Charity number: 232476
QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
REPORT AND FINANCIAL STATEMENTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
CONTENTS
FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
| Page | |
|---|---|
| Legal and administrative information | 1 |
| Annual Report of the Committee | 2 - 8 |
| Independent examiner’s report | 9 |
| Receipts and Payments | 10 |
| Statement of Assets and Liabilities | 11 |
QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
Status
The governing document of the charity is the Constitution and Rules of the Quekett Microscopical Club (as amended 2007).
Trustees
Ms Joan Bingley Mr Stephen Parker Mr Philip Greaves Dr Christopher Thomas Mr Alan Wood Mr Paul Smith Mr Grenham Ireland Mr Robert Ratford Mrs Lisa Ashby Mr Steve Gill Mr Graham Matthews (appointed 10 March 2020)
Secretary Mrs Lisa Ashby Charity number 232476 Business address 31 West Park Mottingham London SE9 4RZ
Independent examiner’s Bradshaw Johnson Croft Chambers 11 Bancroft Hitchin Herts SG5 1JQ
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
The Committee are pleased to present their annual report for the year ended 31 December 2020.
Membership
At the end of the year 2020 the total membership was 506 (2019 503) now made up of:
403 UK based Ordinary Members, 103 Overseas Ordinary Members (26 Europe/77 rest of the world). These numbers include:
15 Honorary Members, 11 Young Members, 12 Complimentary Members, 7 Supporting Member organisations.
There were 60 new or re-joining members in 2020, in the same period unfortunately 7 members died, 17 resigned and 33 lapsed.
Carol Sartory, Joan Bingley and John Gustav Delly were all elected Honorary Members during the last year recognising both contributions to the field of microscopy as well as to The Club.
Finances
The Club’s income for the year amounted to £50,761 (2019: £62,897) and expenditure £37,082 (2019: £63,661). This leads to a surplus for the year (and increase of cash funds) of £13,679 (2019: deficit of £763).
The Club’s cash funds as of 31st December were £206,827 (2019: £193,148), and our investment assets £381,201 (2019: £370,015).
The drop in income was principally due to lower income from the Geoffrey Owen trust fund. Covid-19’s economic impact has resulted in lower, or passed, dividends and low interest rates. Covid-19 has also reduced the Club’s expenditure (given, amongst other matters, reduced payments for meeting rooms & decreased opportunities for charitable spend). All figures in this report are rounded to the nearest whole pound.
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
Committee
The Committee for 2020 was composed of
President: Joan Bingley (to 10[th] March); Steve Gill thereafter Vice President: Steve Gill (to 10[th] March); Joan Bingley thereafter Hon. Secretary: Lisa Ashby Meetings Secretary: Paul Smith Hon. Treasurer: Stephen Parker Journal Editor: Phil Greaves Bulletin Editor: Chris Thomas Collections Officer: Dennis Fullwood (until 2[nd] May 2020)* Archives Officers: Phil Greaves Webmaster: Alan Wood Membership Secretary: Robert Ratford Committee Member: Grenham Ireland
*Following the death of Dennis Fullwood the position of Collections Officer has remained vacant with Phil Greaves providing a watching brief.
Meetings in 2020
January 11[th] - Gossip Meeting ‘My Latest Microscopical Acquisition’ A popular meeting cunningly scheduled to take place after Christmas!
February 22[nd -] Workshop on the Doug Richardson slide collection.
A chance to view some of the nearly 2,500 slides bequeathed to the club. Ultimately some of the slides will form part of the loan collection. A foothold in the task has been established with the nearly complete photography of the all the slides. Steps remaining are transcription of the label information into database, access for members via the website and the physical loan of slides to members.
March 10[th -] 153rd Annual General Meeting
The usual nuts and bolts bureaucracy required legally to run a Club like the Quekett.
Due to Covid-19 lockdown all scheduled meetings were suspended until the Club got used to hosting Zoom meetings. We now have to ability to host virtual meetings of up to 100 attendees. The upside of meetings no longer being location dependent is that attendance has increased. Zoom meetings have enabled participation of many of our overseas members (eg. USA, Canada, New Zealand) in Gossip meetings which has been one advantage of an otherwise disrupted meetings schedule. Zoom meetings are recorded and available to view by members on the website.
July 7[th] - Gossip Meeting ‘Hairs and Fibres’
A meeting on how to study hairs and fibres under the microscope, included was a simple ‘trap’ to gather hairs from passing rodents!
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
July 25[th ] – Joint Meeting with the Bournemouth Natural History Society
A well-attended meeting that leant heavily towards the use of polarised light.
August 11[th ] – Gossip Meeting ‘Slides by Ernie Ives’
Ernie was an enthusiastic microscopist and a prolific maker of slides and was particularly known for his slides of sections of wood.
September 28[th] to October 3[rd ] – Annual Exhibition of Microscopy
A week long Zoom meeting, although fortunately occupying only a couple of hours per day. See below for more details.
October 22nd to 24[th] – The National Honey Show
Under normal conditions the Club has a stand in the Trade Hall, this year the Club had web space in the virtual Trade Hall.
November 7[th] – Festival of Geology
Organised by the Geologists’ Association and held online. The Club had a display of information in the section devoted to Local Groups and Societies.
December 5[th ] – Christmas Meeting
The usual General Knowledge (Microscopy) quiz prepared this time by Robert Ratford and a short talk on the Slides of Richard Suter by Phil Greaves.
Annual Exhibition
The Annual Exhibition 2020 was for the first time in the Clubs history forced to become an online event. As a result the event was held over several days from 28[th] September 2020 until 3[rd] October 2020.
Each day there was a different component
Monday 28th – The website went live with members’ exhibits on their Lockdown Microscopy Projects
Tuesday 29[th] – Lecture, Robert Hooke an early microscopist by Terry Hope. Wednesday 30[th] – Entries for the Barnard, Marson and Quekett Art awards were available on the website
Thursday 1[st] – Lecture, Magnetic Resonance Imaging by Matthew Clemence. Friday 2[nd] – A gossip meeting on Lockdown Microscopy.
Saturday 3[rd] – Lecture, Art beyond the range of ordinary vision by Gwyneth Thurgood. Followed by the announcement of the recipients of the Award certificates.
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
There were over 20 entries to the main exhibit and entries for the award categories were also plentiful with judges remarking on the high quality of the entries.
Feedback following the event was on the whole very positive and with good participation from members not only outside of London but outside of the UK participating for the first time. This resulted in requests to include a digital component to future events.
Publications
Journal: Part 7 of Volume 43 was issued in Summer 2020 and was a ‘bumper’ issue, having been well supported with authors’ submissions on a variety of subjects. The last issue of Volume 43 (Part 8) was unfortunately delayed late in the production process with printing scheduled for early February 2021. This being the end of the volume, it will contain both a full index and a listing of members and their interests (limited to those members who gave express permission for their details to be printed, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation).
Bulletin: Numbers 78 in May and 79 in October 2020 were compiled as the Covid-19 epidemic spread and most of us were in Lockdown or isolation as many of us are, shall we say, of mature years. The Bulletin provides a more magazine-like complement to the academic Journal. Despite the global pandemic, the editor’s call for articles by members resulted in more contributions, which counterbalanced the decline on the number of events reported as physical meetings had to be cancelled. Authors came from a wide range of interests, expertise and locations. The number of articles and also the use of more images resulted in 125 and 104 pages of content for the respective editions, again requiring a perfect bound booklet. The number of contributions for the 2021 spring edition looks as if the trends of diversity, number and locations of contributors is continuing.
The Club on-line: The Club’s website (www.quekett.org) continued under the care of webmaster Alan Wood and has been updated to HTTPS so that passwords and messages are transmitted securely. The WordPress installation is kept up to date to take advantage of security updates, and is backed up daily by VaultPress. The site now has over 1000 pages, over 10,500 images and over 750 PDFs. Only 10 meeting reports were added during the year as many events had to be cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twelve videos were added, including recordings of gossip meetings that were held via Zoom.
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
We are still exploring ways to extend our use of social media and attract a younger audience. The Twitter page (https://twitter.com/QuekettMicro) and the Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/quekett) are used mainly to announce Club meetings about 10 days in advance, and to provide links to reports of meetings. The Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/QuekettMicro) that acts as a forum for members and prospective members to share their experiences and ask for help has grown substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic because people stayed at home and surfed the Internet; it now has over 1200 members, several of whom are frequent contributors. The Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/quekettmicro/) showcases some of the most attractive and interesting photos by members.
Collections
Progress with the Club’s Collections (slides, library and archives) was severely impacted by both the COVID-19 pandemic which prevented any access to our stores from late March, and due to the sad death of Mr. Dennis Fullwood, Collections Officer, in May 2020.
However, before the first lockdown, a successful meeting was held in February to explore the Doug Richardson slide collection, and several sets of slides were loaned out to members for them to progress field entry from the slide labels into the database. Late in 2020, the Club was offered a bronze medallion of John Green Waller who served as President of the Quekett from 1896 to 1898 and purchase of this was arranged through an anonymous donation. The medallion is a valuable addition to our archives collection and especially so for a President who is otherwise poorly represented in our collections.
Archives
Unfortunately all of our archives that had been held in temporary storage outside London were returned to the Club’s store room at the Natural History Museum in late 2019 and have been inaccessible since March 2020 due to COVID restrictions. Consequently there has been little progress with the archives in 2020 although the opportunity has been taken to tidy up and correct existing entries into the database.
Library
Four books were loaned prior to lockdown and these remain with the borrowers. We also received two requests for slides during the same time but have been unable to send these out as the library resources remain within the Natural History Museum.
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
Charitable / Outreach Activities
Inevitably the restrictions this year due to the virus outbreak led to the cancellation of all outreach events involving attendance of the public. We hope the Weston Super Mare Big Bang and the Sidmouth Science Festival will return to our programme eventually.
The organisers of the two autumn events, the Geologists’ Association (GA) Festival of Geology and the National Honey Show made heroic and very effective efforts to reorganise them with a platform for digital presentations by the groups whose display stands usually provide a vibrant public show. Our contribution led to a significant increase in visitors to our website over the GA Festival weekend as we highlighted the geological use of microscopes. Our website also provided an answer to the competition organised for the GA’s childrens’ section – Rockwatch. The Honey Show provided us with another opportunity to highlight the benefits of microscopy to beekeepers with a digital presentation.
For several years we have organised a hands-on microscopy workshop at the Museum for the Arkwright Scholars. These students, in their last couple of years at school, have an interest in engineering and science careers. Chris Thomas and Pam Hamer collaborated to run a Saturday Zoom workshop for 10 of the students highlighting the development of microscopes and the type of specimens which can be examined. An objective and eyepiece lens was sent to each student to test their engineering skills in making a useable microscope to image and photograph a specimen of their choice. Models were made from cardboard, plastic items and Lego with each student explaining how it worked. This was a pioneering exercise both for the charity sponsoring the students and for the Club. The feedback from the students was very positive.
Looking forward it seems likely that there will be further virtual Outreach events in 2021 and the experience we had this year provides ideas to develop.
Prior to lockdown on March 14th the Reading Convention was held in St Peter’s Church Hall, Earley nr Reading. A meeting of displays, sales and talks in the afternoon. Despite some new attendees, attendance overall was slightly down, this being attributed to the early Covid-19 situation.
The Club continues to provide grants to the Microbiology in Schools Advisory Committee (MiSac), Reading Microscopical Society, Leeds Microscopical Society, The Postal Microscopical Society (PMS), and the Malham Tarn Field Studies Centre; as well as £500 for adoption of the Micrarium at the Grant Museum UCL.
For many years Kit Brownlee has represented The Club on MiSac however, due to ill health, she retired this position and Phil Greaves has taken over representation.
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
Links to other organisations
With many Clubs and Societies facing difficult times we continue to maintain dialogue with as many of them as possible, offering support and the use of facilities such as the Club Zoom account.
Following an article placed in the Bulletin by the New York Microscopical Society we have been working to build on this new relationship arranging to share in some joint meetings in 2021.
Advice on Microscopes
The website and social media continue to receive enquiries regarding buying and selling of microscopes, technical expertise as well as historical research. These are usually shared among either committee members or passed to members with specialist knowledge. This year some have also been shared within the Bulletin.
Conclusion
This year has been a challenging one for The Club having been in a situation where there has been hardly any opportunity for physical events since our last AGM.
The lack of opportunity to meet did mean that we have started four new projects for members to become involved in. Although intended to originally take place over short periods the committee have taken the decision to continue them indefinitely along with a re-launch of the Spotted Winged Drosophila project.
The committee look forward to a time when we can once more hold events in person. In the meantime we remain committed to offering live online content to our members wherever possible and acknowledge the support of the members in making this viable.
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
INDEPENDENT EXAMINERS’ REPORT TO THE TRUSTEES ON THE UNAUDITED ACCOUNTS OF QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
I report on the accounts of the Charity for the year ended 31 December 2020 set out on pages 10 to 11.
Respective responsibilities of trustees and examiner
The charity’s trustees are responsible for the preparation of the accounts. The charity’s trustees consider that an audit is not required for this year under section 144(2) of the Charities Act 2011 (the 2011 Act) and that an independent examination is needed.
It is my responsibility to:
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examine the accounts under section 145 of the 2011 Act;
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to follow the procedures laid down in the general Directions given by the Charity Commission under section 145(5)(b) of the 2011 Act; and
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to state whether particular matters have come to my attention.
Basis of independent examiners’ report
My examination was carried out in accordance with the General Directions given by the Charity Commission. An examination includes a review of the accounting records kept by the charity, and a comparison of the accounts presented with those records. It also includes consideration of any unusual items or disclosures in the accounts, and the seeking of explanations from you as trustees concerning such matters. The procedures undertaken do not provide all the evidence that would be required in an audit and consequently no opinion is given as to whether the accounts present a ‘true and fair view’ and the report is limited to those matters set out in the statement below.
Independent examiners’ statement
In connection with my examination, no matter has come to my attention:
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which gives me reasonable cause to believe that, in any material respect, the requirements:
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to keep accounting records in accordance with section 130 of the 2011 Act; and
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to prepare accounts which accord with the accounting records and comply with the accounting requirements of the 2011 Act
have not been met; or
- to which, in my opinion, attention should be drawn in order to enable a proper understanding of the accounts to be reached.
Neil Harding FCA Bradshaw Johnson Chartered Accountants Croft Chambers, 11 Bancroft Hitchin Herts SG5 1JQ
Date: 19 April 2021
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
RECEIPTS AND PAYMENTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2020
| Receipts | Unrestricted Funds 2020 £ |
Unrestricted Funds 2019 £ |
|---|---|---|
| Functional Analysis Gifts, donations & other Voluntary receipts Receipts From Trading Activities Receipts from Assets Sub-total Other receipts (not counting as “Gross Income”) Total receipts Payments |
45,792 992 3,977 50,761 - 50,761 |
57,776 1,479 3,642 |
| 62,897 - |
||
| 62,897 | ||
| Functional Analysis Payments directly for Charitable Purposes Payments for publicity, fundraising, Management & administration Sub-total Other payments (not counting as “expenditure”) Total Payments Net of Receipts/(Payments) Cash funds brought forward Cash funds carried forward |
25,158 11,644 36,802 280 37,082 13,679 193,148 206,827 |
52,572 10,809 |
| 63,381 280 |
||
| 63,661 | ||
| (764) 193,912 193,148 |
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QUEKETT MICROSCOPICAL CLUB
STATEMENT OF ASSETS AND LIABILITIES AT 31 DECEMBER 2020
| Cash Funds Current Account Deposit Account One Year Bond Paypal Account Less Uncleared Total Cash Funds Investment assets Lion Trust (was Architas) (For Income) Aberdeen Multimanager Funds (For Capital Growth) |
Unrestricted Funds 2020 £ 6,002 100,093 100,000 732 206,827 - 206,827 Unrestricted Funds Year End Value 191,234 189,967 |
Restricted Funds 2019 £ |
|---|---|---|
| 2,589 90,559 100,000 - |
||
| 193,148 - |
||
| 193,148 | ||
| Unrestricted Funds Year End Value 185,455 184,560 |
Assets Retained for the Charity’s Own Use
Computer & Peripherals to assist in Club Management Library of Books for loan to & reference by members Library of Microscope Slides for loan to & reference by members Video Library for loan to & reference by members Microscopes & accessories for use by members Digital camera & printer for recording the slide collection Data Projector for use with Power Point Applications
Signed on behalf of the Trustees on 9 March 2021 by:
Stephen Parker – Honorary Treasurer
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