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40th Anniversary Dinner
1st March 2003
Speech by Bill Manville

Jeremy has described the formative years of the Scholar Gypsies. My speech will be more Rambling as befits the then name of the club.

By the time I came up in 1966 the club may still have been in its childhood, but it was well established.

Like many others, I joined the club at Freshers Fair in the Town Hall. The first event of the term was tea at LMH where jelly babies were served; in those days of a 7:1 sex ratio, any excuse to get into a women's college was to be grasped enthusiastically! My first ramble was led by Mike Walker. After a session on the swings at Wolvercote, which gave me an idea of the sort of club I had joined, we found Port Meadow to be under a foot or so of water. Mike's archive of the ramble read "Splosh, Splosh, Splosh". I was hooked.

During my time in the club there were a number of innovations.

There were rambles each vacation, staying in youth hostels. The Peak District, Yorkshire Dales, Lakes and North York Moors were most often favoured. In the summer of '68 we ventured abroad for the first time and hostelled along the Bavarian/Austrian border. Vicki Lloyd joined us from Czechoslovakia where she had been at a work camp when the Russian tanks drove in.

We made contact with the Oxford Fieldpaths Society and provided them with a willing if unskilled labour force for the clearing of overgrown footpaths - an activity known as Toggle-Lopping after the long-handled tool that was used for the more inaccessible branches. The chairman of the OFS at that time was a splendid character named Col W.P.D'Arcy-Dalton, after whom the D'Arcy-Dalton Way in the Cotswolds is named.

We organised Oxfam walks to Reading and to Aylesbury - rather unimaginatively on the verges and pavements of the main roads - too dangerous to contemplate in the greater traffic levels of today.

But the core of our activities were the Saturday afternoon and Sunday rambles. The meeting place was usually a seat and bike rack outside Nuffield College from where we would walk to the Gloucester Green bus station (which then occupied the whole area between the Playhouse and Worcester Street and actually had a good range of bus services going out in all directions). What is now the tourist information office was then the bus company's office. The inspector there got to know us and would put on a relief bus for us if we were substantial in number. On one such occasion we were given a double-decker to go to Chalgrove, on a route always served by single-deckers. When we reached the railway overbridge at Cowley there were some anxious moments for the crew as the bus just inched under.

Comparing the term card then with this term's is possibly revealing.
Then 7 pages, printed by George Milnes, Wakefield; now 24.
And you can read the information on the cover!
Gate on the front offering delightful prospects - compared with a footprint.
Membership 2/6 (12.5p) term cf £6; 6/- (30p) year cf £12.
(and we got grants that we didn't have to repay...)
Maximum fare: 9/- (45p) cf £14.50.

Chris Higley and I both migrated in 1969 to "the other place" to do a diploma in computer science. We found CURC to be a pale immitation of OURC, with approximately 3 active members. We never managed to build it up to match the success of OURC - maybe something to do with the countryside around the fens. However, we did organise a successful Varsity rambling match in the Dunstable downs.

My three years in the club gave me much pleasure and resulted in friendships which have continued to today (and, I hope, tomorrow!). It has been good to see the club continuing to thrive and adapt to changing circumstances and names.

Before handing over to Geoff Stearn I would like to mention that I have created a database of committee members from the start to the present, as an historical record and to give the club a mailing list for future events such as this.

We now have a complete list of presidents which is available to anyone who is interested. Committee details are lacking for most of the middle years (complete up to HT78 and largely complete from TT84. It would be nice to achieve completeness so if anyone has information for the missing terms please let me know at bill_manville@compuserve.com - click here.

We have an address of some sort for about half the ex-Presidents, but many may be out of date; if you would like to give me missing or corrected details, please catch me in the bar afterwards or on the walk tomorrow.

Finally I would just like to add my thanks to John Seymour and his colleagues in the current OUWC committee for their hard work in making this weekend so enjoyable for all of us.

Bill Manville - 17th President, Oxford University Rambling Club