Dave Bell
Dave belongs to: Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade
Dave is an Engineering Manager. He joined the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade to give something back for the pleasure he has had from the sea. He is a Captain.
Dave was interviewed by Carl Greenwood on 7 December 2005. The interview took place at Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade garage and lasted 13 minutes and 17 seconds.
Social events
"Loads of social events- we’re very social people"
Loads of social events- we’re very social people. There are three main ones plus a whole host of others. The big one is the Smoker. We have a, it’s called the Smoker firstly because when it first- it’s a party to celebrate the founding of the brigade. And when the brigade was founded 141 years ago, to encourage the men to attend the meeting they put on tobacco- they put free tobacco on. So the guys would come and get this free tobacco and sign up.
So to this day this party is called the Smoker and it’s basically, it was originally a thank you from the committee to the men but these days it has become our biggest fundraiser and the men now do most of the work. We serve all the food, we serve all the beer and there’s a band and there are speeches and it’s quite an interesting evening. We don’t have a licence so we give the beer away and we don’t have measures we have gallon jugs and the guys, the brigadesmen walk around with gallon jugs filling people’s glasses up, so people end up quite merry really because they don’t know how much beer they’ve had, it’s just constantly there and the if guys get it right…(phew). But it’s an interesting evening.
And then recently we’ve been having a dinner to commemorate, we started on the 140th and we repeated again this year on the night the wreck of the Stanley happened. It’s called the Stanley Dinner, but it’s really called the Wreckage Dinner because that’s the kind of warped mind the brigades have. And it’s just a dinner where we all sit down and have dinner and it’s nothing more exciting. It sounds quite boring- it’s nothing more exciting than that but it’s just a quiet gentle event before the bedlam of Christmas starts.
And we obviously have other events through the year. The Rotary Club normally has a do- it normally hires us to put on their own smoker, but they have a bar, and it’s slightly different there. But as you’ve seen the watch house is a wonderful place to sing sea shanties in- it lends itself beautifully to that sort of stuff. Things with nautical themes we get involved in.
Dave has 7 memories in the memorynet:
Dave's memories with a Community theme:
Joining the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade- Social events
Dave's other memories:
Brigade members carrying out a training exercise of Collingwood FieldThis memory has these themes:
Community | Leisure | Music and Poetry | Traditions
Use this form to add your comment to the memorynet: