Editor's note:  Please do click on the WW2 airfields pop up icon above to discover the vast amount of research that our member Rotarian Robin Davies has done on the subject. This is a valuable resource, not just for the families of wartime airmen, but for anyone doing research into air warfare of World War Two.  Nothing comparable exists.

LATEST CLUB NEWS.......

NICO KOOIJ GIVES US AN UPDATE The Rotary Club of Cambridge supports the Helderberg Sunrise Club in South Africa with their "Literacy for All" project. A group of members from our Club went out to South Africa to see the work for themselves and attracted coverage in the local press in the process. Last Tuesday Nico Kooij of the Helderberg Sunrise Club came to give us an update. These are his words:  Literacy is the core project to which we have started to add Numeracy. The growth of a sizeble African middle class is the key way forward to competent governance and growth of the economy.  We had a super opportunity to address you with a PP presentation last year and socialise with your members who visited South Africa the year before. My main purpose is to convey a short word of thanks for your very important contribution to our Literacy and Numeracy projects. Thank you to Nico and we wish him and his Club continued success.

New members join us over the past year....

THE "METRO" MAYOR! At our meeting on 31 July we were delighted to welcome as our guest speaker James Palmer, the elected “Metro” Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. Having been in post for only a little over a year he said he was happy to say something of the problems he was tackling and how far he had got on what was undoubtedly going to be a long and difficult journey. In short the problem was to sort out the County`s infrastructure and build more houses, especially affordable houses. This meant having to change the housing market and to improve physical communications across the whole County. In his view this could only be done by controlling the cost of land and building new garden villages, not just adding to existing villages or to Cambridge itself. Cambridge and the necklace villages were to be preserved; the jewel in the crown.. What was needed to unlock the solution to our problems was a new metro rail system linking St Neot`s to Haverhill passing under Cambridge, and serving the various science and business parks already in existence and capable of further expansion. Mayor Palmer reckoned that if building land could be acquired at say £80,000 per acre then a viable financial system could be devised to make it possible for first time buyers to get onto the home owning ladder. He pointed out that if you took a long enough view all our homes were on land which at some time in the past had been green. All of Cambridgeshire was experiencing growth at a rate higher than the national average, and somehow we had to tap into this wealth and use it to fund continuing development. The Mayor told us he was in negotiations with a number of possible financial backers for his ideas and whilst he couldn`t say more at this stage, he came over as someone who was confident he was getting somewhere. We thanked him warmly for a fascinating and very encouraging talk. We all want to see the problems he had so clearly defined tackled and solved, otherwise the future could be very bleak indeed. We wished him well in his endeavours. Rotarian Jim Stewart