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May 2024 May 2024
43 years I headed the club which the main aim was to teach local children to
swim. Looking back, apart from my family, it is the achievement I am most proud
of, and the club still continues today nearly 50 years later under the excellent
guidance of Alan White and a new generation of teachers. I well remember that
first club night in June 1976 when 120 children and adults turned up to be taught to
swim in the tiny school pool. It was certainly a baptism by fire as Jane, Bryan and I
took turns to teach yet another group. Numbers settled a little after that and I look
back fondly at the many hundreds if not thousands of youngsters who have learnt
to swim at the club. From time to time, I still get former members come up to me
remembering fondly their time at the club: the barbecues and presentation nights
in our garden, the carnival floats, the galas.
There have I guess been a few other significant events in my life. Meeting Tom
Watch, the Weymouth channel swimming coach legend and in 1992 completing a
solo channel swim in 18 hours 41 minutes with the Channel Swimming Association. I
won the Rosemary George trophy for the most meritorious swim of the year for that
year because of the rough seas in the crossing. On the back of this I did a couple
of 26kms swims across the Gulf of Toroneos in Greece, a wonderful experience in
much warmer seas.

With others, I formed the East Dorset Open Water Swimming Cub in Poole and was
its founder chairman starting up the annual Seahorse Race at Studland where 300
swimmers compete over a 3.8kms course. The club and the race continue today. I
also swam a mile in every one of the remaining UK lidos in 2007/08 with my friend
Dave Pratten (100 miles in 100 lidos) raising over £4,000 for Save the Children fund. I
carried the Olympic torch in 2012 in recognition of my years teaching children to
swim. I also became Dorset County ASA president in 2005 and ASA South-West
president in 2018.

Meanwhile, I made a couple of national television appearances, first with Robson
Green on ITV with his wild swimming programme and then with Louise Minchin and
the BBC’s Real Rescues programme. I have covered these stories in previous
features for the parish magazine so I must not go over the detail again. They were
great fun to do, and it was interesting to see how programmes like these were put
together. My dramatic rescue from Dancing Ledge on the Purbecks in 2011 was
covered brilliantly by the BBC and Louise was charming. It was the second time
that I had been rescued by helicopter earning me the title in the family of, air miles
Bob!
Inspired by Diana I took up competitive flower arranging and have done quite well
at that over the years. I will never be as good as Diana as she is the real expert, but
I have had fun trying. Interestingly, our friends in the Dorset flower arranging world
treat me like a proper flower arranger and I have picked up the occasional Area
and Dorset County Show awards, so I am not a complete fraud!

In the last couple of years and 20 years after I retired from Canada Life, I have
been selling advertising space for Miranda’s West Dorset Magazine. It has been

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