OPENING our meeting on August 20, President Brian Melville announced a number of absences through illness and holidays. He then invited Dennis Wright to receive the most attendances cup from Pat Sparrow, followed by a number of Scottish misspelling howlers courtesy of Bob Young. And we welcomed Phil Bawn’s decision to join our club.

Our speaker this week was Angela Applegate, a volunteer at the Holst Birthplace Museum in Cheltenham, who told us about the life and times of Gustav Holst, the highly regarded English composer and teacher. He was born in Cheltenham although the family originally was of mixed Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry. He lived from 1874 until 1934 and is best known for his orchestral suite ‘The Planets’. He regarded music, friendship and the Cotswold Hills as hugely important and wrote over 400 pieces of very versatile music, including the melodies for “I vow to thee my Country” and “In the Bleak Midwinter”.

Angela urged us – and any others - to visit the Holst Birthplace Museum which has a wide variety of exhibits and which shows the typical life of those times. She also recommended the Gustav Holst Way for the walkers among us. The Holst Birthplace Museum is easily found on the Internet.

George Bourne thanked Angela on our behalf for her thoroughly informative and interesting background to this important national musician and composer.

Our next meetings will be on September 3 and 10, when we shall hear about the RNLI and Trivia respectively.

CHRIS DONOUGH