handy. We had to leave the Bell, unfortunately, because they were going to knock it down. The Christmas tree was always a success. In those days we collected for parcels for the old people. The only trouble was the Round Table were doing the same sort of thing. They were very good at entertaining the old people. Later on we altered it to having an old peoples’ Christmas dinner.
The International Committee and Links with Cambridge
Various committees used to have events of their own to raise money. We frequently had speakers whom we supported in their charity. The District Governor always had a charity that we supported. The International Committee at this time had plenty to do because of the various organisations for young people and students. We went to the Students’ British Council meetings in London and met a lot of foreigners there. We met them at Upminster and took them off to Cambridge. That was one thing we did. Our Chairman was Charlie Brech. He was a printer in St. Lawrence Road. He lived at Thorpe Bay and we had our Council meetings there. The one thing about our meetings with Charlie was that he used to go down to Leigh-on- sea to the cockle sheds, and we always had fresh cockles that evening.
Charlie was very keen on youth. We had a camp another year that the council ran at Stubbers just near Corbets Tey. They used to have a camp fire there for the evening. We had a lot of youngsters come to visit us and we sat and talked. One or two lovely girls and chaps kept in touch with us for a number of years.
Another one we met from our Cambridge outings was a Japanese man called Mr. Matsimoto. He was training to be a police inspector at Hendon College. I wondered how we would get on with him because Jean’s brother, who was in the RAF, had been a prisoner of war in Singapore and taken to Java. He got the DFC for flying out there at that time. He was in Japan and we did not hear for two years whether he was alive or not. This chap was so charming, however, that we got on well on that Cambridge visit. We then had him at home and he was so interested in all our youngsters. He showed us photos of his family at home. He could not have been nicer. He did very well. The last time we heard he was in charge of police at Yokohama.
The Cambridge visits started when we had a visitor one week who talked about the Cambridge colleges. He was a Rotarian and his hobby was taking people round the colleges. His wife was a dragon! We decided to take
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