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barrier would have been beaten and building
work would have been well under way.
Following prolonged negotiation and in
accordance with the provisions of the original
1956 agreement between the Club and West
Ham Corporation, ownership of the natural
history and geological collections and the
library has now reverted back to the Club.
Tins is a significant achievement and a major
debt of gratitude is owed to Ken Adams and
Andrew Snelling for the work they have put in
to obtain this result.
With this transfer of ownership, the Passmore
Edwards Museum Governors' Committee,
[originally set up as a partnerhip between the
Club and the West Ham Corporation to
manage the museum], has been dissolved. As
one of its last decisions, the Governors
generously agreed to make a substantial sum
of money available from the Museum Fund to
help with removal and curation costs.
Alternative premises are being sought for
interim storage and the Field Club, once again,
is looking for a suitable organisation to partner
with in a joint education/museum project.
Meanwhile, the Club has already put in hand
various curation measures. For instance,
Graham Ward has begun to process the
backlog of geological material and the
William Cole lepidoptera collection is being
rehoused in new cabinets.
Council is developing a written set of
procedures to ensure that its responsibilities
arc discharged each year and that incoming
members of Council have a clear knowledge
of its working practices and what they need to
do. A full, written set of procedures has been
drawn up and will be distributed annually to
Council Members. It must be made clear that
the procedures are to facilitate the work of
Council and are not its raison d'etre. We are
now in the process of bringing together all the
Field Club's archival material - past Council
and AGM minutes, financial records,
publications such as Programmes, Bulletins,
Newsletters and Naturalists and formal
documents such as agreements with other
organisations. These had become rather
widely distributed with the loss of the
Passmore Edwards Museum and as they were
passed on from retiring to incoming Council
members. Finally the Constitution is being
looked at to ensure that it is in good order and
appropriate to the Field Club to-day.
The Field Club held 46 meetings and an
Annual General Meeting during the year, three
jointly with the other societies, as listed above.
The field meetings were as follows: mosses 1,
fungi 11, higher plants 8, spiders, bees and
wasps 1, moths 3. amphibians and reptiles 2,
birds 8 (one of which was washed out),
mammals 2, geological 3, general natural
history 3, ramble 1 (cancelled owing to
extreme muddy conditions). Three of the
meetings were indoor, with lectures on the
flora of Iceland by Steve Prewer, the wildlife
of Trinidad by Geoff Gibbs and the Essex
geology collection by Graham Ward. Two of
the meetings were Group annual meetings.
The number and range of the meetings
remains encouraging. However, consideration
needs to be given to attracting more members
to attend. Council acknowledges the need Io
reconsider the content and possibly the format
of the meeting programme and consider
changes such as half-day and evening
meetings.
Four issues of the Newsletter were published
during the year and Volume 15 (new series) of
the Essex Naturalist was published in
November. The Newsletter has covered a
wide range of issues. The problems and
potential of Special Verges in west Essex and
the problems facing the Rainham Marshes
SSSI were local issues brought to our notice,
while local and not so local observations were
offered by Geoff Wilkinson and Ken Hill.
There were three articles on various
hymenoptera and a history of a local 19th
century fossil collector, John Gibson. Sadly,
there were no reports of field meetings.
The Naturalist demonstrated the more serious
side of the scientific activities of the Field
Club and its members with reports from the
Essex Naturalist (New Series) 16 (1999)