Twenty-One Years of the ACS

submitted to the next annual meeting. There is no intention to follow the negotiations through every stage but the more relevant points that arose have to be mentioned in an official history of this sort. It must also be emphasized that those ACS officers and committee men, who held shares privately in Sport-in-Print, took no part in the voting at each successive stage as the pros and cons emerged at many protracted meetings.An original,estimated £40,000 valuation for 3 Radcliffe Road, predictably, proved too low and it was also found that to take on Sport-in-Print as an on-going business,in addition to the premises, was beyond financial reach. This did not really matter as the committee had only flirted with the idea as a possibility and it was never considered an essential part of the deal as far as Peter Wynne-Thomas was concerned. It was known from the start that the day by day running costs of owning the premises could be met and the first serious setback did not come until the disclosure that the property was valued at £55,000 and that the bank's maximum loan of£40,000 would necessitate repayments that would simply not be possible to meet. As the committee's aspirations threatened to fade into a pipe dream, it was John Featherstone whose prescience saved the day. He advocated that the members themselves should be asked for monetary pledges - perhaps in the guise of shares if a limited company was created. The ACS president, who was in South Africa with the Indian touring team, will confess that from 8,000 miles away, he was sceptical whether there would be much response in what were hard,economical times but he was totally mistaken.The members reacted in magnificent fashion and they effectively guaranteed that the headquarters purchase could go ahead. It was Featherstone's finest hour in all his many-sided ACS work and to say that does not overlook that he helped to combat another potential, financial crisis in the 1980s and this story will be told in its due place. During 11 years in office Featherstone incurred criticism at times for his refusal to allow annual meetings and committee ones to depart from the strict rules of procedure but his ideas and constructive thinking, though,proved salutary more than once at gatherings which tended to be more oriented to cricket issues than business matters. Featherstone went on to represent the ACS in discussions with a solicitor, who advised that the ACS should becomea non-charitable trust rather than a limited company and he drew up the revised constitution and rules that would be necessary. It was a memorable moment on March 27 at the 1993 AGM at Chelmsford when a recommendation to buy 3 Radcliffe Road was approved unanimously. Three months later a special general meeting at Nottingham agreed the new constitution. A committee meeting followed the same day to which Robert Brooke and Dennis Lambert,the co-founders, were invited. It was decided that the four trustees required would be Brooke,Lambertand Featherstone,together with Peter Griffiths as the committee's representative. To complete the story with the financial details, the final pledges from members, in round figures.