Organised very ably by team member Claire Morrissey (who is also our Team Secretary), the Dinner this year was held at the Ramada Jarvis Hotel, with over 80 team members and guests present. An excellent meal was followed by the presentation of the “Stanley Award for the Most Promising New Team Member”, awarded to Peter McKale, who joined us last year, and is a serving Ambulance Technician with GMAS.
The “Howard Hill Memorial Tankard”, awarded to the person or persons making the greatest contribution to the team over the previous year, was unusually, but not unsurprisingly awarded to the entire team membership, for the way all members pulled together in our relocation from Overdale to Bolton Fire Station and our Base/HQ development at Ladybridge Hall.
There then followed our annual “Alternative Awards Ceremony”, (our version of the Gotchas!), where team members were reminded of all those things over the last year they did not want reminding about! 18 awards were personally presented by our Team Leader (who, as ever, had handmade each one!), following on from his hilarious review of the teams’ year and his monthly review. As ever Garry’s funny ramblings were subjected to a “Guess the length of Garry’s Speech Competition”, which, at 1 hour 23 minutes, was jointly won by Paul Mears and Mark Scott. Both donated their £20.00 winnings back to the team, which combined with £40.00 initially raised, brought £80.00 to the team.
A raffle on the night raised the staggering total of £325.00! Thankfully proceedings were not interrupted by our pagers going off – also thankfully a quiet following Saturday allowed us time to recover from our hangovers!