A Family Wedding
Rileys in Forfar - September 06
SRE North – East Area Synopsis
The North-East Area
of SRE is the largest of the five SRE Areas, and has currently 36 members,
of whom we regularly see about 10 to 14 at our monthly meetings on the
first Tuesday at the Torryburn Hotel in Kintore.
This Area is
historically the second oldest in the confederation of local area meetings
that now makes up SRE, having been running since 1984 originally as the
North-East Area meeting of the Riley RM Club. Nowadays you will find our
Noggin fixture details in the pages of the Club newsletters of the RM
Club, the Riley Register and the Riley Motor Club, all of whom are
apparently happy to claim us as their own – well, so they should, as
many of the members in our Area are also members of one two or all three
of these larger Riley clubs. Quickly off the top of my head, there are
thirty RMs among our members, eleven assorted Pre-war Rileys and three
assorted BMC Riley cars; so with examples of each in my personal fleet,
all these club subscriptions do get to feel expensive!
Our first Chairman
was Doug Thurston, who was, I am told, the person who managed to get the
meeting up and running on a permanent basis, following previous fits and
starts by other enthusiasts. The Noggin was held at the Thainstone Hotel,
when it was in the hands of the Lovie family, who were friends of Doug.
The Club remained there for several years, till the Thainstone was taken
over by a consortium involving Stewartie Milne, and was no longer
welcoming to folk with rusty old cars and no intention of spending more
than a couple of quid on a sandwich. I joined the Area in 1989, while the
meeting was still at the original Thainstone when it was comfortable,
cheap and welcoming, and was part of the decision to move to Gight House
Hotel when the Milne staff snash at the Thainstone Hotel and Country Club
became unbearable. I later took up the Chairmanship after Doug, who is now
our Patron, had to retire due to ill health about five years ago, and we
moved to the Torryburn shortly afterward, as the landlord at the GHH had
ceased to be welcoming. (Was it us, we wondered, but only fleetingly!)
We do not have a
structured programme of activities for the Monthly “Noggin and
Natters”. The meeting is
exactly that – a small drink, sometimes even a soft one, and an evening
of chat and merriment, interrupted occasionally by news and discussion of
some great and weighty matters if they threaten or otherwise bear on our
hobby, and tales of motoring problems and their solutions.
Our Noggins have a
routine supply of sandwiches and Tea / Coffee supplied by the Torryburn,
for which we collect ₤3-00
per head to pay the bill of ₤2-50
per head, putting the change into a club account for a rainy day. Phil
Gray is our Treasurer.
We do try to arrange
Garage Visits within the Area members, and the occasional run out to a
nice beauty spot with a pub conveniently sited.
Now and again we get invited to piggy-back on someone else’s
arrangements and enjoy an interesting visit that they have arranged. For
instance, we have gone to two visits arranged by the Garioch Vehicle
Restoration Society, one to the VOSA local Vehicle Testing Centre, and
another to the Barrack Collection of steam Traction Engines and Road
Rollers. (Members of our meeting are often also members of GVRS)
We do hold an Annual
Business Meeting at which I solemnly offer to stand down from Chairmanship
if the members so wish, but so far nobody has wanted to step up in my
place, so we go on as before. Phil is also regularly re-elected. Our Rep
to the Committee is Colin Watt, who is also routinely re-elected to rush
south, after work, the 100 miles or so to the four or five SRE Committee
meetings in the year. One needs one’s youth for that.
Recent Activity Report
Having read my
comments concerning the way we operate, the reader may not be surprised to
hear that there is not a lot of recent activity here.
This is a laid-back community, far from the feverish rush of great
metropoli like Aiberdeen. A visit to Dundee is hard work for us, and
Glesca or Embra are right oot.
We hold a
traditional Late Christmas dinner at the Rothie Inn, in Rothienorman,
which is further into the Aberdeenshire hinterland than Kintore.
This is usually in January or February, but his year it may have to
be an Early Easter Dinner, because the Pub kitchen is hors de combat as a result of Building improvements. We go to the
Rothie because Larraine is a lovely cook, and puts on a special event just
for us; we would not want to go any where else. We also savour the
challenge of getting to the place when the snaw is on the ground and the
blizzard blowing, and the even more challenging drive to get home after
the meal.
We try by our
attendance to support the local events such as those held at the Grampian
Transport Museum in Alford, though it is a few years since we mounted a
Club Stand there (not altogether our fault but the GTM’s policy changes
have put us into a no-man’s land) We also turn out members to the GVRS
event in Oldmeldrum in the summer.
We do exchange
visits with the Tayside lads about once a year, and enjoy each other’s
company on visits to scenic and or interesting localities in the Rileys.
We also tend to meet them at Glamis for the Extravaganza and at Stonehaven
for the Thomson Rally.
We do of course take
our turn in organising the Scottish National Riley Weekend, and recently I
have been in the hot seat again for the 2006 event at Nethybridge, but the
local members are very helpful, I have to say, thank goodness. Our past
events were at Elgin, 2001, organised by Gunn & Co; Aberdeen, Dyce,
1997, organised by Norman Glen; and Aberdeen, Stoneywood 1992 organised by
Doug Thurston and Team.
We visit members at
home to see their engineering related activities in progress. The last victim was member Gordon Mc Donald, and before that
member Danny Alexander, both of whom had been (and indeed still are)
Tractor specialists of umpty years standing before discovering Riley RMs.
One of the basic tenets of our social spirit is the support of one another
as far as the cars go.
It is amazing how
one can find that a fellow member can help out with advice, a precious
spare part, and even participation in such restoration tasks as re-roofing
an RM. Fortunately there are lots of other RM owners in the Area to assist
Danny and Gordon, but their fleets of RMs have rapidly escalated, so that
they may now in fact be more able to dispense spares largesse than
longer-serving members! Such matters are very frequently in the
conversation around the Noggin table.