consisted of dancing to Joe Loss and his band. I remember I did not think much of the dance floor where they held the important competitions.
There were then presentations of various dance trophies. The finale was the Dagenham Girl Pipers, who were very famous at that time.
Horses, Bowls and a Visit By the Tourcoing Club
Stan Gunary was a law unto himself, but an extremely generous person. When he came into Rotary, I got to know Stan very well and he turned out to be a very good friend, as well as a good client. He had a market garden and kept two Suffolk horses. He grew asparagus which was his most profitable crop. He had a stable full of horses when the war came along. Even after the war, when they retired, they had the two horses and, in fact, they were well worked, because it was easier to farm the asparagus with horses than with the tractor. Stan was very good to the Club. He gave a lot of his time to the Canon’s Bowls Cup who always played on Stan’s lawn. He had a number of bowls events there and was an extremely interesting man. He was President the year that Tourcoing paid us a visit, and I always remember that, on one of the food courses, they gave us Stan’s asparagus. The dinner was held at the Old Bell in Upminster.
It was in Stan’s year that we arranged the visit of the Tourcoing Club to come to us. As I said before, my son had been there and the son of one of them had visited us. Several made visits during the year. In May we arranged for them to come on a Friday evening to Sunday. Six of us waited on Victoria station for the train to come in to meet our guests. We had with us Val May, the headmaster of Hornchurch Grammar School. He spoke excellent French and made things easier for us. The train arrived and the party of half dozen with their wives came and introductions took place. One of them was the President Ponthieux, and he and his wife stayed with Ronald Green, the dentist in the Club. Archie Rogers was there and some people called Mallard stayed with him. My two guests were Stéphane Dumortier and Marie-France. We had our introductions and four of us took our guests for a meal in Soho before we went home. We agreed to meet the next morning and, when we got home, we sat talking with them for a long time. Stéphane had been an interpreter during the war and had perfect English, which was a great help; he was a most interesting man.
Next morning we were met by a coach and went off for a quick tour of London. Quite a number of other Club members met us for this day, and
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