for 1988–89, and the board agrees. P. G. Mitcham gives his years as 1994–96, and the board shows both of them. Roger Hayhurst signed his gift as Honorary Secretary in 1994, nine years before he took the chain of office himself.

The habit runs deeper still. One of the club's rooms carries a donor's name above its door - the Drummond Room - and Syd Drummond's plate elsewhere in the building records him simply as Former President and Honorary Life Member.

None of it was asked for. All of it is still in use.

Leon Bluston, 1978

Tap a photograph to see it larger

The club's own beginnings were a gift of sorts. In 1930 members bought the building through £5 debentures - six per cent a year, repayable by 1945. Most were quietly gifted back. Debenture No. 216, made out to George R. Bennett of Fairhaven Road, hangs framed in the Kilgrimol Room, presented by Steve Singleton during his presidency.