Bath Chronicle – 22 July 2005
Chainsaws provoked birth of group
by Matthew Pardo
For more than ten years, the friends of the Bath Residents’ Recreation Ground has campaigned over the Rec.
It sprang into life when a number of shocked residents were disturbed by the sound of chainsaws carving up trees on the ground in about 1995.
The outraged residents banded together to stop the destruction, and eventual staged a meeting with the council’s environmental services director.
He advised them to form a protest group.
And so the Friends were born – in line with local authority criteria about the establishment of such groups – and since then, Worthy Gilson has made frequent speeches at council meetings about the Rec.
“The purpose of the Friends is that we cannot have thousands of people talking to the council at once,” said Mr. Gilson, who is chairman of the organisation.
“We are not an anti-rugby group – all we are trying to do is uphold the law. I believe that our group represents 96 or 97% of the opinions of residents. But we do not keep a register of members, and the reasons for that are that we don’t need to, and many members are rugby supporters or elderly people who have suffered some nasty abuse because of their views on this issue. This issue is a cause for concern for residents of Bath, for whom the Rec was intended. I don’t think people who write letters from outside the city, from places like Broughton Gifford, are helping. This is a matter for bath people.”
Mr. Gilson’s most recent fight has been to try to remove two of the three councillors from the charitable trust running the ground.
He wants councillors Jonathon Gay and Sir Elgar Jenkins removed as he says they have a conflict of interest because of their executive responsibilities – and replaced with Andrew Furze (Lib Dem, Kingsmead) and Betty Perry (Ind, Midsomer Norton).
Because of previous problems, the Friends refused to give the Chronicle a contact address or telephone number for the organisation which members of the public could ring.
Mr. Gilson also refused to say how many members the organisation had.
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