Blandford Forum Camera Club

On Tuesday 19^th May, Alan Wilson from the East Dorset Heritage Trust entertained us with an audio-visual presentation with the intriguing title, ‘How Dorset changed the world’.  It was a well-attended evening with both members and guests present and, it must be said, a number of us were perhaps a little surprised to find that this was no idle boast and that Dorset has indeed changed the world!  And not in a trivial way!  Alan’s presentational style was lively and entertaining and his digital projected images were of a high quality; a feature obviously appreciated by an audience of photographers.

Many of us were quite unaware that stars and stripes appear on the flag of the USA because the family of George Washington were friends of the Lawrences of Steeple in the Purbecks.  It’s a long story but a fascinating one.

Even fewer of us were aware that a group of nuns from Wimborne, lead by one Lioba, set out in a rowing boat to both educate and to convert to Christianity those who would listen, and it so happened that they turned out to be the German people.  It is interesting to reflect that, had they turned right on leaving the Dorset coast (rather than left, as must have been on the cards, because in the first millennium, even towards the end, knowledge of the world’s geography was shaky and navigational techniques were not well developed) it could have been the Irish.  Even more remarkable is the fact that the first (and only) female pope was from Dorset!

Brownsea Island influenced the world through the activities of Baden-Powell who took a group of scouts from a variety of backgrounds, including public schoolboys and lads from the east end of London to a remote spot on the south coast of the island and gave them an experience they would never forget.  This was the first scout camp of course and it appears that, despite all the odds, they all got along just fine.  Today of course the scouting movement is an enormous, world-wide organisation and when some 4000 gathered for a jamboree here in the UK recently, none of them got drunk.

Then there is Sir Tim Berners-Lee.  He lived and worked in Dorset and you wouldn’t be reading this without him of course.  Well, you may not be reading it anyway to be fair I suppose, but he made it possible.

The evening concluded with an enjoyable slide show featuring some fine photographic images that had appeared in an international exhibition and which were supplied as a package with background music that was rather less inspiring than the photos.

Bet you wish you’d attended now don’t you?

Malcolm Bowditch