Peter's Waterways Blog A fraught National Annual General Meeting This is a slightly shorter version of my article first published in IWA West Riding's Milepost in January 2019, about the two intertwined strands of discussion at the national AGM, which very few of the Branch members had been able to attend.

The summer of 2018 has been ‘eventful’ in all senses. Our major public event, the peripatetic August Bank Holiday Festival of Water found itself in St Neots at the further end of the Great Ouse system of waterways, and boats visiting from the Midlands needed a tidal passage in both directions to complete their round trips. Secondly, continuing that theme of tidal passages from the September 2018 Milepost, all of our inland waterway connections from the North East to London were closed for lack of water, save for the tidal River Trent, reliably conveying only those confident enough to use it.

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Moored at Tower Pier

Thirdly, as regular attender of IWA Annual General Meetings, for once this year we gave priority to a trip on the historic sea-going paddle-steamer Waverley, which during its annual sojourn to London, was offering a trip from Tower Pier down the Thames, via Southend Pier into the mouth of the River Medway, then returning to London. This was a brilliant day out, giving a higher viewing platform for the river than we usually have from nbFulbourne. Pictures here.

While that trip was warm and smooth, the discussions at the AGM were less so. The presentation of work on restoration was well received, but the finances discussion was much more fraught. The view of this from a West Riding perspective is tricky to discern, the meeting being a long way for our members to travel. It started in Stonehouse, Stroud, Gloucestershire. That’s whichever of those that best create a mental picture of the distance from, say, Leeds (182 miles or 3hrs30mins by train) or Skipton (190 miles or a 6.30am train from Shipley). Maybe my straw poll of audience reactions covered all our participants from oop-north. Whether representative or not, the view was that the Top Table was disorganised, and couldn't answer whatever-it-was that the questions about the accounts were asking. See here for the full minutes of the meeting.

Waverley at Tower Pier

Extract from annual accounts showing which columns didn't add up

Of the many thousands of digits in our Annual Report, a couple had succumbed to the Eric Morecambe syndrome "I'm playing all the right notes, ... but not necessarily in the right order". It was, fatefully, in a total which was supposed to be £1,165,070 which had been typed (in one of the two places it appeared) as £1,160,570. It's obvious that all the adding-up ought to be done in a spreadsheet with the relevant numbers transferred automatically from there to the printed report. Well, that didn't happen properly for this particular number, but by the time it had been talked about at the meeting for an hour, the difference between the correct and mistyped versions somehow became an actual lump of IWA money that had gone awry. Maybe if any of the audience had been given any relevant papers, or had anything like the above explanation, they wouldn't have thought it a bright idea to adjourn the meeting without a decision on the accounts. And we wouldn’t now be worrying about how much of our members’ subscriptions was used in subsequent fidddling-about with numbers and which other extra costs and problems were related to the original mistype.

Maybe many members attending the AGM were already disconcerted by the decision-making about future Festivals of Water. Enough members had signed resolutions for them to appear on the AGM agenda. These suggested separating our Events Committee from its supervising Marketing Committee, and that there should be a report on how these two had (not) been communicating earlier in the year. We need to be concentrating on being a members’ organisation campaigning for the Inland Waterways and minimising our spending on writing-up how much we spent last year. Peter Scott

Waterways Recovery Group activity at Festival of Water at St Neots