Annual reports of the Club in recent years reiterate the theme "more members, more sales, more use of the Club", until you and your Committee suffer from fatigue when the trading difficulties of the Club are mentioned. It Is true that while all clubs which are not filled with gaming machines face a very harsh trading climate, our Club is also subject to the state of the University. When members and potential members are working harder and longer, the Club suffers too.

The Report is always a time for thanks, and this year I would like to thank especially you, our members, who responded to the Committee's call for more use of the Club when we faced an extremely hard time in August last year. The financial reports show that the Club has once again survived - without the increased support of all the members this would not have happened.

The route to financial stability has also been helped by increased use of the Club by the Senior Management of the University and the Committee would want me to acknowledge the help this has been in our financial planning.

Increasing the membership continues to be a priority. Most of the committed members have been members of the university community for a long time and we suffer from a lack of appeal to younger staff. This was very obvious at the party to celebrate ten years of Rod Scroop's management. An excellent affair, but grey heads prevailed! Understandably salaries and contracts affect the interest of younger staff in the Club - membership is always a matter of assessing the benefit against the cost. Networking was once a very obvious benefit of membership, but is now less so and we need to find alternative attractions to increase membership. Our membership campaign among retired staff, Women's Club and Graduate Students has not proved successful - a large effort brought very small returns. While the Club will continue to explore new approaches to club membership, it seems that gains will continue to be small.

We were sorry to lose Aaron Pollard, the Assistant Manager appointed early last year, whose cocktail making abilities were such a feature of the Club on Friday evenings. In the end we could not afford to match the salary he was able to command elsewhere. The arrangements for Rod Scroop's part-time management of the Club have been very successful, so much so that at times I have felt that we have been exploiting Rod, as we seem to get far more of his time than we should. The tenth anniversary party was a small tribute to our manager who has, by his imaginative ideas, marketing packages, enthusiasm and professional knowledge, sustained us for ten mostly very difficult years. Many of us know what a big contribution Rod has made to our wine education and to obtaining wines especially for us - we can help the Club by telling everyone what a great place it is for wine buying. I think that all members and the Committee especially would like to acknowledge our debt to Rod and his wife, Sue, who must at times wonder why he continues to work in the university environment.

Rod has continued to be supported by the Club staff; if we are lucky to have Rod with us for so long, we are also grateful for the long and valuable service we have from Rita van der Wegen and Denise Beaty as well as the rest of the staff. The Club Chair and Committee understand very well the important contributions made by our staff to the operation of the Club and to the friendly, "clubbable" feeling of the Club. Denise in particular put in a big effort over the installation of our new accounting software (along with Paquita Bulbeck) this year. Although a better package, transitions of this kind make big demands on staff time and abilities. And yes, we are Y2K compliant!

Personal thanks go to the members of the Committee - despite gloomy outlooks, they have continued to believe that the Club has many good things to offer the university community and that its continued existence is worth fighting for. In particular, the work of our Treasurer, Paquita Bulbeck, has been outstanding in helping us to know just how close we are to any financial precipices and how we might step back from them, while at the same time carrying the extra burden of all financial officers on committees.

And thanks from the Committee to the members - for those extra sales at the end of 1998, for your continued support and interest, and because the Club is the members.

Gerald Laurence
Chair
May 1999

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