Lytham St Annes CA

At our recent AGM, our Chair Katrina looked back at our 2023-24 season, when we celebrated the tenth anniversary of this branch of the Classical Association, which has been the largest in the UK since 2016.

I’ve done some counting: over the past ten years we have held 68 lectures, 10 ancient world competitions, nine celebration evenings, given six outreach talks and replied to 5,137 email threads (that’s probably nearer to 11,000 individual emails!); we’ve acquired 1018 individual members, welcomed hundreds of students and more than 4,500 followers on social media; we’ve sold 1000s of £s of classics books and raffle tickets, which has helped to support more than 50 students, bursary recipients and classics ambassadors; we’ve curated articles from 24 different writers, tackled seven Declan Boyd crosswords, conducted more than 15 speaker interviews, and collectively enjoyed more than 2222 pieces of cake!

Whilst we must, of course, thank our indefatigable bakers, and all of our brilliant volunteers, I want to take this opportunity to thank some specific people – namely our commitee members (past and present) who have given up so much of their own time to make everything happen; all 38 of our founder members who have been with us across the last ten years, fabulous people who are listed in our recent printed edition of Agora; and all of our speakers, without whom we wouldn’t have events and we wouldn’t have a focal point for our community to get together and learn more about the ancient world. We’re very grateful to the Classical Association, for their financial (and moral!) support; to our friends at other branches, schools and societies who have shared their knowledge, recordings, energy and members; to our hosts and local venues with whom we work; the sponsors and donors to our Bursary Scheme; and anyone who has ever helped with us IT and especially our photographer/videographer John McVitie.

It has been a complete privilege to work with so many fabulous people, to make lifelong friends in the process, to hear the reputation of the branch grow around the country (and occasionally even abroad!) and to still be meeting new members – we do hope to welcome lots more of you to future events. Our biggest thanks goes to our wonderful President, Prof. Michael Scott, who has been both an inspiration and a massive support to us in so many ways, even when I bash him with a large balloon.

In 2023-24, we sought to bring back some of our favourite speakers from the previous nine years and had great pleasure in booking a programme of fabulous people, as well as arranging two very different events – our Roman Day, with special speakers Caroline Lawrence, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Ailsa Vanlint, in September; and an Ancient Worlds Day, combined with the final of our Ancient Worlds Competition, back in April. In November, we welcomed back Egyptologist Jo Fletcher, this time with Stephen Buckley, for a Q&A style event, where they covered a huge range of topics, from the treasures of the Wigan Museum and cats in antiquity to making a real Mummy; and in the New Year Andrew Birley made it back to give us an update on the latest excavations at Vindolanda and Magna Roman Fort; Michael rounded off our programme in style with an epic biography of the Greek general Themistocles.

We must have committed some hubris alongside our celebrations, because we have also been plagued somewhat with bad luck this year! Train strikes, illness and train delays meant that three of our planned speakers could no longer come in person so thank you to our audiences for bearing with us and we are indebted to Armand D’Angour for speaking for us not once but twice online about the elusive true relationship between Catullus and Lesbia, to Edith Hall for doing a webinar on the same night and giving us a brilliant guide to Medea’s life (in fiction and reality), to Paul Cartledge for his support of the branch and especially to Ursula Rothe who stepped in at the last minute and gave us a fascinating talk on the Roman toga!

We’ve welcomed lots of new faces over the past year at our two special interest days and it’s been lovely to also see both regulars and newbies at our Book Club. Since the last AGM, we’ve enjoyed reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon; Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind; Robert Graves’ The Golden Fleece; Daisy Dunn’s Catullus’ Bedspread or In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny and most recently Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine. Do get in touch if you’d like to join our free, online chats – you are most welcome.

Always a highlight of the year, our Ancient Worlds Competition was another sterling success with entrants sharing their ideas for an ancient worlds documentary by researching and delivering a presentation in 15 minutes or less. In the Grand Final, Isla, Olivia, Sophia and Ffion gave us their pitch for the documentary they would like to make about the ancient world and we really enjoyed their talks on goddesses, Roman coins, the Orphic mysteries and the Herculaneum scrolls respectively. Ffion was outstanding and the worthy winner, with Olivia coming second in both the judge’s and the people’s vote. Our friends at the European School in Tblisi put in another storming performance to take the international win – will someone knock them off their winning pedestal next year? Ffion was also awarded the inaugural Paul Jordan Trophy for her excellent blog writing across the year – you can read her latest piece here.

2024 marked the tenth edition of Agora, our magazine, very fitting in our tenth year, and super editor Declan put together a bumper issue with great articles from our ambassadors, including Bianca from Italy, Mili from London, Esmé in Cambridge, and Lorna and Sophie on opposite sides of the Pennines. We had puzzles thanks to Declan and Bill, whose quiz came to us from Alaska, and extra features thanks to Jayne who spent an enormous number of hours doing the formatting so that it looks a really lovely published magazine. Declan is already busy compiling the next digital issue – all members are welcome to contribute and he would love to hear from you.

We continue to be able to support students to attend the Classical Civilisation and Ancient History Summer School, thanks to your generosity, and we look forward to another exciting season of events in 2024-25, beginning in just a couple of months time on Thursday 19 September…why not join us now to be the first to hear about our programme reveal!

©KatrinaKelly