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Friends of RTBP Autumn 2018 Newsletter

Friends of RTBP Autumn Newsletter 

November 2018

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Dear Friends of the River Thames Boat Project,

Welcome to another issue of the Newsletter. Although the summer is over there’s been plenty going on in the last few months perhaps high-lighted by the October day when Discoverer was out cruising and education days were being held both on Venturer at Teddington Lock and at Hermitage Moorings in Wapping. Looking ahead to 2019, challenges will be to ensure more days when both boats are fully utilised and to step up the level of fund-raising as well as celebrating our 30 year anniversary.

With the festive season in sight have you thought about gifting a Friends membership to a friend or relative or how about running the Hampton Court half-marathon or following Nigel's example and joining a charity bike-ride?

Your comments and stories are as welcome as ever.

With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

Kate Oatham, Editor 
kate@rtbpfriends.org


From the Wheelhouse


After yet another challenging quarter nursing Discoverer back into good health and inducting the first volunteer skippers, Peter is taking a well-earned holiday.







Boat Project Fundraising and Event News

The Charity has had a busy time with fundraising and other events since the last newsletter. Across September, October and November, we have managed water stations at two running events, cheering on runners for the Richmond Marathon and the Kingston Half Marathon, attended an Open Day at Twickenham Rowing Club, held our annual Bangers and Fireworks evening, attended a Waitrose Community Matters 10th Birthday event, had our annual volunteer forum on Thames Venturer and managed the charity stall at Surbiton Farmers Market promoting the work that we do, selling merchandise, recruiting volunteers and generally connecting with the local community. All this activity has added £1,945 to the fundraising pot bringing our total for the year to date to just under £3,500. Thank you to all our volunteers who have helped at these events and to the organisers for supporting our charity.
Into 2019, there is a date in the diary for 17th February to man a water station at the Hampton Court Half Marathon. We need volunteers of course, but we can also get free entry for a number of runners so if you or friends and family would like to enter and raise funds for the Boat Project that would be fantastic! There’s time to get in training before February(!) so please let Kate in the office know ASAP if you are interested.

Kate Dodds, Marketing and Fundraising Manager



Education & Learning News

The autumn term has again been busy, with a good crop of education bookings, and our crack team of volunteer teachers and support crew hard at work. We are proud to report that we have smashed all previous records in terms of volume of education bookings, with nearly 70 bookings in 2018-19 to date.

We have rolled out the Drastic Plastic module, which has been inserted into the School on the River content, to great appreciation by schools. To date, we have delivered 20 sessions with primary children, and one school sent us a sheaf of letters thanking the volunteers for the day, which they’d found very positive and useful. The teacher prefaced by saying:

"I am writing to say thank you for our fantastic trip to the Thames Boat Project last week. Every child in my class (and all the adults too!) had a great time. I felt that the children learnt a lot from their visit and gained valuable scientific and thinking skills. Since our visit, the children have been really inspired by the work we did, looking at their plastic usage, and have even written to the council to ask them to ban bottled water. Thank you for highlighting the issues the environment faces in a child-friendly and informative way”.   
(Year 5 teacher, Our Lady of the Rosary School, Staines)


One effect of our enthusiastic delivery is that the resources, in which we’ve attempted to use as little plastic as possible, are falling to pieces and this has created problems for teaching volunteers. Thankfully, long-standing volunteer Pete Gallon stepped up to the mark and created a set of wooden tags with leather ties to represent towns and cities along the river Thames. In the education session, the children re-create the Thames, with its habitations, out of a rope, and then pass rogue pieces of plastic debris along it, until they all accumulate on the world map at the end. 

The wooden tags have been tested out and are great. They are water-resistant, easy to handle for younger children, and underline the point that we want to communicate to children - that plastic does not have to be ubiquitous, we don’t need to be dependent on it in all areas of our lives and items made of other materials can make our life-experience richer and more satisfying and have lower impact on the environment.

Zaria Greenhill, Education Coordinator


30 Years Celebrations Next Year!

Next year in 2019 we will be celebrating 30 years of the River Thames Boat Project! This is an amazing achievement and we will be marking it with special events and activities throughout the year starting from April which is the month that the charity was registered back in 1989. September will also be a big focus for a fundraising sponsored walk Bridge to Bridge event - more details to follow shortly. Many of you will have memories and stories to tell from these 30 years and any ideas and contributions you can add to make it a very special year will be gratefully received.

Kate Dodds, Marketing and Fundraising Manager


Bangers and Fireworks

Recipe for a Perfect Fireworks Evening
 
Take one cosy Dutch barge, fill with friendly folk, and serve up Teddington’s best sausages, buttery jacket potatoes, baked beans and coleslaw, and wash down with preferred tipple. 

Wrap up well before going on deck to marvel for a glorious quarter of an hour at the superb Lensbury firework display the other side of the river, whether old-fashioned Catherine wheels and shooting stars, or feathery shimmers and heart-thumping starbursts, all against a clear sky.
 
Return below for excellent crumble and matchless bread and butter pudding, plus custard and cream, of course. See you next year…

Sarah Herrick, Office Volunteer

Photos - John Frye



Next Generation Volunteer

For some time I had been intending to volunteer for the Boat Project and never quite got around to it. Instead over the years, I enjoyed hearing stories of crewing from my mother, Anna Stokoe and godfather Giles Dimock from the shore. However I hope it may have made her smile to have seen me steer the Thames Discoverer on Friday 28th September through a couple of locks without a scrape as we travelled from Kingston to Chertsey and back with a most gracious group from HANDS. My first outing was made memorable in Giles' cheering company, the sun shone upon us and news of the birth of my niece reached us from Australia just before Shepperton. For those of you who knew my mother, I reckon she would have enjoyed that too. Thank you to everyone who made a donation to the Project in her memory. I am delighted to hear that the £1600 raised will be used to support the work of the Boat Project.

Pollyanne Stokoe, Crew Volunteer



Annual General Meeting

An AGM is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is an important moment in the year of any well-run organisation – a chance to look backwards and forwards, and to reflect, consolidate and put gripes and hopes on the table.
 
Keith Knox took to the floor for the first time, no longer as Acting Chair, but Chair. No mincing of words: ‘This has been a turbulent year’, what with Louise Sibley’s stepping down as Chair, Miranda Jaggers’s departure, the triumphant arrival of Discoverer but then her subsequent two-month laying off at the height of the summer to cure transmission problems, Fothergill’s little bombshell to vacate the premises, and big developments at the dock.
 
David Bell, Jonathan Chapman and Peter Low were all swiftly and appreciatively re-elected as Trustees.
 
Then, in turn, Stephen West, Peter Oldham, Zaria Greenhill, Kate Dodds and Pippa Butterfield each took to the floor, succinctly covering the main issues. ‘This is a prudently run charity’, and plenty of optimism is due when both boats are fully utilised. We have strong reserves, necessary for the move, as well as running repairs to the boats, IT upgrades and work on the dock, not forgetting a necessary refit of Venturer. 
 
Not only have we had our first day of both boats being in operation at the same time, which has meant that Discoverer has been on her first trips with volunteer skippers, but also our first Triple Day in October, with School on the River taking place at both Hermitage Moorings in Wapping and at Teddington Lock, as well as a cruise on Discoverer. We have had a record 70 school bookings for the financial year, the Drastic Plastic initiative especially appreciated by teachers, and with good feedback from the family learning days for home-schooled children.
 
No let-up on fund-raising!’’ came as no surprise. In 2019 we will be celebrating 30 years of RTBP, a great opportunity to tell or remind people about us, with lots of press coverage. The ambition is to find £12,000, on top of regular donations and grant applications. There will be a party in the spring! And mugs, of course – and how about pin badges to be snapped up by our eager and ever-expanding client base, and Christmas cards? (Keep the ideas coming.)
 
We were shown a photo of the Tamesis HQ, our new office home on the Teddington side of the river, of which we will take up a ‘compact and bijou’ part in January. It’s a good fit: Tamesis has similar values to us in making the Thames accessible, and we’ll be much closer to the boats. The legalities are almost sewn up at the dock, we await a final confirmation from Aeon and RBK.
 
Pippa’s glamorous catwalk colleagues showed off the RTBP sweatshirt, fleece and jacket to encourage crew members to wear their kit on board. Can there be pale blue for summer too?
 
Questions from the floor covered Premium Bonds or other accessible investments; do we make the most of Gift Aid?; the timescale of the Kingston Council works on the new accessible walkway in Canbury Gardens; a review of our whistle-blowing policy; what’s the difference between a director and a trustee? (as a company we need to have directors, as a charity we need trustees); safety aspects on board Discoverer (steps, grab rails, anchor-handling, visibility of the crew from the skipper’s viewpoint); new rostering to be up and running for the next season; yes, there is an accident book on both boats, with the first aid kit; and please can the website be updated with the various roles of the Directors/Trustees? All points noted and for consideration/action where necessary.
 
Throughout the evening there were thanks and more thanks, general and particular, to the fantastic staff, and to the wonderful volunteers who raise loads of money and ‘keep the boats afloat’. ‘We look forward to a calmer season,’ said Keith.
 
................and then there was Cake.



Sarah Herrick, Office Volunteer



Nigel's Cycling Challenge

A big thank you to all who sponsored me on my bike ride. I managed to raise £1300 through your wonderful donations. I was originally going to do the Velosouth Charity Bike Ride on 23rd September around the South Downs, but this was cancelled due to safety concerns related to high winds. I finally did my bike ride on 16th October, riding from my home to Buckingham Palace then to Windsor and then back again, a total of 102 miles which I completed in just under 8 hours. A big thank you to Peter Oldham who did the ride with me and supported me throughout the planning and training. It was the first time I have ridden this far and I am proud of my achievement. I am looking to do another cycling challenge in 2020.

Here is a short video of my route with some photos:

https://www.relive.cc/view/1908527665

Nigel Williams, Volunteer


A new home for RTBP 

We announced at the AGM that we are planning to move to our new office in the early New Year. After many years in Richmond with the very generous Fothergills company, we will be taking up residence very close to the river in Teddington at Tamesis Sailing Club. The office has a wonderful view of the river, there is easy car parking, there is wheelchair access to a meeting room and we will be much closer to our boats. Once we have final dates confirmed for the move we will let everyone know.

Kate Dodds, Marketing and Fundraising Manager


Hermitage Moorings

Hermitage Community Moorings (HCM) is a co-operative which built, owns, and operates a mooring on the Thames in Wapping, next to the Memorial Gardens that overlook the river at what used to be known as Hermitage Wharf.

The mooring provides berths for up to 23 vessels: enabling a mixture of long term residential live-aboard use and short term visitor boat use. HCM provides well-managed river access for local people, including educational and recreational facilities.

This year RTBP delivered a total of 8 days education to local primary schools in East London at these moorings. Children do a version of Eco-Venturers appropriate to the moorings, as Venturer is not present. Hermitage River Projects, the charitable arm of the moorings, supports us with some funding towards the costs of 10 school bookings a year, which we are confident of achieving in 2019. 

Zaria Greenhill, Education Coordinator


The Urban Mermaid

Starting on 1st November 2018, Lindsey Cole swam 120 miles from the source of the River Thames to Teddington Lock, collecting plastic to highlight how we are choking mermaids and creatures in our waters. Lindsey’s support boat was manned by artist Barbara de Moubray who pulled a giant mermaid sculpture made of plastic bottles. They asked passers-by to litter pick along the river and put their findings inside the mermaid so that by the time they reached London the sculpture represented a small percentage of the plastic currently polluting the River Thames. ​

Boat Project friends and volunteers turned up at Teddington Lock to celebrate her arrival and John Frye captured the event. 

For more information visit 
https://www.urbanmermaid.org/


 

 







 

Main Contents

From the Wheelhouse
Boat Project Fundraising and Event News
Education & Learning News
30 Years Celebration Next Year!
Bangers and Fireworks
Next Generation Volunteer
Annual General Meeting
Nigel's Cycling Challenge

A new home for RTBP
Hermitage Moorings
The Urban Mermaid


Sidebar Contents

Calendar
Client Comments
Friends Events
Farewell to Bill Timmis
Friends Subscription
Fundraising Help
Charter Thames Discoverer or Venturer



Calendar

7th December: Volunteer's  Supper - 7.30 for 8.00 at Cote in Teddington - SOLD OUT!
11th December: Teddington and Hamptons Rotary Club Santa Sleigh Collection – 6-8pm in Teddington*
21st December to 2nd January: RTBP office closed for Christmas break
12th February: Friends Curry Evening at Sheesh Mahal, Twickenham
17th February: Hampton Court Half Marathon – runners needed!*

TBA March/April: Friends visit to the River Transport Museum, Wapping

* Volunteers are needed for these events
 

Client Comments

'We 'Shufflers' and 'Shakers' needed a break
So, with nothing to lose, we booked on this cruise
The day was so sunny and it didn't cost much money
So we sat back and relaxed, not over-taxed
Many thanks to the crew who cared for us few
And made our day fine so we had a great time'


Friends Events
 
We are holding a Friends curry evening in February, in the Twickenham restaurant we used several years ago (Sheesh Mahal). An evening to enjoy some nice company and scrumptious food and add a little money to the RTBP coffers. Please hold Tuesday 12 February in your diaries!
 
And we are planning a visit in March/April to the Thames River Police Museum which is housed in the former carpenter's workshop at Wapping Police Station (visits by appointment only). This will be combined with an opportunity to have tea/coffee and a snack at nearby Hermitage Community Moorings (see below) and learn about how RTBP's education programmes are delivered in partnership with the Hermitage Trust to benefit local schools in Tower Hamlets.
 
More details later, but please register an interest in either or both with 
info@rtbpfriends.org

 
Martha Tressler,
Louise Sibley


Farewell to Bill Timmis

It is with much sadness we announce the death of Bill Timmis who was a much valued friend and long serving volunteer and supporter of the Boat Project. Our thoughts are with his family and wife Fiona.

Peter Oldham, Skipper

Friends Subscription

Giving a Friends subscription gift to a family member or friend (or even yourself, if you aren’t already a Friend) will help boost these vital unrestricted resources and unlock the following benefits:

  • Membership of an active and vibrant community who care about access to the River Thames and about the river environment 
  • Invitations to special events that are organised for the Friends (see our website or latest Summer Newsletter for details)  
  • Special hire rates for private functions on board our two vessels, Thames Venturer and Thames Discoverer

To join the Friends, or give the gift of a subscription, follow this link, or make a donation of £60 direct to:  
Account Name              River Thames Boat Project
Sort Code                        40-52-40
Account Number          00007014
with your name and FRIEND in the reference box and drop us a line about who you would like to be the Friend, if not yourself.

 
Fundraising - How you can help

We need to keep raising funds for Thames Venturer as well as Thames Discoverer, so please can you think about asking:

1.Your local pub or group to organise a quiz or a bridge evening.
2. Your school or company to choose us as their charity.
3. Your employer to hold a mufti day for us.
4. Running a marathon or half marathon for us.
5. Holding a coffee morning for us.

Easy fundraising:
Make online purchases through
Give as You Live  or Easyfundraising.org.uk.
Order personalised cards from Mountbatten Cards.
More on our website fundraising page, here.



Charter Thames Discoverer or Venturer

If you have an anniversary you would like to celebrate, a business group you want to entertain or just simply want to throw a great party, you can hire Thames Discoverer or Venturer at special rates for a three hour cruise for up to 12 people, or a static event for up to 50 people.

Catering is available at an additional charge, if you don’t want to bring your own.

These special, reduced rates are only available to RTBP Friends and Volunteers - and you must be on board with your party. Please contact Pippa in the office to discuss prices and options for hosting your party.


Newsletter Feedback

If you have any suggestions regarding what you want to see more (or less) of please tell us.

If you have any specific ideas for articles please say so - fundraising activities, stories about the boat or the clients, whatever!  This is your newsletter - feel free to contribute to its content! Email kate@rtbpfriends.org


Friends Website

Remember that the Friends website is the place for the latest news and information on the Friends.  All past Newsletters and other information is available there.

We would love to get your feedback on the site, either via our email or hit the feedback button on the website.


www.rtbpfriends.org



The Friends Organising Team

Duncan Faircloth
Sarah Herrick
Kate Oatham
Louise Sibley
Martha Tressler
Anthea Wilkinson



Contact us:

Phone: 020 8940 3509
Email:
info@rtbpfriends.org
Web: www.rtbpfriends.org

Friends of the River Thames Boat Project
Supporting the work of the River Thames Boat Project - raising funds to provide access to the river.

Registered Charity No.: 1080281
Registered Office:
66 Hill Street,
Richmond,
TW9 1TW



Photo Credits:

Thanks to John Frye, Peter Oldham and others...


















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Copyright © 2018 Friends of River Thames Boat Project, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because of your connection with the River Thames Boat Project - Registered Charity No. 1080281. 
Our mailing address is:
River Thames Boat Project
66 Hill Street
Richmond, Surrey TW9 1TW
United Kingdom
 
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