Book of Remembrance
By Alan (L) Jones
As some of you may know, some years ago, I proposed creating a Book of Remembrance to be held at the hut commemorating the lives of our late friends. This would be a collection of the obituaries, which have been written for the Newsletter over the years. This would be an alternative to the proliferation of memorial plaques, which could easily happen with the best of intentions.
I have (rather belatedly I regret to say) taken up this project again, but I have met with some problems which I hope some members may be able to help me with.
The more recent Newsletters are available in digital format so there is no problem in extracting obituaries from these and putting them in a common format for the book. I had envisaged that earlier obituaries could be scanned and edited with OCR software. Unfortunately this does not seem to be as easy as I expected. I had thought that OCR would make a few spelling mistakes and probably require a bit of reformatting. However, I find that even the resultant character version (Word document or other format) still cannot be edited in the ordinary way: lines are squashed up and words appear in the margins. Can any of our computer gurus offer a solution? If so, please contact me on alan.jones.ski@gmail.com. I had hoped not to have to resort to copy-typing, except perhaps for the very old newsletters which used poor reprographics (by modern standards) and some of which were written by hand.
My collection of Newsletters goes back to October 1974, so I should be grateful if older members could let me have photocopies of obituaries from earlier editions, if they still have them. A few I have been able to obtain, as they were reproduced in the Anniversary Journals. Assuming that there would be an obituary for all founder members and former Presidents this leaves me in need of those for: Geoff Cockroft, Bob Elliott, Eric Flitcroft, Norman Horsefall, Phil Kendall, Alan Simpson and Robbie Worrall. Iain McCallum wrote about Toni Nicholson in the 60th Anniversary Journal but I do not know if there was an obituary at the time of his death in 1948. I am not aware of any deaths in the club between Tony Nicholson and Bob Jones in 1967, but older members may put me right on this. The Club was a much younger organisation in those days: few members were over 40.
