Rover History 1945 - 1956

1948 - The Dawn of Better Rovering

As will have already been seen, the three years just dealt with were turbulent ones as far as building up a Crew were concerned, however the outlook was somewhat brighter in 1948.

Before speaking of that year, it must be recalled that, as well as the members being in the Forces etc, yet another hardship had to be overcome, and that was the RSL had had to resign owing to his moving from Sheffield in the course of his work.

At the beginning of 1948 we were at our lowest ebb - no RSL and practically no Crew. However, Jack [Ash] had been hard at work in the background - as usual - and had secured the services of a Jim Sweet to take over as R.S.L.

Therefore in May 1948, Tuesday the 19th to be exact, six members met at Jims' home to discuss the restart once more of an active Rover Crew in St Augustine's.

At that meeting, Terry was made Secretary, Mick Treasurer and of course Jim RSL. Once again, the meetings were to be held fortnightly - on Tuesday evenings, and again we were having to meet in someone's lounge. At that meeting our first social function was arranged, and that was to run a Dance on the 29th of May. This was the first of four successful dances held that year, one of them was Crazy Dance and was a terrific success.

Although there were only six members at this meeting, it must be remembered that there were another ten in the Forces or elsewhere and we knew that sometime we would have these chaps with us once again.

The following months saw the Crew engaged in all sorts of activities, to quote a cross section, a weekend Camp was held at Bolsterstone, the Crew cleared up all the rear of the Parish Hall, they gave help at a United Nations Association Fete, and whilst busy on these things, machinery was in progress to find a Den for us.

The crowning glory of all this activity was that, for the first time we won the Selwyn Trophy, strangely enough the Selwyn was in its 21st year, and so it received a good 21st!

During this year, more new members arrived to swell the ranks, these were Ken, Peter A, Peter Stacey and Keith Hogg, bringing our strength to somewhere in the region of ten members (not including the Forces).

By the end of August, we had the really welcome news that we were, at last, the proud possessors of a 'home' of our own. We were to have one of the garages belonging to Dr Atkin, in Endcliffe Vale Road. This naturally started us off cleaning, decorating and the like and on 25th September it was officially opened by Gibby.

The meetings were now fixed to be held each week on Monday evenings. Dennis who had been the Librarian since 1947 resigned this post owing to having a considerable amount of work to do for an exam. Peter A was appointed as his successor.

To round off a very 'full' year, we had our first post War investiture, when Man Gee and Eric were made Squires.