Guide to Committee Members

Q: How many years have you been on the committee, and what was your first post?
A: I've been on the committee for about five years. At first I was just a "committee member" and then the radio officer post was created about 3 years ago.

Q: So what does being Radio Officer involve?
A: Officially it just means looking after and issuing Southern's collection of safety radios. We have 6 at the moment, all licensed and approved by the RAC. As well as this I also do general equipment work, working as part of a team for events with BP (Brian Price) and Paul Smith. We all do it together - with help from a few other members especially Brian Hugh.

Q: What have you been doing for the Winter Rally?
A: Mainly getting as many people as I can to help out - it's a lot of gear to move around. Most of the team have now done it previously so they know how it works. All we have to do is get them together with the kit. We start loading the kit on the Tuesday before, and get it back in on the Sunday. During this time the Stores look remarkably empty - it's the only time the floor gets a rest (remember that the Stores are on the first floor of a barn - Ed) To get stuff to Bournemouth we beg or borrow vehicles and trailers - lots of the people we involve have their own vehicles. We now use a 7½ ton lorry - we never used to but nowadays we've got more stuff. We load up 2000 stakes, 900 bolted stakes, boards, arrows, cones, 40 concrete buckets, signs, and various sorts of netting - we use a human chain to get the stuff up and down the stairs. All the equipment crews stay in a separate hotel about 2 miles from the Wessex. Once we're there we give people the work schedules. We've got a very good relationship with Jackie who runs the hotel who feeds and looks after us for the week. Then we just work through the programme. Friday is the busiest day as we finally set up the stages.

Q: How did you get started in motorsport?
A: I started reading magazines and watching the telly. I became a member of Croydon - and I still am a member. Through association with the Winter Rally I became a member of Southern. I started off in marshalling and then got involved with set-up crews. Also Croydon have an active 12 car championship which I used to compete on - with more damage than success.

Q: What was your best event?
A: The Winter Rally in 1987 was the Year of the Storms. We had 1000 trees to move and effectively had to organise a whole rally in 24 hours. We were chopping up big trees and pulling little ones out of the way with a Suzuki. We couldn't use power saws because we weren't licensed - and anyway, there weren't any to be had from the hire shops. Also the Forestry Commission had already sold some of the trees for telegraph poles so they weren't very keen on chopping too many of them up. There's no way we could have done it without the Forestry commission's help and their amazing machinery. Everyone was on the go all day and in the end we lost just 100 yards of stage. At the end of Saturday we all celebrated with champagne - which just knocked us all out! A second best-ever event was the London International Rally for the amount of work required in a short time. We came in to organise it quite late. There was an amazing sheer physical amount of work required to create stages effectively out of nothing - only one of the venues we used had a real defined route through it when we started. It was so much bigger than anything we'd done before - but it worked.

Q: And what your worst event?
A: It wasn't the event itself, it was the journey back. Coming back from Goodwood, it had been wet and drizzly all day and we were all soaked through. I was... well, not exactly hurrying, but I wanted to catch up with BP. The car went into a 360 spin and I managed not to hit a thing - kerbs, cars, nothing.