St George's Ladies Group

Our April meetings were two social occasions. The first was a "Beetle Drive" which always involves a lot of hilarity especially when the dice is thrown too hard and rolls off the table edge. This leaves four people scrabbling to find it quickly, as time is all important as you will know if having ever played!

Also Julie Longyear brought along her beautiful hand-made "special occasion" cards for us to browse through and purchase. So many to choose from made for a difficult choice.

Our second event was our annual Skittles evening, held this year at the Waterlooville Football Club with supper after. It was a very relaxed event which ended all too quickly and the food was excellent. As always the raffle prizes were donated by the committee members and raised a total of £51 towards our charity for this year, which is Naomi House Children's Hospice.

June Bradley

Mrs Pescod came to talk about her time as a tennis umpire. She brought with her several of the uniforms she had worn over the years. At first lady umpires wore matching skirts and blouses but in more recent years they were allowed to wear trousers. At the tennis club on the day of the tournament they would be instructed what to wear as all the ladies had to be identically dressed.

Mrs Pescod started umpiring at tournaments in Eastbourne and Bournemouth and was then asked to become an umpire at Wimbledon. There are 350 umpires at Wimbledon, some seated on the high chairs and others on the ground placed around the court to check whether a ball was in or out; Mrs Pescod was one of the latter. At Wimbledon an umpire will be on court for one and a half hours and then have a break of one and a half hours. Mrs Pescod was an umpire on the centre court and she said you had to concentrate so hard on watching the balls that you completely forgot about the crowds watching. Being an umpire was very remunerative and she and her husband had lodgings at Wimbledon every year and stayed with the same family for ten years.

Umpires are not allowed to talk to players unless the player makes the first approach and whilst Mrs Pescod was at Eastbourne she met Chris Evert and found her a charming lady and she was one of her favourite players. One of the highlights of her career was to be asked to umpire an anniversary match between Becker and Connors at Buckingham Palace. She was an umpire for twenty years and thoroughly enjoyed doing this and was very sorry when she had to retire at the age of seventy. This talk, which was well attended, was most interesting and thoroughly enjoyed by everyone.

Margaret Deal