THE LEEDS ASSOCIATION OF ENGINEERS
Minutes of the Council Meeting held at 7.15pm on Thursday 6th October 2016 at the Cornerhouse Club Leeds.
1. Attendance. J. Aldersley, Vice President in the chair, with, A. Kibler, K. Hegarty, M. Murray, I. Scholes, S. Stacey, G. Toulson, A. Rogers and I. Blakeley.
2. Apologies for Absence. H. Kingswell, B. Yates, J. Bentley and J. Shergill.
3. Minutes of the Previous Meeting, dated 8th September were approved & signed.
4. Matters Arising. None.
5. Treasurers Report. In Mr. Bentley’s absence we did not have a Treasurer’s report.
6. Correspondence. None.
7. Membership. We had no new applications for membership this month but need to ratify the applicants proposed at the last council meeting at our next open meeting (one attended by the general membership). Mr. Murray agreed to write to Mr. Aldersley’s previous employer to see if they wish to continue with their corporate membership. Mr. Aldersley said he planned writing to the new college in Leeds along with any other local colleges who have engineering students to try to get new members.
8. Current Programme. We are struggling to get a programme together at the moment and it was suggested that if we have nothing in place for the November meeting council members might either bring an interesting item from their work and give a short talk or discuss a period of their working career. We all agreed to give this some thought, whilst also pursuing any leads we have for lectures or factory visits. We must keep other members of council informed of any progress to ensure things are coordinated. We had planned asking Frank Smith to give us a talk in November but he is suffering bad health at the moment so is unavailable. Mr. Stacey will contact Gerry Allen to see if he has any contacts who may be able to help. Mr. Rogers is trying to get one of his contacts to tell us about flying Drones and their uses. Mr. Aldersley told us the court house in Bradford now do organised visits which might be appropriate for the ladies evening. He also suggested that Mr. Shergill might be able to organise a visit to a Sikh temple. Mr. Hegarty agreed to investigate the possibility of visiting the new recycling unit in Leeds and Mr. Stacey will contact the new Leeds technical college that’s on the Braime Industrial site. Mr Toulson reported that Mark Batchelor is not ready to give a lecture at the moment but is not ruling out giving us something in the future.
9. Next Session. No Progress.
10. Website. Photographs of the golf day have now been added.
11. Journal. Nothing further to report.
12. Golf. Mr Stacey reported that the 2016 tournament had been a great success at the Cobble Hall Golf Club. They went to great lengths to accommodate us and even gave a prize of a free round of golf for four people. He announced that next year’s tournament is likely to be at Scarcroft Golf Club, assuming he can negotiate favourable terms. In order to keep numbers of participants up he tries to keep the cost as low as possible. The probable date for next year is Friday 30th June 2017. Contrary to our belief Gerry Allen was not retiring prior to the 2016 tournament, he brought 19 participants from Mitchell Fox and is clearly a major factor in the continued success of our tournament.
13. Annual Dinner. We had all agreed to come with our ideas in mind of what we wanted from the annual dinner in the future having discussed changing the format on many occasions previously. In the absence of Mr. Yates, Mr. Aldersley conveyed the views of Mr. Yates to council that he was in favour of an informal dinner and likewise Mr. Toulson gave Mr. Bentley’s views which were also for an informal dinner, Mr. Bentley felt that he was no longer prepared to act as toastmaster and that he felt recent dinners had been more for the benefit of non-members. Mr. Rogers said he is not prepared to continue as dinner secretary unless the dinner was informal. We discussed the issues at some length. Mr. Murray said that our dinner was admired by other associations including Keighley and Hull. After further discussion Mr. Kibler expressed the view that he likes the formal dinner and said he was prepared to act as dinner secretary. He proposed that we have a semi-formal dinner, where dinner jackets would still be worn but we would do away with some of the other traditions. We agreed that we were all in favour of going down this route and may be some of the corporate people who book tables might still wish to do so. We decided that we would not invite the Lord Mayor but the Vicar of Leeds Parish Church would still be invited, it would seem wrong to have a plaque placed in the church last year celebrating 150 years of association with the church only to sever our relationship this year ! We decided that we will only have one brief speech given by our president and we do not expect a speech from the vicar. There was a proposal by Mr. Kibler and Mr. Yates that members should get a free dinner but this needs discussing along with every other element of the dinner format so we are all in agreement. We agreed to try re-establishing the student engineer award and thought this might be something we could do in conjunction with the new Leeds College. We thought if there were sufficient students it might be good to bring up to three students to the dinner and announce the winner on the night.
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Any other Business. Having no other business Mr. Aldersley closed the meeting.
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