The Friends of Honeywood Museum
Trustees Report for 2020/21
Charitable Incorporated Organisation No 1175789
This is the third AGM of The Friends of Honeywood Museum as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation and it is now the second one to be conducted by post! All the documents that we are required to send you are included in the AGM pack you have received and are listed on the Agenda page. They include the Annual Accounts which, along with this Trustees Report, need to be agreed to be sent to the Charity Commission.
The headings in this report follow the Charity Commission’s guidance notes on the information that charities must set out in their annual report.
Objectives and Activities
The objects of The Friends of Honeywood Museum are as follows:
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To advance the heritage and arts within the London Borough of Sutton for public benefit
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To advance education in the heritage of the London Borough of Sutton for public benefit
All of the activities of the Friends, referred to below, have been in support of these objects.
Structure, Governance and Management
The Friends of Honeywood Museum is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation governed by a Charities Commission Association model constitution. The Trustees are as follows:
Susan Kelsall (Chairman)
Lucy Kelsall (Secretary)
Christopher Cartwright (Treasurer)
Christopher Ford (Membership Secretary)
Anthony Price (Webmaster)
Susan Hoskin (Talks Secretary)
Jeannette Crosier
John Phillips
As this is the third AGM under our new Charitable Incorporated Organisation Constitution a third of our Trustees have to stand down and seek re-election. The Trustees have agreed to go through this process in alphabetical order, which means that this year the following Trustees are standing down and seeking re-election:
Lucy Kelsall
Sue Kelsall
John Phillips
Tony Price
A voting paper is enclosed in your AGM pack. Please complete this, sign and date it and return it in the SAE also enclosed.
The Board of Trustees has adopted Rules covering Procedural Rules, Financial Rules, Membership Rules and a Data Protection Procedure. These Rules regulate the way that the Trustees operate and are kept under review to make sure they reflect current good practice. Under the Procedural Rules, the Board of Trustees consists of a Chairman, Secretary, Treasurer and Membership Secretary (all Trustees) and up to six other Trustees. At the end of the year 2020/21 there were four other Trustees.
The Board of Trustees has the power to co-opt up to three non-voting members to the Board and for 2020/21 these have been:
Margo Cartwright
Steve Morris
Elizabeth Price
The Procedural Rules also provide that Sutton Council may appoint a local Councillor to act as their Representative at meetings of the Board of Trustees. The Council’s Representative is a non-executive attendee and is currently:
Cllr Jake Short
Financial Review
Accounts for the year 2020/21 are set out separately as part of the Treasurer’s Report. This has obviously been a very different and difficult year for the Friends. We have continued to receive subscription income and, besides the Treasurer’s Report, there is also a separate Membership Secretary’s Report. There has been a limited amount of shop sales from the brief times that Honeywood was able to open and otherwise from the sale of duck food, thanks to John Pepper in the tearoom! Susan Hoskin has
been doing brilliantly with our talks via Zoom and YouTube and, even at just £4 for a connection, a significant amount of money has been raised. More on that later!
On the expenditure side, there have been the usual costs of sending out our newsletters, and there is the monthly cost of the Friends’ Zoom account. All valuable ways that we have been able to keep in touch with our members.
Achievements and Performance
The Friends have done really well to keep things running and keep in touch with members in these difficult times. Our thanks must go to Lucy Kelsall, who, as a Primary School teacher, had to get to grips with new technologies from the start of the first lockdown. Thanks to her the Friends have a monthly Zoom account, which can be used as often as necessary, and the Friends also have their own private YouTube channel. This has enabled us to continue with regular Book Club sessions, monthly talks, Board of Trustees’ meetings, garden volunteers’ meetings, meetings with Heritage Service staff etc etc!
Obviously everything totally stopped at the start of our 20/21 year and we cancelled a couple of book club sessions and all our talks through until the summer as well as our summer family activities.
But then we recovered! We just started doing everything in a different way. So the 2020 AGM was held by post (and who would have thought that we would still be in that position in 2021!).
Sue Horne had been due to give a talk on the Carshalton Old Rectory and very gamely said she would do a YouTube talk instead. So she and Lucy got together when they could and made the recording which was on our YouTube channel for 24 hours. Thank you so much Sue for getting things underway again! We have since been doing Zoom talks and Ian Bevan, the City of London Guide we have used often in the past, has been brilliant at this. Our thanks go to Susan Hoskin for organising all this and sending out up to 60 links for each talk. We have certainly been reaching more people than we can usually pack into Honeywood’s Billiards Room!
Lucy has also been running very lively monthly Book Club sessions on Sunday afternoons, although they have all had to organise their own tea and cake! The group choose their own books and so a wide range of tastes are catered for! Lucy runs quizzes and puzzles and they have also set up a very active WhatsApp group.
We have also been keeping in touch with members through our regular, posted, newsletters. Many thanks to Tony Price for his wonderful designs for the newsletters and for the Friends posters, displayed outside
Honeywood and showing that we are still active. Also a great many thanks to Tony for his fantastic work on the Friends’ website, which is always kept totally up to date and has the most wonderful on-line exhibitions, including one on local Picture Postcards, with lovely historic images and an informative commentary. Also Tony has produced word searches, puzzles and colouring sheets to stop us getting bored!
Many thanks also to Jeannette who runs, very successfully, the Friends’ Facebook page. All these contacts have become so important to us.
When Honeywood re-opened on a limited basis at the end of July, the Friends paid for the printing of two children’s activity leaflets to help them enjoy and appreciate their visit to Honeywood. These were called ‘Lets Discover Honeywood’ and a ‘Wandle Wander’. An activity pack put together by the Friends was available for just £1 each, just a little over cost price. Each leaflet was in a separate paper bag with a small pack of colouring pencils and a special Honeywood pencil (again funded by the Friends).
We have also managed to do some conservation work in Honeywood. In one of the breaks from lockdown last summer the Friends paid for ‘Art with Glass’ (based in Crystal Palace!) to repair some of the stained glass, in the Drawing Room and on the Edwardian staircase. They did a really good job. But also the main person we met doing the work was brought up in The Greyhound and walked past Honeywood every day on his way to school. He is also related to Frank Dickinson of Little Holland House. Not only did they do a brilliant job but they also gave the Friends a very welcome donation of £150!
Also over the summer we developed, with local artist Helena Vaughan, a mascot for Honeywood. He is a very lovely elephant, called Edward! The Trustees agreed to use an elephant because of the very popular photograph of circus elephants in the pond outside Honeywood in the 1900s. Edward is now used on the website and in our newsletters. He will be developed further in future, so look out for him!
Our thanks also go to John Phillips, not just for all the usual things he does for the Friends and Honeywood, but also for taking the lead, on behalf of the Friends, with the garden project, working with Jane Howard of the Heritage staff. We really hope to make the garden a more attractive and useable space. John and Tony have developed a wonderful section on the Friends’ website, providing a fascinating description of the garden and its history. John is also writing a regular blog about developments.
Unfortunately all the Friends’ big events of the year had to be cancelled, so there were no events in the back garden and no Environmental Fair or Frost Fair. At the time of writing all of these have already been cancelled
for 2021 as well, with the possible exception of the Frost Fair, which is too early to predict.
We will see what sort of Report we can write for 2021/22!
Reference and Administrative details
Charity Name The Friends of Honeywood Museum Registered Charity number 1175789 Charity’s Principal Address 46, Upland Road, Sutton SM2 5JE
The Friends of Honeywood Museum
Treasurer’s Report
2020-21 has certainly been a different year from previous years. The Friends and members have had to get used to paying for subscriptions, talks etc in different ways to paying cash. Although both the Friends income and expenditure have been greatly reduced it still enabled the Friends to achieve a surplus of £571. In the present circumstances this is more than we expected at the start of the year.
Membership subscriptions, although down on the previous year, still provide the Friends with a large source of income and in turn, with other generous donations, enable a huge boost from Gift Aid to add a further £904. I should also say a big thank you to the members who paid for talks that were unable to go ahead because of the pandemic and donated the money instead.
It has also been a fantastic year for talks which has been achieved by incredible time and effort by the Friends Talks Secretary Susan Hoskin. I also thank our members for overcoming the sometimes tricky method of BACS payment in purchasing their tickets for these talks raising £886.
Shop sales are understandably down but still generated a healthy source of income for the Friends.
Postage, printing, advertising and insurance are still a large part of the Friends expenditure amounting to £2,370.
As I said in last year’s report the Friends are currently holding a Public Realm Grant of £2,000 to provide a new Information Board outside Honeywood Museum. This has been increased by a further £650 contribution from the Rotary Club. The work on this is still ongoing.
There were three main projects the Friends completed last year which included repairing some of the stained glass windows (a big thank you to Art with Glass for donating a large part of the fee back to the Friends of Honeywood Museum). The framing of the Honeywood Embroidery sample, and of course the development of Edward the Elephant. The work in the garden is ongoing.
Also, a Just Giving site has been set up for anyone wishing to donate to the Friends of Honeywood Museum.
The Friends of Honeywood Museum are pleased to have managed a successful year through the pandemic and hope we are able to resume normal service in the near future. We are grateful for your continued support through your subscriptions, supporting the Friends’ events and donations.
Chris Cartwright, Treasurer. 12[th] June 2021
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