The Old Elizabethan Association

Dear fellow O.E.s

It is with a mixture of pleasure and trepidation that I greet you as President of the Old Elizabethan Association.

Trepidation in the sense that if I had been asked at the age of eighteen whether this role was amongst my aspirations for life I know what my reply would have been! Indeed I regret to have to say it was some thirty years before I even attended an O.E. Dinner after I left school.

My unthinking indifference to College changed a couple of years ago when one of my Partners at the Law Firm in which I work, who had relocated to Guernsey from a successful career overseas, told me that he thought that his children had received a fantastic education at the Colleges in Guernsey and he was hard pressed to think of anywhere better in the world they could have been brought up; this together with a chance read of the Elizabethan caused me to realise the superb education and opportunities that are now provided by the College.

I have obviously to thank my predecessor Juré-Justicier Jerry Girard (a bit of alliteration here!) for his enthusiasm and vigour in pushing the Association to a new level of activity and reinforcing its link with College. Trepidation yet again as he will be a hard act to follow.

One of the outstanding features of College is the enormous benefit it brings to the Island through what are in effect State Scholarships. That boys of ability, often great ability, can have the benefit and opportunities of a College education is of inestimable benefit to both the College and the Island as a whole. This must not be lost sight of in any coming debate
concerning College funding.

Finally, I get to the pleasure bit and it is with enormous pleasure that I am looking forward to the coming years which along the way will have the one hundred and fiftieth Guernsey Dinner and, towards the end of my term of office, (if I am not expelled beforehand!), there will be the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 2013 of the College's Foundation.

Planning for this starts now.

With all Best Wishes

Mike Eades, 6529