Following nearly two years during which the Old Bournemouthians’ Association had been asking for new blood to replace the existing committee, and during which it offered no services whatsoever to its members, I led a small group of individuals who offered to take on the running of the Association. Our plan was to rebuild, to restart annual dinners, to add drinks events in other places, such as London and further afield, and to bring closer the link between the Association and the school.

The only response that I received to this rescue plan was that certain members of the existing committee did not want to work with all of the people that I proposed to rebuild. Other committee members have simply ignored the offer.

After nine months of pushing this, I am throwing in the towel. It is clear to me that the outgoing committee have no interest in passing on stewardship of the Association to anyone else, and that they are content to let it wither. I think this a great shame.

I have run this website, at my own cost, for nearly 15 years. I am going to keep it online for a while as a communications channel, but I will be repositioning it from the website of the OBA to simply a site for sharing and celebrating the school and its alumni’s further endeavours. From today, this is not the OBA’s website, and so far as I can tell, there is no functioning OBA.

If you currently have a standing order to the OBA, you may want to consider cancelling this. There is very little chance that you will receive anything in return for your membership payments, and it is not clear to what use the accumulated OBA funds will be put. I hope they go towards the school, but that is not guaranteed.