Untitled Document

TOAST TO ABERDEEN SCOTTISH HELLENIC SOCIETY ON THE OCCASION OF THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY DINNER 7 June 2010
Back in the 1970’s a number of social events and talks were organised by Hector Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Ancient and Modern Greek in the University of Aberdeen, advertised as being under the auspices of the Aberdeen Scottish Hellenic Society, although no such body formally existed. The last such informal meeting comprised a talk in February 1980 by our own Margaret Chapman on the Greek War of Independence. Later that year some of us, including veterans of Hector’s MA Modern Greek class such as Melvin Dalgarno and myself, realised that, with Hector due to retire in 1982 and certain to leave Aberdeen with his wife Andromache to live in Edinburgh and Cyprus, if we wished to continue to enjoy similar events in future it would be necessary to set up a properly-constituted Society on the lines of those already existing in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews. Hector was persuaded to convene a meeting of interested parties on 28 August 1980, and the positive outcome was that office-bearers and a Committee (including Tom Pearce) were appointed with responsibility to draw up a Constitution and to arrange a programme for 1980-81. Despite the short notice a syllabus was quickly drawn up, comprising a Greek Evening (held on 30 October), 5 talks, a musical entertainment by Greek students and a trip to Robert Gordon’s College to see the school’s production of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannus”, well beyond Hector’s original expectation of one event per term. We are not the first Hellenic Society in Aberdeen. In January 1850 a meeting of ten people, including Professor William D Geddes (he of the Geddes‑Harrower Chair) resolved to set up “the Hellenic Society” for the purpose of reading and discussing the classics. This Society does not appear to have been confined to Aberdeen, because one of its early leading lights, Professor J S Blackie of the Chair of Humanity at Marischal College, received a presentation in Edinburgh in the 1880s as a token of his contribution to the Society. Further research is clearly needed! Hector Thomson was the obvious choice as first President of the new Society, and on his retirement in 1982 he was appointed Honorary President, a post which he held until his death in 2008. During his honorary presidency he undertook three visits to Aberdeen to give talks to the Society, on each occasion travelling by bus “to save the Society money”, but after 1993 ill-health and family commitments in Cyprus forced him to decline further invitations. I kept Hector informed by letter of the Society’s activities, and I treasure his writings, of which I now give an example. In 1994, after I had sent him a postcard-sized photograph of a painting by our daughter, Fiona, of a Cypriot priest, he replied: “Fiona’s portrait of a priest is excellent. He looks exactly like a Greek priest, and a Greek priest looks and feels like a real priest. I always say, but not too often lest I give offence, that a Catholic priest looks like an imposter in fancy dress or a druid at the Welsh Eisteddfod, an Anglican vicar looks like a public school master in fancy dress, a Scottish minister looks like a solicitor in mourning. Only an Orthodox priest looks like a priest. When he blesses you, you feel blest; when you are reproached by him, you feel like a miserable offender, as you are”. Not that Hector’s boundless patriotism for Greece and Cyprus blinded him to what he called the unruliness or individualism (dhichonoia) which he described as a besetting fault of the Greek character. After I had mentioned to him in a letter in 2001 some internal problems affecting the newly-formed Hellenic Students’ Society, he responded: “Two Greeks, three opinions. Very near to where we used to live in Nicosia, there was a narrow three-storey house, one room long, one room wide, which was the headquarters, complete with flagpole, notice-board outside and a coat of arms, of a political party, consisting of one man – Chairman, Secretary, Treasurer, Agent, prospective candidate and sole member”. No wonder the Cyprus Problem remains unresolved! Hector was succeeded by John Skinner, distinguished classicist and former Rector of Aberdeen Grammar School (Byron’s old school), who carried out his Presidential duties in an exemplary manner until he was forced to demit office in 1987 after a severe stroke. He was able to attend the Society’s Tenth Anniversary Dinner in 1990 with his wife Flora, and Flora (who died only last year at the age of 95) was also an honoured guest at our Twentieth Anniversary Dinner in 2000. John Skinner was succeeded by his Vice‑President of the previous five years, Dr Loula Solomou- Dalgarno, who went on to serve as President for a remarkable seventeen years. If Hector Thomson was the Society’s initial source of inspiration, then Loula was undoubtedly the inspiration for the next generation of Society members. She had already started the teaching of Modern Greek evening classes at Aberdeen College of Commerce in 1980, where she continued to work for over twenty years, during which time she was an exceedingly effective recruiting sergeant for the Society. Loula was a lovely person, hospitable and generous of spirit; her classes were full of learning and laughter, groups of friends rather than a formal teacher-pupil relationship. Her day job was teaching English to foreign students in the University of Aberdeen and she also helped generations of Greek students with their academic and personal problems, acting as a sort of unofficial Greek consul in Aberdeen. After Loula’s untimely death in 2004, there was a tremendous response to the Committee’s proposal that a permanent memorial to her be provided in the form of a bench in the Cruickshank Botanic Garden in Old Aberdeen. Over £1,300 was raised, including a contribution of £400 from twenty Greeks who had known Loula while studying in Aberdeen. The bench was duly commissioned and inscribed with a quotation from her beloved Byron: “Round her she spread an atmosphere of life”; a formal opening ceremony was held in the Garden in October 2004. The Committee decided that the substantial balance of donations should be regarded as a sort of ‘special projects’ reserve, known as “Loula’s Fund”, and this has been used primarily to maintain the teaching of Modern Greek which had been discontinued by Aberdeen College at end of session 2003‑2004. Urwin Woodman, former classics teacher and Assistant Headmaster at Robert Gordon’s College, having been Vice‑President for the entire seventeen years of Loula’s tenure as President, served most acceptably as President from 2004 to 2007, completing twenty six years on the Committee. This just shows how a humble spit‑turner at Greek Easter Parties can rise through the ranks to become President of this great democratic Society. Urwin thought that he had retired to the back benches, but he is still called on to carry out Committee-type duties, most recently only two and a half weeks ago when he acted as host to Professor Edith Hall at dinner before her talk; she clearly enjoyed “dining with a Geordie”, as she commented afterwards. Melvin Dalgarno’s appointment as President in 2007, after three years as Vice‑President, was particularly apt as, back in August 1980, he had proposed that Loula be appointed to the very first Committee rather than himself, on the grounds that it would be unfair for a couple to occupy two places on the Committee. Not that this selfless gesture saved him from menial work at Easter Parties! Melvin is tremendously hospitable, generous and extremely efficient. He has performed an outstanding task in organising, and in part teaching, the Modern Greek evening classes, of which the Society assumed sponsorship in 2004. He has declined to accept a single penny in return for all his hard work, while ensuring that his team of Greek student tutors are adequately recompensed. Melvin has been a great host for visiting speakers – and indeed our musicians here tonight – meeting them at airports or railway stations, taking them on tours of Aberdeen and surrounding areas, even persuading them to have a round of golf at Newburgh. This January when he ran Sean Damer to the railway station on the morning after his talk, not even a bomb scare could disconcert him; he just drove on to Stonehaven and put Sean on a train there, even though there was some doubt about which way the train was travelling! If Melvin has a fault, it is that, perhaps because he has lived for so long with Greeks and in Greece, he has become attached to the concept of Greek time, Elliniki Ora. This concept reminds me of the story of the tutor at a Gaelic evening class who, when asked by a student what the Gaelic word for ‘tomorrow’ was, replied: “The Gaelic language has no word which conveys the urgency of the Spanish ‘mańana’ ”. As Treasurer for most of the past three decades I am particularly conscious of the debt which the Society owes to its benefactors. Firstly, the Greek National Tourist Organisation, from whom we have received annual grants (currently £250) every year since our foundation. Special thanks are due to Despina Katsirea, formerly Deputy Director, then Director, of the London office, who attended many Greek Evenings and both the Tenth and Twentieth Anniversary Dinners; she would have been here tonight but for having already booked a cruise with her husband in the area of the Crimea, where her father had worked for the International Red Cross in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. She has ensured, by strong persuasion of her former colleagues, that our grants have continued long after she took early retirement. Her love for the Society was further shown in an article which she wrote in 1985 in the Greek literary journal “Nea Skepsi” (New Thought), likening the atmosphere of Aberdeen to that of the Athens of Palamas and expressing deep emotion at the sight of Scotswomen preparing the finest Greek delicacies. Secondly, the London Hellenic Society, which first volunteered a grant in 1983 after one of its office-bearers, George Angeloglou, had delivered a masterly talk on “Laiki Mousiki”. Until 2003 generous cheques were sent to us intermittently, totalling £4,100, along with effusive messages of goodwill from the Society’s President, John Hadjipateras; the Society even sent two representatives to our Tenth Anniversary Dinner. Alas, since Mr Hadjipateras’s death some eight years ago, this particular source of funding has dried up, and our annual begging letters have remained unacknowledged. But we will keep trying! Thirdly, I must mention Christos, who offers generous discounts to the Society members at the Taverna and has donated prizes of free dinners for two to the raffles held at Greek Evenings and Easter Parties and to the winner of the lucky coin in the Vassilopitta. If you want to ask him a favour, I advise you to do it now while he is still basking in the glory of his beloved Panathinaikos soccer team achieving the League and Cup double in Greece this season. In fact I think that I heard him say that if Greece wins the World Cup football tournament Society members can have free drinks for the next year! On the other side of the coin, the Society has not merely expended its funds on the annual programmes of meetings and social events. We have supported what the National Lottery describes as “good causes”. For instance, we have made grants to the Terpsichore Balkan Dance Group for new costumes (they performed at several Greek Evenings in the Elphinstone Hall) and to a fund organised by the Greek Embassy for the relief of Albanian refugees in Greece in the early 1990s; we contributed £100 towards the foundation of the Douglas Dakin Postgraduate Scholarship at Birkbeck College, University of London (named after the distinguished historian of Modern Greece, a former speaker), £1,150 to Aberdeen University Library for the maintenance of Modern Greek archaeological periodicals, and several grants of between £50 and £100 to senior school pupils attending the Summer School in Ancient Greek held annually in Dorset prior to their proceeding to classical studies at University level. Last, but certainly not least, the Society sponsors a prize in New Testament Greek in the University of Aberdeen which, since 2004, has been named after Dr Loula Solomou‑Dalgarno. In my capacity as Secretary for the first twenty years of the Society’s existence, what impressed me most was the willingness of our speakers to travel considerable distances in order to share with us their enthusiasm for particular Greek topics in return for minimal expenses. Almost without exception our speakers (upwards of 130 of them) have been charming, pleasant and thoroughly nice people. I am sure that Verna will confirm that this trend has continued. We have been particularly fortunate in having one source of captive speakers in the form of holders of the Geddes‑Harrower Chair of Greek Art and Archaeology in the University of Aberdeen – the cream of the world’s classical archaeologists and art historians, such as Emily Vermeule of Harvard University (our very first speaker in November 1980), followed twelve years later by her husband Cornelius of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (whom I recall telling me that, as a child in the 1920s, he had accompanied his father, a senior official with the League of Nations, on a trip to Turkey, where they had conversed in fluent French with Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic), Manolis Andronikos of Thessaloniki, the excavator of Philip of Macedon’s tomb (the only Aberdeen University Professor to have featured on a postage stamp), the splendidly-named Brunilde Ridgway (who in 1989 in my presence gave Principal McNicol of Aberdeen University such a severe dressing-down over the regrettable decision to close the Department of Classics that in his discomfiture he spilled a full cup of coffee over himself!), through to our own Patrick Edwards, Robin Osborne with his twinkling red and green shoes, and most recently Mary Beard, who gave us a masterly tour of the new Acropolis Museum. I have been privileged to have served on the Committee with some wonderful people – the first wave of Urwin, Loula, Betty Russell (whose house used to be the nerve centre of catering activity on the eve of Greek Evenings and Easter Parties), Mae McKenzie Smith, Martyn Steed, Roger Carlund and Litsa Hampden‑Smith, all tremendous voluntary helpers at social events. And now we have what I call the second wave of Verna Ward, who has brought the secretarial administration of the Society from the age of the dinosaur (me!) to the technological era of computers and e-mails, Katerina Bamlett, who has taken on the role of social and catering convener, and Mike Leys, who has created a marvellous web-site for the Society. A Society is only as strong as its members, who have shown tremendous loyalty, not least those who travel considerable distances to attend meetings from such places as Aberlour, Finzean, Alford and Stonehaven. Many members outside the Committee have also offered their services or volunteered prizes at social events, in which connection I should mention Dragutin and Smilja Gvozdanovic, who have decided to retire from kebab duties at Easter Parties after many years of sterling service, and Ken and Cath Watmough, whose generous donation of salmon at the recent Scottish Evening disappeared like snow off a dyke! Time for me to stop rambling on about the past and to invite you to join me in proposing a toast to the future health and prosperity of the Aberdeen Hellenic Society – Chronia Polla kai Na Zisi! John G N Fraser

TOAST TO ABERDEEN SCOTTISH HELLENIC SOCIETY ON THE OCCASION OF THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY DINNER
7 June 2010

Back in the 1970’s a number of social events and talks were organised by Hector Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Ancient and Modern Greek in the University of Aberdeen, advertised as being under the auspices of the Aberdeen Scottish Hellenic Society, although no such body formally existed. The last such informal meeting comprised a talk in February 1980 by our own Margaret Chapman on the Greek War of Independence.

Later that year some of us, including veterans of Hector’s MA Modern Greek class such as Melvin Dalgarno and myself, realised that, with Hector due to retire in 1982 and certain to leave Aberdeen with his wife Andromache to live in Edinburgh and Cyprus, if we wished to continue to enjoy similar events in future it would be necessary to set up a properly-constituted Society on the lines of those already existing in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews.

Hector was persuaded to convene a meeting of interested parties on 28 August 1980, and the positive outcome was that office-bearers and a Committee (including Tom Pearce) were appointed with responsibility to draw up a Constitution and to arrange a programme for 1980-81.

Despite the short notice a syllabus was quickly drawn up, comprising a Greek Evening (held on 30 October), 5 talks, a musical entertainment by Greek students and a trip to Robert Gordon’s College to see the school’s production of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannus”, well beyond Hector’s original expectation of one event per term.

We are not the first Hellenic Society in Aberdeen. In January 1850 a meeting of ten people, including Professor William D Geddes (he of the Geddes‑Harrower Chair) resolved to set up “the Hellenic Society” for the purpose of reading and discussing the classics. This Society does not appear to have been confined to Aberdeen, because one of its early leading lights, Professor J S Blackie of the Chair of Humanity at Marischal College, received a presentation in Edinburgh in the 1880s as a token of his contribution to the Society. Further research is clearly needed!

Hector Thomson was the obvious choice as first President of the new Society, and on his retirement in 1982 he was appointed Honorary President, a post which he held until his death in 2008. During his honorary presidency he undertook three visits to Aberdeen to give talks to the Society, on each occasion travelling by bus “to save the Society money”, but after 1993 ill-health and family commitments in Cyprus forced him to decline further invitations.

I kept Hector informed by letter of the Society’s activities, and I treasure his writings, of which I now give an example. In 1994, after I had sent him a postcard-sized photograph of a painting by our daughter, Fiona, of a Cypriot priest, he replied: “Fiona’s portrait of a priest is excellent. He looks exactly like a Greek priest, and a Greek priest looks and feels like a real priest. I always say, but not too often lest I give offence, that a Catholic priest looks like an imposter in fancy dress or a druid at the Welsh Eisteddfod, an Anglican vicar looks like a public school master in fancy dress, a Scottish minister looks like a solicitor in mourning. Only an Orthodox priest looks like a priest. When he blesses you, you feel blest; when you are reproached by him, you feel like a miserable offender, as you are”.

Not that Hector’s boundless patriotism for Greece and Cyprus blinded him to what he called the unruliness or individualism (dhichonoia) which he described as a besetting fault of the Greek character. After I had mentioned to him in a letter in 2001 some internal problems affecting the newly-formed Hellenic Students’ Society, he responded: “Two Greeks, three opinions. Very near to where we used to live in Nicosia, there was a narrow three-storey house, one room long, one room wide, which was the headquarters, complete with flagpole, notice-board outside and a coat of arms, of a political party, consisting of one man – Chairman, Secretary, Treasurer, Agent, prospective candidate and sole

member”. No wonder the Cyprus Problem remains unresolved!

Hector was succeeded by John Skinner, distinguished classicist and former Rector of Aberdeen Grammar School (Byron’s old school), who carried out his Presidential duties in an exemplary manner until he was forced to demit office in 1987 after a severe stroke. He was able to attend the Society’s Tenth Anniversary Dinner in 1990 with his wife Flora, and Flora (who died only last year at the age of 95) was also an honoured guest at our Twentieth Anniversary Dinner in 2000. John Skinner was succeeded by his Vice‑President of the previous five years, Dr Loula Solomou- Dalgarno, who went on to serve as President for a remarkable seventeen years.

If Hector Thomson was the Society’s initial source of inspiration, then Loula was undoubtedly the inspiration for the next generation of Society members. She had already started the teaching of Modern Greek evening classes at Aberdeen College of Commerce in 1980, where she continued to work for over twenty years, during which time she was an exceedingly effective recruiting sergeant for the Society.

Loula was a lovely person, hospitable and generous of spirit; her classes were full of learning and laughter, groups of friends rather than a formal teacher-pupil relationship. Her day job was teaching English to foreign students in the University of Aberdeen and she also helped generations of Greek students with their academic and personal problems, acting as a sort of unofficial Greek consul in Aberdeen.

After Loula’s untimely death in 2004, there was a tremendous response to the Committee’s proposal that a permanent memorial to her be provided in the form of a bench in the Cruickshank Botanic Garden in Old Aberdeen. Over £1,300 was raised, including a contribution of £400 from twenty Greeks who had known Loula while studying in Aberdeen. The bench was duly commissioned and inscribed with a quotation from her beloved Byron: “Round her she spread an atmosphere of life”; a formal opening ceremony was held in the Garden in October 2004.

The Committee decided that the substantial balance of donations should be regarded as a sort of ‘special projects’ reserve, known as “Loula’s Fund”, and this has been used primarily to maintain the teaching of Modern Greek which had been discontinued by Aberdeen College at end of session 2003‑2004.

Urwin Woodman, former classics teacher and Assistant Headmaster at Robert Gordon’s College, having been Vice‑President for the entire seventeen years of Loula’s tenure as President, served most acceptably as President from 2004 to 2007, completing twenty six years on the Committee. This just shows how a humble spit‑turner at Greek Easter Parties can rise through the ranks to become President of this great democratic Society. Urwin thought that he had retired to the back benches, but he is still called on to carry out Committee-type duties, most recently only two and a half weeks ago when he acted as host to Professor Edith Hall at dinner before her talk; she clearly enjoyed “dining with a Geordie”, as she commented afterwards.

Melvin Dalgarno’s appointment as President in 2007, after three years as Vice‑President, was particularly apt as, back in August 1980, he had proposed that Loula be appointed to the very first Committee rather than himself, on the grounds that it would be unfair for a couple to occupy two places on the Committee. Not that this selfless gesture saved him from menial work at Easter Parties!

Melvin is tremendously hospitable, generous and extremely efficient. He has performed an outstanding task in organising, and in part teaching, the Modern Greek evening classes, of which the Society assumed sponsorship in 2004. He has declined to accept a single penny in return for all his hard work, while ensuring that his team of Greek student tutors are adequately recompensed.

Melvin has been a great host for visiting speakers – and indeed our musicians here tonight – meeting them at airports or railway stations, taking them on tours of Aberdeen and surrounding areas, even persuading them to have a round of golf at Newburgh. This January when he ran Sean Damer to the railway station on the

morning after his talk, not even a bomb scare could disconcert him; he just drove on to Stonehaven and put Sean on a train there, even though there was some doubt about which way the train was travelling!

If Melvin has a fault, it is that, perhaps because he has lived for so long with Greeks and in Greece, he has become attached to the concept of Greek time, Elliniki Ora. This concept reminds me of the story of the tutor at a Gaelic evening class who, when asked by a student what the Gaelic word for ‘tomorrow’ was, replied: “The Gaelic language has no word which conveys the urgency of the Spanish ‘mańana’ ”.

As Treasurer for most of the past three decades I am particularly conscious of the debt which the Society owes to its benefactors. Firstly, the Greek National Tourist Organisation, from whom we have received annual grants (currently £250) every year since our foundation. Special thanks are due to Despina Katsirea, formerly Deputy Director, then Director, of the London office, who attended many Greek Evenings and both the Tenth and Twentieth Anniversary Dinners; she would have been here tonight but for having already booked a cruise with her husband in the area of the Crimea, where her father had worked for the International Red Cross in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. She has ensured, by strong persuasion of her former colleagues, that our grants have continued long after she took early retirement. Her love for the Society was further shown in an article which she wrote in 1985 in the Greek literary journal “Nea Skepsi” (New Thought), likening the atmosphere of Aberdeen to that of the Athens of Palamas and expressing deep emotion at the sight of Scotswomen preparing the finest Greek delicacies.

Secondly, the London Hellenic Society, which first volunteered a grant in 1983 after one of its office-bearers, George Angeloglou, had delivered a masterly talk on “Laiki Mousiki”. Until 2003 generous cheques were sent to us intermittently, totalling £4,100, along with effusive messages of goodwill from the Society’s President, John Hadjipateras; the Society even sent two representatives to our Tenth Anniversary Dinner. Alas, since Mr Hadjipateras’s death some eight years ago, this particular source of funding has dried up, and our annual begging letters have remained unacknowledged. But we will keep trying!

Thirdly, I must mention Christos, who offers generous discounts to the Society members at the Taverna and has donated prizes of free dinners for two to the raffles held at Greek Evenings and Easter Parties and to the winner of the lucky coin in the Vassilopitta. If you want to ask him a favour, I advise you to do it now while he is still basking in the glory of his beloved Panathinaikos soccer team achieving the League and Cup double in Greece this season. In fact I think that I heard him say that if Greece wins the World Cup football tournament Society members can have free drinks for the next year!

On the other side of the coin, the Society has not merely expended its funds on the annual programmes of meetings and social events. We have supported what the National Lottery describes as “good causes”. For instance, we have made grants to the Terpsichore Balkan Dance Group for new costumes (they performed at several Greek Evenings in the Elphinstone Hall) and to a fund organised by the Greek Embassy for the relief of Albanian refugees in Greece in the early 1990s; we contributed £100 towards the foundation of the Douglas Dakin Postgraduate Scholarship at Birkbeck College, University of London (named after the distinguished historian of Modern Greece, a former speaker), £1,150 to Aberdeen University Library for the maintenance of Modern Greek archaeological periodicals, and several grants of between £50 and £100 to senior school pupils attending the Summer School in Ancient Greek held annually in Dorset prior to their proceeding to classical studies at University level. Last, but certainly not least, the Society sponsors a prize in New Testament Greek in the University of Aberdeen which, since 2004, has been named after Dr Loula Solomou‑Dalgarno.

In my capacity as Secretary for the first twenty years of the Society’s existence, what impressed me most was the willingness of our speakers to travel considerable distances in order to share with us their enthusiasm for particular Greek topics in return for minimal expenses. Almost without exception our speakers (upwards of 130 of them) have been charming, pleasant and thoroughly nice people. I am sure that Verna will confirm that this trend has continued. We have been particularly fortunate in having one source of captive speakers in the form of holders of the Geddes‑Harrower Chair of Greek Art and Archaeology in the University of Aberdeen – the cream of the world’s classical archaeologists and art historians, such as Emily Vermeule of Harvard University (our very first speaker in November 1980), followed twelve years later by her husband Cornelius of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (whom I recall telling me that, as a child in the 1920s, he had accompanied his father, a senior official with the League of Nations, on a trip to Turkey, where they had conversed in fluent French with Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic), Manolis Andronikos of Thessaloniki, the excavator of Philip of Macedon’s tomb (the only Aberdeen University Professor to have featured on a postage stamp), the splendidly-named Brunilde Ridgway (who in 1989 in my presence gave Principal McNicol of Aberdeen University such a severe dressing-down over the regrettable decision to close the Department of Classics that in his discomfiture he spilled a full cup of coffee over himself!), through to our own Patrick Edwards, Robin Osborne with his twinkling red and green shoes, and most recently Mary Beard, who gave us a masterly tour of the new Acropolis Museum.

I have been privileged to have served on the Committee with some wonderful people – the first wave of Urwin, Loula, Betty Russell (whose house used to be the nerve centre of catering activity on the eve of Greek Evenings and Easter Parties), Mae McKenzie Smith, Martyn Steed, Roger Carlund and Litsa Hampden‑Smith, all tremendous voluntary helpers at social events. And now we have what I call the second wave of Verna Ward, who has brought the secretarial administration of the Society from the age of the dinosaur (me!) to the technological era of computers and e-mails, Katerina Bamlett, who has taken on the role of social and catering convener, and Mike Leys, who has created a marvellous web-site for the Society.

A Society is only as strong as its members, who have shown tremendous loyalty, not least those who travel considerable distances to attend meetings from such places as Aberlour, Finzean, Alford and Stonehaven. Many members outside the Committee have also offered their services or volunteered prizes at social events, in which connection I should mention Dragutin and Smilja Gvozdanovic, who have decided to retire from kebab duties at Easter Parties after many years of sterling service, and Ken and Cath Watmough, whose generous donation of salmon at the recent Scottish Evening disappeared like snow off a dyke!

Time for me to stop rambling on about the past and to invite you to join me in proposing a toast to the future health and prosperity of the Aberdeen Hellenic Society – Chronia Polla kai Na Zisi!

John G N Fraser

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