My Visiter article including the Mayoral Bake Off

Regular readers will know that over the past twelve month I have been presented with all manner of cakes. I have been greatly impressed by the range of home baking that local
 Congratulations to Eileen Saunders and her team, pictured above with their star baker, they produced an amazing spread. There were cakes from all over Europe. The quality and diversity of baking eclipsed all other events. Students from Edge Hill University helped put on the event and they have promised me some of the photographs they took which illustrate the brilliant bakes and which I will put on the blog

The cakes demonstrate the enormous and diverse contribution that the migrant workers make to our community. In every generation people have moved to our town they have enhanced our society by their hard work and cultural impact.

There was more cake at the 100th birthday celebration for Josephine Coulton at her Park Lane nursing home.  It was good to see so many family and friends gathered together for the party especially those from Leyland Rd Methodist church who turned up to sing Happy Birthday to her. Josephine belong to St Marks which joined together with Leyland Rd. It used to be called the ‘Jam Chapel’. Christiana Hartley,arguably my most illustrious predecessor as Mayor, belonged there. In 1921 she was the town’s first female Mayor and was a pioneer of social reform.
This week I also attended the Lydiate Festival, held a Civic reception for those involved with the tourism sector in the town, and attended a charity cricket match at Churchtown cricket club and as you may have guessed there was cake at most of the engagements.

groups have produced. I found that I was holding a competition in my mind as to who was the best. As my term of office draws to a close I think it is time to declare a winner. For a long time Maghull Baptist Church led the bake off. Highly commended goes Clarence High School, Age Concern Crosby, St Luke's Crosby, the amazing Guinness Cake at Mrs & Mrs Fletchers whose home was open as part of the National Garden Scheme, Grosvenor Rd URC Birkdale and the MacMillan Coffee Morning in Marshside. But the undoubted winner was the 'Cakes of the World' celebration held by the Migrant Workers' Community last weekend.

And the winner is: Cakes of the World Celebration with the Migrant Workers community

Regular readers will know that over the past twelve month I have been presented with all manner of cakes. I have been greatly impressed by the range of home baking that local groups have produced. I found that I was holding a competition in my mind as to who was the best. As my term of office draws to a close I think it is time to declare a winner. For a long time Maghull Baptist Church led the bake off. Highly commended goes Clarence High School, Age Concern Crosby, St Luke's Crosby, the amazing Guinness Cake at Mrs & Mrs Fletchers whose home was open as part of the National Garden Scheme, Grosvenor Rd URC Birkdale and the MacMillan Coffee Morning in Marshside. But the undoubted winner was the 'Cakes of the World' celebration held by the Migrant Workers' Community this weekend.

Congratulations to Eileen Saunders and her team, pictured above with their star baker, they produced an amazing spread. There were cakes from all over Europe. The quality and diversity of baking eclipsed all other events. Students from Edge Hill University helped put on the event and they have promised me some of the photographs they took which illustrate the brilliant bakes and which I shall add to this posting.


The cakes demonstrate the enormous and diverse contribution that the migrant workers make to our community. In every generation people have moved to our town and they too have enhanced our society by their hard work and cultural impact.

My Visiter article this week

I met Bob King this week. Bob is a retired solicitor from Shropshire. He was a prisoner of war in WW2 held in Oflag 79. I met him at the Brunswick Youth and Community Centre-known locally as the Brunny. If you don’t know the story of the Brunny you may be wondering why an elderly gentleman made a special trip to Bootle. Let me explain. On a cold February night in 1945 the POWs met together. They had understood what living in boring, depressing conditions had done to their morale and realised that this was the same for young people at home. Boys without purpose, with too much time on their hands, were wasting their youth. They had nowhere to go, and nothing to do to channel their energies. Together they resolved that when they returned home they would establish a network of Boys’ Clubs.

In Oflag 79 along with Bob were three POWs: Michael Marshall, Philip Evans, and Harry Mounsey, it was they who started the Brunny. I was asked to open the birthday celebrations where all three were represented by their sons.

Today the centre flourishes providing a home for numerous groups including Sefton Veterans, The Army Cadet Corps, Brownies, Toddler groups, Pensioners and Jamie Carragher’s Academy.

One aspect of their youth work that particularly appealed to me was their international links. Many in Britain today fear that as a nation we may become inward looking and forgetting the lessons about the warping influence of nationalism we learnt at such a great cost WW2. The Brunny has established exchange programmes with people from Germany and Norway.

In contrast to the Brunny’s party I attended a much more formal event at St George’s Hall when the county’s new High Sherriff, Stephen Burrows, was installed. Then it was off to the Bootle Beer Festival at Safe Regeneration followed by a visit to St Faith’s church to hear the excellent Crosby Symphony Orchestra.

On Friday night I was at a reception to launch a mental health programme aimed at supporting staff from our ‘Blue Light’ services. It is a testament of how far public attitudes towards mental ill health have moved that people from all walks of life can talk openly about mental health issues. I have worked in this field for close on 40 years and the change in public attitude is long overdue.