In the latter months of 2008 the St. Albans, Harrow and Chelmsford Groups held their customary inter-group competition. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the St. Albans and Chelmsford groups were the accustomed ones, Harrow joined in the fun just this very year.

Your editorial team had not previously attended one of these particular "inter-groups", and so it was, that on a somewhat chilly winter's evening in the latter quarter of 2008 your editorial team joined the traffic heading onto the infamous M25 for our proposed one hour journey to St. Albans!

After more than two and a half hours we eventually made it to our destination! We had inadvertently picked the one evening when there was a 35 mile long traffic jam on the M25! Nonetheless, we got there for the last hour and just in time for the judging; and, luckily, also in time to take a series of photos and to do an interview or two. So, read on for our intrepid interview - report:

Enrico, Chairman St. Albans Group, explains the competition background:

Enrico: “Some years ago, while talking to members of the Chelmsford Group, we decided it was about time we got our groups together and had a social evening plus a competition. Not just a competition on its own, but we should all sit down and make a nice long social evening out of it – and that’s basically what we did.

So we said, or I think it was Alan (Townsend) who said, “pick a subject and we’ll hand out the pre-cut base boards, or applied piece blanks to each group, for distribution to the members of the groups, that is for whoever wants to do it, and then we’ll just display the completed pieces like that (shows your interviewer the display of the competition pieces) as you can see, that being the main task of the host group to mount a good display. And then Alan came up with the idea of how to choose the winning entries. Everyone votes, even the one who makes the thing gets to vote, and he says they just vote one single vote per person. So if a piece of marquetry is liked (you know, the piece they’d most like to take home with them) they choose their selection and go to the table where a corresponding numbered slot is to be found on the “prize fund box” and they put their pound coin in the numbered slot of their choice – that is the voting system. At the end of the competition, the numbered slot section with the most coins in wins a prize, a cash prize. We made the cash prizes £25 - £15 - £10, but the group’s pay for that, the money comes out of each group’s own funds, and all the money in the “prize fund box” then goes to charity. Any raffle monies we accrue during the “get together” then goes towards paying for the evening by the host group.

It works out superbly, we have been doing this now for around six years but we don’t do this on a yearly basis. It could be, say, every twelve months or every fifteen months. We could, perhaps, be preparing to host a National or something similar, so we would delay it until after that. We’ve done it five times now, and every year it’s been great. This year we said, “Let’s add to it” so we asked Harrow. Alan made the applied box blanks for the competition, so I went over to Harrow, told them all about it and they thought it was a great idea and they came along with their completed and finished boxes as you see tonight.

We then had a good idea, we said “perhaps we should ask Roy and the Redbridge Group” so we thought, “well, let’s try this out with Harrow first, and at that same time we will also invite you editorial guys from Redbridge to check it out and if you like it, your group could join us next time.”

So what we’ll do is, after Christmas we will get in touch with each other, ask our groups and then arrange a meet at a place, perhaps your place as its central, and just discuss the event. Someone will come up with a subject. If it’s decided to make an applied piece, Alan will take care of making the box or whatever, as he says that is no particular problem for him – and that’s it! And then we all get together and the host group just has to fix a date so that everyone can join in and off we go!”

Thanks for describing the background to this inter-group competition Enrico; I rather think this is probably going to grow to become a big event before very long!    

A small gathering from a few of the various group members meet in the dining room

View 1 of a section of the other exhibits

View 2 of a section of the other exhibits