West Dorset is the land of the un-smart phone, and nowhere is there an un-smarter phone than this.
Posts tagged “Sherborne”
SIR ANTHONY JOLLIFFE GBE DL DSc has announced that he will retire, after 28 years as President of the Society of Dorset Men, at the annual meeting next April.
The only Weymouth man to become Lord Mayor of London told 187 members of the society at the annual County Dinner, held at Sherborne School: “I’ve now been President for 28 years and I have decided this is my last year.
“This is a great society, one of the very best county societies in the country.
“However, I will continue to give the Society my full support.”
Chairman Stuart Adam expressed members’ thanks to Sir Anthony.
He said: “You, my father Roy Adam and Gordon Hine have transformed the Society of Dorset Men into a very successful organisation.
“We thank you sincerely for your hard work and commitment to our Society, you will be sorely missed as our President.”
Members then stood to drink to the health of Sir Anthony and Lady Jolliffe.
The President of the Society of Dorset Men with his principal guests, before the County Dinner at Sherborne School.
Pictured above, from left to right: Gay Mole, Captain Peter Mole, Fran Leaper, Professor David Leaper MD ChM FRCS FACS FLS, Sophie Palmer, Hon. Tim Palmer [HM High Sheriff of Dorset,] Emma Jolliffe, Sir Anthony Jolliffe GBE DL DSc [President of the Society of Dorset Men,] Lady Georgina Jolliffe, Stuart Adam [Chairman of the Society of Dorset Men.] Photograph by Michel Hooper-Immins.
Message from The Queen
The County Dinner began with the traditional message from The Queen.
“Her Majesty sends her best wishes to all concerned for a most enjoyable gathering,” wrote HM Private Secretary.
Speech by High Sheriff Tim Palmer
Principal guest speaker The Hon. Tim Palmer, HM High Sheriff of Dorset, began by remembering the late David Woodhouse, a Deputy President of the Society, who had nominated him three years ago.
“Being High Sheriff takes you to all four corners of the county and beyond. I have discovered that there are a huge number of volunteers who keep the communities of this great county going.
Vikings
“The first High Sheriff of Dorset had his head chopped-off by the Vikings, but fortunately we live in more enlightened times,” he went on.
“The last Government was planning to abolish the shrievalty, but it never happened. High Sheriffs used to exercise great power in the county. They have always been associated with law and order; my predecessors had to stand witness at executions. Indeed, the rope for all English hangings was made at Bridport.
Libraries
“One of the modern duties of High Sheriffs is to get to know the volunteers of Dorset. There’s lots of talk these days about the ‘Big Society,’ but the fact is that it’s already happening in Dorset.
“A third of the county’s population are volunteers for some cause and I have seen some outstanding examples as I travel around Dorset, whose people are ever ready to support their communities.
“For example, the libraries of tomorrow will almost certainly be run by local volunteers. Dorset people know what it is to look after their neighbours,” concluded The Hon. Tim Palmer.
Gavin Henson
Weymouth Harbourmaster Captain Peter Mole, who grew up in the resort, talked of his interesting role in running one of the South Coast’s most historic ports.
He felt much at home back in Weymouth, enjoying meeting the sailors and yachtsmen, including Wales rugby international Gavin Henson, whose yacht was berthed in the harbour.
Martinstown vineyard
Surgeon Professor David Leaper spoke about his happy experiences of being in Dorset for seven years. Revealing he owned a vineyard in Martinstown, he had developed a love for Dorset.
Sir Anthony Jolliffe presented the Bryan Challis Cup for recruiting most members to Chairman Stuart Adam and the Hambro Golf Cup to Secretary Hayne Russell. The President closed the evening by thanking Stuart Adam for taking-on the Chairman’s mantle from his father.
“What a fantastic evening,” said Sir Anthony Jolliffe, “and we are grateful to Hayne and Pat Russell for all their sustained hard work on organising this and other Society functions.”
Master of Ceremonies Colin Fry, from Lyme Regis, donated his fee to the Youth Cancer Trust.
HAVE YOU heard from “Race to Infinity”? Sounds a bit Toy Story but is it child’s play? If you think your broadband connection is slower than what you’re actually paying for, read on because if Beaminster and Bridport’s votes are anything to go by, West Dorset is not even in the race. Yet.
BT are conducting a survey for the establishment of their superfast fibre optic Broadband within the UK called Infinity Services. Have we got a chance in West Dorset to even get what some of us already pay for but are not getting: a fast connection?
Well… five areas of the UK (yes 5) with the largest percentage of votes by 31 December 2010 will win the chance to be the lucky BT’s Infinity race winners. ‘Chance to win’ never guarantees anything in my books but lack of trying certainly guarantees failure.
So, before you go and vote please tell all your friends, your colleagues, your neighbours, your parents and whatever you do please don’t forget your silver surfer friends. We do live in West Dorset after all. Only 8 people have voted for Beaminster out of 1,800, Bridport is marginally better with 38 votes out of 8,110 (on Monday 25 October 2010).
Our neighbours Weymouth will probably be on fast track mode thanks to the Olympics but let’s face it, Beaminster, Bridport or Sherborne may well be in West Dorset too, it doesn’t mean we’ll have any of that legacy. Go on, it takes a minute, does not cost a penny and it’s nice to be full of hope once in a while…
To Infinity and Beyond? Go: http://on.fb.me/c0Fn20
THERE’S been an extraordinary collapse in sales of the Western Gazette’s West Dorset and Sherborne editions.
Sales of the West Dorset edition dropped to just 317 a week during the first half of this year, according to official circulation figures.
The Sherborne edition fell to 445 a week.
What were they before?
Look at this.
Average circulation of the Gazette’s West Dorset edition for the second half of last year (July – Dec 2009) was 2,663.
Sherborne’s average sale over the same period was 2,841.
So the West Dorset edition has lost 2,346 of its buyers – that’s 88%.
The Sherborne edition has lost 84% of its buyers (2,396).
The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) certificate for the Western Gazette, over the first half of this year, is unusually revealing because of the paper’s merger between March and June of its West Dorset and Sherborne editions.
So you can see that at the start of this year the West Dorset edition was selling 925 copies a week, Sherborne 1,044.
If those numbers seem much less than the ones given above for the last six months of 2009, well, we must remember that those figures were averaged out over six months, and guess that they must have been considerably higher in the summer of 2009 than they were at the end of the year.
Anyway, come March 2010 the Western Gazette suddenly merged its Sherborne and West Dorset editions, with Sherborne initially given much greater prominence than West Dorset.
The merger was not well received in the Bridport area.
Nevertheless, sales for the joint edition from 18 March to 3 June averaged 2,304; that’s more than the combined total for West Dorset and Sherborne at the start of the year.
However, in June the two separate editions appeared again. At the time, a Western Gazette staffer told me, in conversation, that the merged edition had indeed proved to be particularly unpopular in the Bridport area, where readers had been deserting it.
Are they coming back? Buyers, once lost, can be hard to recover.
The ABC website only gives figures up until the end of June, which takes us back to where we started: West Dorset 317, Sherborne 445.
The Gazette’s circulation overall for Jan – June 2010 is recorded as 30,052 (down from 30,789 July – Dec 209).
So West Dorset now accounts for just over 1% of that, Sherborne nearly 1.5%.
Incidentally, the population of the area covered by West Dorset District Council, which obviously includes Sherborne, is about 97,000.
Editor’s Note: The drops above – 88% and 84% – look incredible, but they are based on official figures from the ABC, and they have been double-checked. Nevertheless, if there is some mistake lurking somewhere, I’d be pleased to have it pointed out to me.
A puzzle about circulation
There is a further question about all these figures that I don’t understand, which is how exactly it’s been worked out that the Western Gazette’s average circulation for Jan – June 2010 is 30,052.
According to the ABC, it’s selling 3,847 in North Dorset, 12,345 in Yeovil, 3,482 in Crewkerne and 5,253 in South Somerset. That’s 25,017 in total. Then there’s an average of 280 added for multiple bulk sales, making 25,297.
The average figures for West Dorset and Sherborne are more difficult to work out, because of the odd periods of time that different editions were for sale, but let’s just – as an indicative figure – add up the different numbers for each edition and divide them by three.
We’ll cut the number for the merged West Dorset – Sherborne edition in half, giving 1,152 of the total recorded sale of 2,304 to each.
So, West Dorset: 925 + 1,152 + 317 = 2394, divided by three = 798.
Sherborne: 1,044 + 1,152 + 445 = 2641, divided by three = 880.
Add 798 and 880 to the previous total of 25,297 and you’ve got 26,695.
That is an indicative figure only but it’s still not very close to 30,052.
As I hinted before, I’ve got a horrible feeling I’m missing something here, or that there’s a mistake lurking somewhere, which is why I’ve been worrying at these calculations.
So I’ll say again: if anyone can enlighten me, please do.
TRACES of a Roman camp have been discovered near Sherborne in West Dorset.
Aerial photographs taken earlier this summer revealed three sides of a lightly built defensive enclosure in a barley field near Bradford Abbas.
Marks showed up through the crop because the long hot days of June had parched the ground.
The Roman camp discovered near Bradford Abbas in West Dorset. Photograph copyright English Heritage.
English Heritage say the camp provided basic protection for Roman soldiers on manoeuvres in the first century AD.
It’s one of only four discovered in the south west of England.
Aerial photography was developed as a technique to uncover archaeological secrets by OGS Crawford before World War Two.
You can read more about him and Dorset by clicking here.
English Heritage say they were lucky to avoid the effects of the Icelandic ash which grounded thousands of other flights, but not their Cessnas.
Damian Grady, English Heritage Senior Investigator based in Swindon, said: “Fortunately the piston-powered Cessnas used by aerial archaeologists were not affected by the ash, so it was easier to undertake planned flights inside airspace around Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and Bristol airports.
“Promising signs started to emerge in late May when the dry conditions had started to reveal cropmarks on well drained soils, especially river gravels and chalk in the East and South East of England. By June it became clear that the continuing dry conditions would produce good results across most of the country. We then targeted areas that do not always produce cropmarks, such as clay soils, or have seen little reconnaissance in recent years due to recent wet summers or busy airspace.
“Unfortunately July saw deterioration in the weather which reduced the amount of flying we could do and the cropmarks started to disappear just before the harvest got underway.
“It will take some time to take stock of all the sites we have photographed, but we expect to discover several hundred new sites across England.”
SO FAR in this election campaign, Oliver Letwin has worn out two pairs of shoes.
It’s amazing he hasn’t also worn out his tongue.
After talking for an hour and a quarter in Loders Village Hall near Bridport - and no answer he gave was ever less than five minutes long, and several were nearly ten - he said he’d been walking and talking his way around West Dorset’s towns and villages, eight hours a day for the last four weeks.
The Conservatives – in short – are taking no chances against the Liberal Democrats’ candidate Dr Sue Farrant.
“Imagine it could just be down to one vote,” said one canvasser. “If that one vote is in Highacres [part of Loders], we want to get it.”
So the Tories motored down through one of the old drovers’ tracks into Loders just as children were coming out of the village school, and they left more than five hours later.
Take money off poor people
One highlight:
6-year-old to canvasser – “When I couldn’t get to sleep one night I came downstairs and I watched one of those things on telly and I saw David Cameron saying he was going to take money off poor people and give it to the rich.”
Canvasser: “I don’t remember him saying quite that. I think you’ll find he has the right economic policies…”
6-year-old: “I think people should vote for Nick Clegg, although I’m only six so I’m not old enough to vote…”
At which point I fancied I could see the canvasser thinking, “good thing too”.
Oliver Letwin himself addressed an audience of 40 people, only one of them aged under 40. All but 4 of the men there were bald or balding; a lot of what hair there was, was grey or greying.
The King
Dr Letwin was sporting the beginnings of what could be a very fine quiff. Put him in a jump-suit, dye his hair black, teach him Blue Suede Shoes and you could call him The King – at least, The Philosopher King – or so I fancied during an extraordinarily long and detailed question about litter on the A-Roads and Motorways of the South of the United Kingdom, with particular reference to the area surrounding Bath…
Sadly Dr Letwin didn’t sing, but he did speak with tremendous fluency and seriousness, interspersed with fits of boyish enthusiasm for the resurrection of engineering, and for using the findings of American academics for nudging social changes, for example by using different rates of tax to encourage a fashion – if fashion there must be – for drinking alcohol that is less than super-strength. You see his manner of speaking is, in itself, contagious.
Anyway, last month, when Dr Letwin’s idea of “The Big Society” was being derided on the front page of one national newspaper as “bollocks”, I had this exchange on Twitter with greendrawers.
On personal level @greendrawers I feel sorry for Oliver Letwin seeing his ideas trashed as “b*ll*cks” – cos they derive from West Dorset 2:23 PM Apr 21st via web
Letwin’s never put it like this @greendrawers but the Big Society stuff has been hidden theme of his Western Gazette columns for years 2:25 PM Apr 21st via web
Question @greendrawers is whether Letwin persuaded himself his ideas would work elsewhere – or do they only suit places like W Dorset? 2:29 PM Apr 21st via web
If indeed @greendrawers Letwin ever even right in 1st place abt W Dorset? But fascinating, even noble, attempt to make rest UK like here 2:32 PM Apr 21st via web
Well yes @greendrawers Twitter imperfect for conducting philosophical debates. Perhaps aim was to make UK more like here, not exactly same 2:53 PM Apr 21st via web
As it happened, this subject came up. Dr Letwin spoke of “the fantastic tapestry” of West Dorset life, its clubs, its societies, its volunteer litter-pickers in Chickerell, its community pubs, its community shops, its community First Responders in Thorncombe, and so on.
“People get together and they do things for themselves. This is a natural thing in West Dorset.”
And then he added: “What we have in West Dorset is not a universal phenomenon in the UK. We want to make it a universal phenomenon.”
The essence of the idea of the Big Society was, he said, that people were not just like atoms, they could bond together to make things better.
He recalled how he’d been mocked as crazy for once making a speech about beauty, but he insisted that the look and feel of things was important, and people should be given a greater say in, through, for example, changes to the planning system, from the top down, starting with the abolition of Regional Spatial Strategies, currently, in his view, menacing Sherborne with absorption into a Greater Yeovil.
“Together,” he said, “we forge the kind of place we’re in.”
Editor’s Note: Candidates standing for West Dorset in the 2010 General Election campaign are Dr Oliver Letwin (Conservative), Dr Sue Farrant (Liberal Democrat), Dr Steve Bick (Labour), Oliver Chisholm (UKIP) and Susan Greene (Green).
Spot the difference: Sherborne looks like it is going to be central to the Western Gazette's future coverage of West Dorset.
THE WESTERN Gazette has merged its West Dorset edition with its Sherborne edition.
The move has been badly received by readers such as Bill Gray, 60, of Bridport, who said: “It’s rubbish, that paper.”
In the 1990s, the Gazette was one of the biggest weekly newspapers in the country, with a dozen or so different editions.
But its sales have been steadily declining, and its shrinkage this spring is the latest in a series of changes ripping through the West Dorset media landscape.
The West Dorset – Sherborne merger comes three weeks after the Bridport News and Lyme Regis News moved their publication day to Wednesday and increased their pagination to 80 pages. The News titles have launched new features and initiatives, as have the competing View From free weeklies. (The View From titles also come out on Wednesday; the Gazette is published on Thursday).
The Gazette still has four reporters covering West and North Dorset, and it dedicates space to Dorset court reporting.
Gazette staff – speaking unofficially – say the merger is meant to give a better service to readers across West Dorset by providing a spread of news relevant to the whole district. Sherborne, Bridport, and Beaminster are all covered by West Dorset District Council, and all fall within the Bishopric of Sherborne. Indeed, viewed historically, Sherborne is the ancient capital of Wessex.
But, around Bridport, potential buyers were not keen to keep paying 60p for the newly merged paper. Comments included:
“It’s a waste of time.”
“They’ve killed it.”
“I’m not interested in the Western Gazette – I don’t know why anybody would buy it.”
“I suppose it depends on how much coverage poor old West Dorset gets.”
“If I was in the shop and I saw that [SHERBORNE in bold letters on the masthead, WEST DORSET smaller and fainter underneath] I’d think it’s not the local one and I wouldn’t buy it.”
“It’s rubbish, that paper, there’s nothing in there of any interest to anybody in Bridport, what there is has already been in the Bridport News.”
“If they managed to come up with a fantastic story about Bridport that nobody else had got, then I might buy the paper, but otherwise no, it’s boring.”
The average weekly sale of the Western Gazette’s West Dorset edition was 2,663 in 2009, according to official ABC figures. Sherborne’s tally was 2,841.
The vox pops above suggest the Gazette will struggle this year to do better in West Dorset.
The Gazette was asked last week for its own official comments, but no response has been received.
Editor’s Note: I had hoped to find more enthusiasm for the Western Gazette. In recent months it has published good stories on subjects like the South West Quadrant, planning applications in West Bay Road, Cattistock playground and Dorchester town centre. I’m interested in Sherborne news and I know there is traffic from West Dorset to Sherborne for pubs (eg The Digby Tap), shops (eg Booklore, Buzz, Fired Earth, the Pear Tree Delicatessen, the Toy Barn, etc) and grand structures like the Abbey and the two castles. But everyone I spoke to was scornful of the merged edition.
The Western Gazette is published by Northcliffe, best known as the regional arm of the company which publishes The Daily Mail. It’s possible Northcliffe sees more of a future in the west and south of Dorset for its websites www.dorchesterpeople.co.uk and www.weymouthpeople.co.uk Dorchester in particular is regarded as prime territory for rounding up Daily Mail readers.
Last year Northcliffe also considered launching a bridportpeople site. In total (I was told by a Northcliffe manager) the company has registered 3,000 domain names nationwide, covering towns with a population of more than 10,000 people.
Meanwhile, View From Publishing is experimenting with an online newspaper called the Dorset Weekender, while the Bridport News, Lyme Regis News and Dorset Echo – all owned by Newsquest - are conducting surveys to see how people interact with their websites.