Here we are, off down the M1 again for another A.G.M. It has been a couple of years since I last attended one, but this year not even the hotel changing its name can stop me.

There is a good-sized gathering in our room. As high noon strikes Cliff Underwood wants to get the proceedings underway, but our Chairman, Bernie Tarling, decides to wait a few minutes for stragglers. How wise he is; the room soon fills up completely and we have to send out for more chairs. I cannot remember seeing so many people at an A.G.M. before. Very encouraging. Bernie the Chair gets the meeting started. Item 1 on the Agenda then. Oh no you don’t! Cliff Underwood wants to count the votes. O.K Cliff, let's count the votes. Now, this sounds simple, doesn’t it ? But as it turns out, this is a most complicated and lengthy process, beyond my proper comprehension. It involves bits of forms and looking in the book and all sorts. It ends up with a gent I do not know with three votes, Clare Ash (nee Straiton), with two, and most of the ladies with one each, including Dunstable’s own Gilly Spencer who has the vote for Glasgow. I have never heard of Glasgow Octopush Club or realised that they are members of the B.O.A., not that that means much, but what Gilly had to do with this august body I have no idea. She plays for Dunstable or the Teeny Weeny Warriors, works in Milton Keynes and holidays in South Africa.

Apart from some humour derived from speculation on how the man with three votes was going to register his third vote when it came to a show of hands, the whole thing was ridiculous. Some years ago we banned proxy votes, but the little devils have weeviled their way back somehow. We must rebanish the horrible things. If a club wants to vote at the A.G.M., it should attend. If a club does not attend it cannot listen to the arguments put and also not care a great deal about the vote anyway.

We never did absolutely agree a voting figure, but it was about 18 or 19, a very large vote for an A.G.M. Finally we stopped counting votes and got on with the meeting. Nobody had read the Minutes of the Last Meeting, so we accepted them quickly and got on with Item No.2 on the Agenda: "Interrupting the Officers Reports". There were a lot of good reports from obviously hard-working officers, all properly interrupted in the traditional manner.

Next up it was the Election Of Officers. Bernie the Chairman had already stated in his report that he had been Chairman for four years and that was enough for any man, in my view it would be enough for any saint, so we needed a new Chairman. Normally this would be a huge stumbling block, but not this year. This year we had two candidates. So a proper election. Goodness. Both candidates were given three minutes to state their case. Keith Dunkinson from Northampton went first. HE said that he was just the man for the job and wanted to work to get more clubs playing and so more players in the game. Tim Arnold from Slough was the other candidate. He clicked three minutes into his go-faster wrist watch and told us he had been on four courses on being a chairman at Keele University which obviously made him perfectly qualified for the job. This took him 53 seconds. He spent the next two minutes and four seconds telling us of his plans for when he became chairman. These seem to consist entirely of his hobnobbing with very senior members of the Royal Family. HE finished with three seconds unused. We elected Keith.

Bernie the Chairman wanted to stand down, but Cliff Underwood would have none of it. It would seem that Cliff would not be happy until Bernie had overseen the election of all the Officers. Our Secretary promised to do one more year as Secretary only on the condition that at the end of the year he could give up Octopush for ever and get on with living a proper life. (This seems a bit funny as I write it, but I think that is what he said). Neil Dixon would continue as Chief Referee as long as he could continue sulking. Tony Mourad elected ‘Glasgow’ Gilly as Vice Chairman and Helen Field as Octopush News Editor. Clare Ash, or is it Straiton, would continue as Coaching Officer. No, Hold it. Tony Mourad has another proposal for the position. It is a lady that I have not heard of and whose name, I’m afraid, I cannot remember. She is not present at the meeting and has not sent anything about herself to be read. However, Tony says that she is very good with kids, so what more is there to be said? Clare has already reported her achievements and intentions at length and the Invisible Woman is not here so we proceed to the election. Clare goes out of the room with the ghost of the Invisible Woman and we take a vote. The Invisible Woman wins easily. Clare and the ghost are invited back into the room and Bernie dispenses with the tradition of telling the winner that they have won by telling Clare that she had lost; perhaps he does not like talking to ghosts. I do not know who was the most surprised and shocked: Claire, the ghost or me. On reflection it was probably not the ghost. I suggest that in future it is mandatory that, in a contested election, all the candidates should be present to give an account of themselves. Perhaps then we can avoid such ludicrous elections happening again.

Back to the meeting. Bernie wanted to elect a couple of other posts but Cliff vetoed them but made Bernie agree to some others instead. Bernie seemed a little miffed at this. Tim Arnold was offered several different positions on the Committee, but each time he politely and patiently told us that he had come seeking the Chairmanship, we had exercised our democratic rights to deny him his heart’s desire so he was not interested in any lesser post.

Finally we got to the important bit. You might have thought that Uncle Cliff was really going to retire from the administration of our sport. You might have had the seed of this idea planted in your mind by the article he wrote in the Octopush News saying just that. If you did, I’m very happy to inform you that you have been misled. The truth is that Uncle Cliff is no more able to retire than I am, and thank goodness for that. The loss to the sport will be enormous when he actually does. It turns out that Uncle Cliff still wants to be our CMAS Representative, help organise tournaments etc. etc. but is not getting any younger, so would be very pleased if someone else would do the Octopush News and, if they are very keen, the club’s records. If anyone does have a serious interest in looking after the records, please contact Cliff. Having got this sorted out, Uncle Cliff was ready to move on, so he let ex-chairman Bernie stand down and called a five minute pissers pause.

We all stopped for a chat and a drink and then the next surprising event took place: everybody started going home. We were only down to item No.4 on the Agenda, but off they went. Bernie the ex-chairman was itching to go. Presumably Tony M had finished his business and so left taking the man with three votes with him. Uncle Cliff girded his loins and departed, along with Dave Simpson. About 8 of the 10 ladies went, including the newly elected Vice Chairman and at least one other new Committee member. There were probably some others that I did not notice caught in the stampede for the door. When we recovered in the now half empty room, with Keith in the Chair we had to do the vote counting exercise all over again. Instead of the 18 to 19 teams represented in Part 1 of the meeting, we were now down to 10 or 11.

I have to say that I have never seen the like of this general exodus. What had these people come for? Clearly it was to elect the officers they wanted and go home. Perhaps we should apologise for inconveniencing them by putting the election of officers as far down the Agenda as Item No. 4. If it had been Item No. 1 they could have gone home an hour and a half earlier. It is a bit of a worry that new committee members were amongst the leavers. Obviously some of Keith’s committee are going to be keener than others.

Back to the meeting, now under Keith’s control. The first thing that he had to deal with was 5 or 6 changes to the constitution. As he had not seen these proposals until he sat down in the Chair one minute earlier this was an almost impossible task. He had had no time to consider the consequences; come to that nor had anyone else. For myself, I have no time for constitutions etc. in small organisations such as ours, whenever you write something down in constitution all it does it stop you doing something that you want to do at some later date. I think that a constitution should set up a committee and then say that the committee is empowered to act as it thinks best for the sport as a whole. Finally you should elect some good committee members.

However, at present we are cursed with a constitution which will need revising virtually all the time. This has to be done at a General Meeting. For any discussion at the meeting at all considered, I think that members should be advised of any meeting taking place, I also think that this should apply to any changes to the playing rules.

In our case, the now absent Uncle Cliff came to Keith’s rescue by ruling several of the proposals out of order before he went. So we referred the rest to the new committee for their consideration and go on with the changes to the playing rules. As usual it was pointed out that CMAS had let their rules get out of step with ours. As usual we sensibly thought that we should inspect the differences and propose adoption of any reasonable ideas whilst shunning the bad ones.

Onward to Any Other Business. Many good points were raised here including the perennial chestnut of how to encourage better attendance at the A.G.M. In the light of what had just happened, perhaps a short debate on how to stop people leaving half way through the meeting might have been more appropriate. It is a great pity that A.O.B. has to be at the end of a long meeting when everybody is shuffling their feet wanting to go home.

This is THE place on the Agenda where member clubs can put their points to the whole Association. Many of these points are valid and useful, sometimes almost revolutionary, but because it is where it is there is real feeling that we should rush through this item.

My other thought is on the advisability of changing Chairmen in mid-meeting. My comments are no reflection on Keith, who handled a difficult position very skilfully when he took over, but a brand new Chairman can not have prepared himself properly to chair the meeting, especially on the specialist technical subjects such as changes to the constitution and playing rules.

Clearly the outgoing Chairman will know of these matters in advance and probably will have discussed them with the committee so will have some idea how the debate might develop and have considered the answers to some of the queries that might be raised.

My solution to all these little difficulties is to make the Election of Officers the very last item on the Agenda. Then everyone would stay to the end of the meeting, A.O.B. would be discussed in less haste, and the outgoing Chairman would have chaired all the meeting before he became outgoing. All very neat, what!

By Tony Drakard, Dunstable

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