MID SURREY MEMORIES

Published by the mid surrey intergroup of Alcoholics Anonymous

www.aamidsurrey.org.uk

Contents

Introduction 3

“Mrs A.A.” 4

“The Doctor called an alcoholic” 5

“Tough love, cold turkey” 7

“John would kill me” 8

“I was watched over” 9

“You two need 24 Steps” 11

“A.A. more like a family” 12

“I used to pray for leprosy” 13

“I kept coming back” 14

“I had my hair done” 15

“Too young to be an alcoholic” 17

“Everyone did P. I.” 18

“I de-alcoholised eight pints of beer” 19

“We clung to each other as though our lives depended on it” 20

“The Meeting was Somewhat Rougher” 21

“The man who wrote the ‘Who Me?’ pamphlet.” 22

“I threw £25 at him” 24

“These men were very kind to me” 26

“OK I’ll try it” 28

“My friend passed the message but didn’t get it herself” 30

“They didn’t wait until you volunteered” 30

“There was only one meeting a fortnight” 32

“The Unsung hero of Scotland” 33

Introduction

MID SURREY MEMORIES is a collection of interviews I did with Oldtimers in the Intergroup in the years 2006 and 2007, while researching the history of the Mid Surrey Intergroup.

As a result of this research, and with the support of the Intergroup at the time, I was able to publish a small book titles “Sobriety in Surrey” which was a record of the starts and progress of all the groups comprising the Intergroup.

Because of the nature, perpose and size of that book, I was unable to include th einterviews in that book and they have been gathering dust in my archive files until now.

Recently I have been encouraged by the present Intergroup committee to produce those interviews in a second book which you are reading now.

Unfortunately, many of those Oldtimers whom I interviewed at that time have passed on but, I felt, that in no way invalidated their ability to pass the message from “beyond the grave” Hopefully many present day members will remember those Oldtimers.

With a gap of ten years I encoutered two problems. The first was to find out when those Oldtimers died, in order to ascertain their sobriety years at death. The second was to track down those interviewees who were reported to be still alive and update their sobriety dates with them personally.

In a few cases, I have reverted to listing their sobriety dates at the time of the original interviews

For one interview, with Frank O’D (Boxer Frank) I have used poetic liscence and included his story. Frank is not a member of Mid Surrey Intergroup. He is a member of the neighbouring Southdown Intergroup but his story is one of the most extraordinary I have ever heard and I make no apologies for including it.

My very profound thanks to Joe C who has been a partner in all four books. Not only does Joe brighten up the text but he also contributes many valuable visual suggestions. My thanks to to Barbera M, archivist Mid Surrey who has been an enourmous support in getting the book out.

Finally reading through these interviews has moved me and brought back my own memories of these lovely people. It also has made me proud and grateful, once more, to be part of this wonderful fellowship.

John M

Archivist, South East Region

29th June 2017

JOAN P.

(Deceased 2010) Sober 35 years in 2010

Recorded in September 2006

“Mrs A.A.”

I SUPPOSE I got the name because I was so active in A.A. I did service in all the positions and so people in A.A. gave me the name, affectionately I hope.

My first meeting was at the old Beechcroft Hospital in Woking on a Friday night. The hospital was later pulled down and the meeting moved to the Quaker Meeting Room in Park Road.

At this particular time my husband was away on business and I had run out of gin. I phoned my son and he came round. I asked him to go and get me some more gin and he refused. When he returned home my daughter-in-law suggested that he phone A.A. and he did. He spoke to a man called Tony and, later, Tony came round in person, and two days later, he took me to my first meeting and then a second meeting and then he told me that I had to get to A.A. meetings on my own from then on.

A.A. members were much more direct in those days. Tony did a lot of work in A.A. and had started producing the Addlestone tape cassettes which he still does.

At that first meeting in February 1975, I remember walking along the hospital corridor in Beechcroft and I heard the sound of people laughing and I thought “Oh, Good. They’re having a party! Probably they are going to tell me how to drink properly”.

I was offered only half a cup of coffee and I thought, “How mean!” But I realised how much my hands were shaking and I could hardly hold it. My hands were flapping all over the place and Tony told me to sit on them. I was wearing a beaver lamb fur coat with a big collar because I was trying to show them that I was too respectable to be an alcoholic but I was amazed to see another woman there wearing a mink!

I remember disliking two people at that meeting: one was Liz who looked like my mother—my mother was so bossy. The other was Nell who was very very bossy. But Nell later became my sponsor and she was wonderful for me.

I got hope at that first meeting. Everyone spoke to me and I was given so many telephone numbers and so much literature. I came home so excited with those piles of literature.

I started to go to about five meetings a week and Nell pushed me into doing all kinds of service, from making the tea, to becoming a Secretary and, eventually, to organising the conventions.

Nell ran the Selsey Conventions and she was active in the Tilford Conventions too. She had been sober since 1964 and she worked day and night for A.A. In fact, it became her life. Eventually she finished up on the Board of the General Service Office. Nell wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea but she helped a lot of people in A.A. She had a lovely bell which she had used at home to summon the family to dinner. She brought this bell with her to the Tilford Conventions to call the meetings to order and, when she died, she left me this bell in her will. It became known as the Tilford Bell.

There was one group in Woking at that time at Brookwood Hospital. That meeting later moved to St John’s and is now known as the Brookwood and St John’s Meeting. In my time we were made very unwelcome by the staff at Brookwood. We met in the hospital library, which also contained the hospital toilets, so we had a continual stream of patients coming in and out of the room. So we had our meetings with a background of chains being pulled.

The librarian, a woman, absolutely hated us and would find any excuse to try to get rid of us. She scolded us for not putting her chairs back in exactly the same positions after the meetings, so we made a floor map of the room with the chairs marked on certain spots and we placed them there, only to be told by her that we had placed the wrong colour of chairs on the wrong spots! We could do nothing right with her. We invited her to our meetings so that she could see that we were respectable people but she told us she didn’t want to get mixed up with a bunch of alcoholics. We also encountered hostility from a Brookwood doctor who later opened his own private clinic for alcoholics.

We also had a meeting at Brookwood on a Sunday which wasn’t exactly an A.A. meeting. We didn’t say the Serenity Prayer or announce that we were alcoholics but many people came and we talked about everything. One man brought a Bible with him and read it while we talked. Often one hospital patient would run in and turn somersaults. It was all a bit informal, to say the least, but several people got sober at that meeting and we kept a tradition of always being open on Christmas Day.

At that time there was a Step meeting at Guildford on every alternate Tuesday and Paula and I founded a meeting at Addlestone in a church hall there. There was a dancing class there at the same time as our meeting and we could hear the teacher calling out, “Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow” as we shared our strength, hope and experience. This meeting later moved to the Health Centre.

I started another meeting with Tall Sheila at St Peter’s Hospital in Chertsey in 1985. We met with the hospital doctors, who weren’t all that interested in letting us have a room, but one doctor asked us what we would require and we told him we just needed a room, some tea-making facilities and a cupboard for our literature. After the meeting broke up, that doctor stayed behind and told us that he was an alcoholic and in A.A. We got our room.

I have seen changes. Not in the A.A. programme, although some people will always try to change it. The basic programme will never change but I see the changes in the people. It seems to me that the Guidelines are not followed as strictly as they used to be. You hear now of Treasurers being appointed with only two months sobriety, and with regard to Twelve-Stepping, we would always go round to visit the suffering alcoholics—even get out of our beds at midnight. We would call the doctors and call for ambulances. I don’t see that kind of commitment today. I think that many people are coming in from rehab centres and many of them really don’t want to be in A.A. They feel they got sober at the rehab so they have no particular gratitude for A.A. and I think this is the reason why we have so few people now willing to do service. They come into A.A. sober. This is just my opinion.

Also, we don’t have the drunks who came in to the meetings in those days and reminded us of why we were there. I also don’t like the swearing I hear at A.A. meetings today, especially as this is a spiritual programme.

I really dislike this holding hands and chanting, “Keep coming back. It works if you work it” after the Serenity Prayer. They chant it like a mantra and it means nothing. I think if I had had to do this at my first meeting, I wouldn’t have come back. I keep expecting them to do the Hokey Cokey next.

My favourite A.A. literature, apart from the Big Book, is the ‘Just for Today’ card. I used to keep it in my pocket at all times where I could always touch it. It gave me great comfort.

PETER L.

(Deceased 2016)

Sober 40 years in 2016

Recorded in September 2006

“The Doctor called an alcoholic”

I CAME INTO A.A. at the Addlestone Saturday Night meeting on 25th January 1975. It was being noticed at work that I had a drink problem and my Managing Director called me in and asked me if I had a problem. I froze. I knew then I had to do something about my drinking but I went out to my car and started drinking gin straight from the bottle.

When I came home that night I was full of booze and the following morning my wife shook me awake and told me that my mother and brother were downstairs and that my brother was going to take me to the doctor. I went with him to the doctor’s and the doctor asked me how much I drank. I lied to him but my brother told him that I drink most of a bottle of gin every day. The doctor gave me some pills, one of which was Antabuse. I don’t know what the other was, probably a tranquiliser. He told me to take these for two weeks and see how I got on.

Within ten minutes of returning home my wife told me that there was a man called Dick on the phone and he wanted to talk to me. I knew no-one called Dick but I picked up the phone. Dick told me he was a member of A.A. and his doctor— who was my doctor—had called him and told him that he had just been talking with a drunk and could he help? The doctor had given Dick my number. Dick said he was coming round to my house to see me. I asked him where he lived and he said, “ The next house, but one, to you”.

He took me to my first meeting and I was scared to death. This was a huge meeting and for me it was like walking onto a stage in a big theatre. I didn’t get a great deal from that meeting. I was very confused. They were talking about steps and programmes and spirituality and I thought it all sounded like witchcraft. I did get hope, however.

At first I didn’t want to get involved in A.A. I just wanted to go to the meetings and get sober. That’s all, but I went to a lot of meetings and I was struck by the kindness of everyone. At that time there were two meetings in Woking. One on Wednesday and one on Friday but the really big meeting in the area was the Guildford meeting at Jenner Road on a Tuesday. This was a smokers’ meeting and I remember when you entered the room, there was this dense cloud of smog.

I seem to remember that the meetings were very large and I remember thinking there couldn’t be so many alcoholics in Woking!

I remember many of the people from those times. There was Irish Tony, Hugh Mc, who ran his own personal telephone service on his home number and didn’t want to give it up when we started the Telephone Service in Guildford. There was Gurkha Tony, of course, and Nell, who was very busy in A.A. and whose husband was the chairman of a big oil company, and Joan P. ,who was something of an icon in A.A. She did so much service.

I had a slip after six months but I got back to A.A. and stepped up my meetings and I never drank again after that.

I got involved in service after twelve months. I had resisted service up until that point but, since that time, I have done service in every position including being Chairman of Intergroup. I also served for three years at Region.

The previous Chairman was a marvellous man, Gurkha Tony, who had been a Colonel in the Gurkha Regiment, and who ran the Intergroup with incredible efficiency, using a mixture of persuasion and humour. Tony used to always say, “I am powerless over alcohol and my WIFE is unmanageable”.

My Twelve-Stepper, Big Dick as he was known, became my sponsor.

I was also very involved in setting up our Mid Surrey Telephone Service with Bill B and Hugh McK. in 1981 in a very dingy room which Bob the Builder decorated at his own expense. The Service later moved to a community centre in Farnham and we operated from our own homes as responders.

I think that meetings now are more casual. There is not so much attention paid to the Guidelines.

My favourite piece of literature is Living Sober. I probably read that more than the Big Book in the early days because it was so practical.

SUE L.

42 years sober in 2017

Recorded in 2007

“Tough love, cold turkey”

I ATTENDED my first A.A. meeting at the Bristol Akron Group in August 1974. My husband, Tony, had been an Al-Anon member for about a year and he took me to see a counsellor who turned out to be a man named Travers, himself an active A.A. member in the area. The Akron groups were fashioned on the original group in the U.S. I also attended the Bristol Newcomers Group. I was taken to my first meeting by Travers and Di T.

There I met Jean R. and Chris A. and others of the Bristol crowd at that time. I did not sober up until February 1975. I am told I was not given much of a chance to recover due to my attitude of denial, self-pity, blaming others, and general lack of understanding of what was wrong with me. My first inkling of a ‘Spiritual Awakening’ was at the Chippenham Thursday meeting in about mid-January 1975. All I can say is that I sat back in my chair one evening and ‘felt different’. I had gone into the meeting without any change of attitude but the following day was the first in years that I did not take a drink.

I was a ’top-up’ drinker. I realised, about three months later, that what I had felt that night was a feeling of hope, probably for the first time in years. Not drinking one day at a time was not easy, as we all can testify, but with help and support and a fair chunk of tough love, it became possible. I began to realise that, contrary to expectations, the A.A. programme of recovery worked and I started to actually look at the evidence to support that belief at the meetings I attended. Since that time I have always believed in the spiritual alchemy of meetings. Miracles happen. Going to a meeting for me is an act of faith.

It turned out that the groups I attended were somewhat maverick groups and did not belong to Intergroup and there was something of a personality cult going on. I attended Group Conscience meetings in a haze of bewilderment but do remember that there was some conflict between Travers and the General Secretary at GSO, Bill S. Travers, however, helped many newcomers and devoted himself to A.A. and carrying the message. He was a charismatic man, an actor by profession, and generous with his time, love, and support for a number of people like me. For me, he was the right man at the right time. When I reflect on Bill W. and Travers and others, including myself, I experience the unconditional love of a ‘God of my understanding’ in that we are all flawed and yet trusted to carry the message of recovery to others. I did my first Fifth Step with Jane C. and my first sponsor was Jane H.

Travers was sponsored by Sackville, a lovely quietly spoken Irish ex-army officer, whose story appears in the first edition of the Big Book under the title of ‘The Career Officer’. Travers used to joke that his story came between ‘Annie the Cop Fighter’ and ‘The Independent Blonde’. Sackville was, in turn, sponsored by Bill W. from the States. I believe that the sponsorship was by letter.

A.A. came to Ireland before it came to the U.K. and was brought to Dublin by Conor from the U.S. There were some great stories about the first meetings in Ireland which I wish I could remember. The group was formed at the Country Shop in Dublin. Sackville was a member and the early meetings have passed into A.A. history as things of legend. On occasion, Sackville came to the UK and I remember hearing him speak at a meeting in Bristol sometime in 1975.

Before I moved to Buckinghamshire in late 1975, Travers and a group of others, mostly A.A. members as far as I can remember, opened Broadway Lodge, then known as Totterdown Hall in Weston-super-Mare. I was not involved in this but did visit on occasion. I understood it to be the first treatment centre in the U.K. and treatment was Twelve-Step based, using the model from the Hazleden Foundation in the U.S. A little later Jim and Joyce Ditzler came over from the States and took over the running of Broadway Lodge. They later bought a house in Ockley in Surrey which became the renowned treatment centre known as Farm Place. Neither Jim nor Joyce were Fellowship members. Joyce had been a nurse working with alcoholics in the U.S. The treatment offered at these early centres was the ‘Minnesota Method’.

My husband and I moved to Buckinghamshire in late 1975 when I was about ten months sober. When I, eventually, shared, I was welcomed into the meetings at Amersham and Beaconsfield. Briefly, I was sponsored by Dave D. and then Sonia T. who is my sponsor to this day. (2007) Some years later I was a co-founder of the Chesham Saturday Night Group with Tom M.

In 1977 there was a re-structuring of the South Midlands Intergroup which had become unwieldy with too many groups, covering too big an area. It was decided to split this intergroup into three. South Midlands retained the Oxford, Banbury and Bicester area. A new Thames Valley Intergroup covered the Reading and Bracknell area and the other new intergroup, Chiltern and Thames, covered Beaconsfield, Amersham and went up as far as Aylesbury and down to Marlow and Maidenhead. This caused some resentment with the Oldtimers involved in the original South Midlands Intergroup, a resentment which rumbled on for years with some friendly name-calling. However, eventually, unity prevailed and no friendships were lost, as far as I can remember. The bone of contention was due to the fact that the Chiltern and Thames Intergroup incorporated the most ‘wealthy’ groups. There was some friendly competition at the time to achieve status in the league tables of group contributions to GSO.

I became the first Secretary of Chiltern and Thames Intergroup and Terry C. the first Chairman. Later I became the Secretary of South Midlands Region.

I moved to Mid Surrey in 1991 and, being new to the area, decided to keep a low profile for a while. After about a year Joe McP. suggested I become Secretary at the Guildford, Waterden Road, Sunday Night Meeting and I began to sponsor a few people in the area.

Towards the end, in 2000, Carol G. and I decided to co-found the Guildford, Friday Newcomers Meeting. It was to be one hour-long and patterned on a Newcomers Meeting in Newport, Connecticut. Bob S., a member from the Guildford area who had spent a few years in the U.S., came back from America at about that time and suggested we try the format locally. It was, and is, an unusual format. The Secretary changes every two months, and introduces topics for discussion. The tradition of A.A. service is encouraged within the group and, in addition to the usual service positions, this frequent changeover gives newcomers a wide range of service. They are supported by members who have some experience. The meeting is divided into two halves. The first half is devoted to the illness of alcoholism for identification and to assist acceptance of the condition, and the second half is devoted to recovery; the solution. The aim is to take topics from the early chapters of the Big Book. This meeting continues to flourish.

Over the years A.A. has undoubtedly changed. There were changes going on when I arrived in the Seventies, in that more women were attending meetings and alcoholism was being written about in women’s magazines. The rock bottoms of new members were higher than previously, due to more information being available about the signs of alcoholism. Today, there are much more younger newcomers coming in, many, often, multi-addicted. There are many more treatment centres and these centres give alcoholics and addicts a kick-start into recovery. We went through a time when it seemed to become almost fashionable to be an alcoholic and there were mutterings of resentment among older members about all these ‘wannabes’. A far cry from the shame and guilt and no-speak attitude of earlier decades.

Being an A.A. member and trying to work the Traditions in my recovery, I am advised to have no opinions on outside issues. However, I have observed that where the first Five Steps of the programme have been ‘sold’ rather than given in A.A. meetings, there is a difference in attitude. Some vital aspects of recovery are not ‘sold’; for example, the concept of gratitude and service being linked to recovery. Some treatment centres advise food addicts to attend A.A. meetings as the recovery is, in general, stronger and more mature than in a lot of Overeaters Anonymous meetings. In seeking a sponsor in A.A. these young people are, often, difficult to help, as there can be an absence of identification. Their primary addiction, often, is not alcohol. Yes, addiction is addiction, and the Twelve Steps of recovery apply to all of these problems, but newcomers in A.A. can sometimes be forgiven for wondering if they are in the right place with the various side-issues that occur in the sharing.

Some of us older members, who had the ‘tough love, cold turkey’ treatment, fail to understand the statement that ‘I am not getting my needs met’ by the group or their sponsor. The concept that being sponsored is a privilege seems to be lost on occasion.

However, there is so much information available now and this has to be regarded as extremely positive. My favourite literature used to be the Twelve and Twelve book. In the last twenty years, since attending about five of the Big Book seminars, I have come to appreciate the magic of the Big Book all over again. An all-time favourite is the ‘Just for Today’ card.

ALEX M.

(Deceased 2015)

Sober 32 years in 2015

Recorded in November 2006

“John would kill me”

MY FIRST MEETING was in Godalming in 1979. I came into A.A. through a priest, Father Dunstan, who had been approached by my wife to see if he could help with my drinking. Father Dunstan knew Brian, who was a local man and who was in A.A., and Brian Twelve-Stepped me.

He took me to a meeting at the Unitarian Church in Godalming on a Monday night but I remember nothing about that first meeting and I spent the next five or six months drinking on and off. By this time, my wife had joined Al Anon and a woman she met there said her husband John was in A.A. and perhaps he could help.

That was when I met John the Rat-catcher, known by that name because he was a professional rodent exterminator. Well, John came round to talk to me every Tuesday but it took a year and a half for me to get back into A.A. in April 1985. From then on, I went to meetings every night of the week but I think the only reason I was going was that I was convinced that, if I didn’t go, John would kill me!

After nine months I asked John if he would sponsor me and he replied, “What the hell did you think I was doing all this time?” We started working the Steps and we would often sit talking until two or three in the morning. My relationship with my sponsor was very close.

I remember that there were a lot of meetings then—1985—around 20 or so. These were mostly chair and discussion meetings but there was a Step meeting in Guildford. They were pretty much the same format as they are today. They were mainly held in church halls and community centres. One meeting I particularly remember was the Farnborough Sunday where we all sat around in armchairs. That was very comfortable.

Some meetings gave away their literature free while others charged. Frank B., who was a very active local member, gave me my first Big Book. After some meetings we would have an ‘after the meeting’ meeting in a cafe or someone’s house. I seem to remember that in those early days people put themselves out more to help than they do now.

I volunteered for telephone service which had just been started by Byfleet Bill, Gordon from Liss, Bob the Builder and Brigadier Hugh McK. The Telephone Service was first established in l981 in an old police station in Guildford, then it moved in 1985 to a community centre in Farnborough. In 1986 we started a RCF system which was more efficient.

Other people I remember from that time as being very active were Reg, who was Intergroup Chairman, Gurkha Tony, who wasn’t a Gurkha but was an ex-officer in the Gurkha Regiment. Tony was Vice Chairman and had succeeded Norman in that position. Godalming Margaret was another A.A. who did a lot of work.

I can’t remember the public’s attitude to us being either hostile or interested. We started working hard on P.I. to inform the community about us and I think that changed a few attitudes.

Conventions were well-established by 1985. They moved several times over the years, first to West Byfleet and then to Tilford and then to Merrow where it is now (2006). These conventions were always well-attended.

I became a telephone responder in 1986 and a GSR in 1987. Service has been a very big part in my recovery. I have done service ever since. We worked from Twelve Step lists and we worked in eight to twelve-hour shifts. This later became a 24 -hour service.

We really didn’t have much contact with GSO. We worked in our Intergroup and sent money regularly to GSO. Regarding money, some groups just spent all their money on literature but most sent money to Intergroup. The finances were pretty chaotic at that time. Some groups had no bank accounts. The treasurers just carried the cash around with them.

My favourite literature, apart from the Big Book obviously, has been ‘Living Sober’ which I think is a marvellous book and helped me tremendously.

Final thoughts. I went through a lot of physical and emotional pain in recovery which my programme helped me to cope with. My family are happy now and I am a very grateful alcoholic.

CHLOE

30 years sober in 2017

Recorded in November 2006

“I was watched over”

I WAS ORIGINALLY Twelve-Stepped in Paris where I was living at the time. I drank regularly with another woman who was always very badly behaved when she was drunk. Then, suddenly, she stopped and I would watch her as I carried on drinking. When I asked her how she had been able to stop, she said she was now in Alcoholics Anonymous.

When I moved back to the U.K., I got married and my drinking got worse. When I found myself hiding my vodka in the bottom of my baby’s pram, I knew I had to do something about it.

I remembered my friend in Paris and called her. She got someone in England to call me but I refused the help and drank even more to forget the contact with A.A. There was another baby and more drinking, ending in a suicidal rock-bottom. I phoned Redcliffe Gardens, the A.A. London office, and was Twelve-Stepped in the conventional way by two women and, subsequently, taken to meetings.

I was given very practical advice. If I was suffering they would tell me to “clean my shoes, clean the oven, phone another A.A.”, things like that. If Danny, who was very helpful to me, thought I wasn’t sharing openly in local meetings, he would drive me to meetings sometimes up to sixty miles away, so I could share more openly. He was particularly fond of the Croydon and Purley meetings.

Sometimes meetings could get very heated in those days and I remember one particular occasion when it was particularly bad during a Group Conscience meeting. Then an Oldtimer stood up and said very quietly, “Can we please just say the Serenity Prayer again and re-read the Traditions?” Everyone, immediately, calmed down once we had invited God in and focused on the Traditions.

Sometimes I think A.A. was more hands-on in those days and I miss the strength of the Oldtimers. Newcomers were sponsored into service and supported. When I was Secretary at the Cobham meeting after I was one year sober, I was very much watched over by the older members to make sure I kept to the Guidelines.

Other advice they gave us was, “If you are going to a party in your early days, take another alcoholic with you, if possible make sure you have an identifiable glass, always have ten pence in your pocket for a phone call and enough money to go home. Go on Twelve-Step Calls with older members when you can.”

My sponsor would listen to me and then always ask me which Step or Tradition would help me and that was how I learned to live the programme.

Danny and others gave me tough love but I needed that and I also went to pretty rough meetings at first which had, mainly, men there as I hadn’t really drunk with other women Later, I learned to share with women. Danny would tell me, “Stick with the alcoholics of your type. Ask yourself, are these the kind of people you would have drunk with? If they were, stay with them.”

I loved all the different kinds of meetings but I found conventions difficult. They absolutely overwhelmed me. When I went to my first one I had to go to six or seven meetings back to back afterwards to recover but I liked mini one-day conventions and still do.

Regarding the A.A. literature which helped me, obviously the Big Book, especially the passage on page 52 which refers to how we can apply the programme to other areas of our lives. This was my bedrock.

I liked the ‘Little Red Book’ and the pamphlet ‘Letter to a Woman’. I also carried the ‘I am Responsible’ card and I still do, along with the white card with the Serenity Prayer and the Steps and Traditions on it, and the Preamble. Lots of times I have seen it used for spontaneous meetings.

I have served in most positions in A.A. and have been a secretary, a GSR, a Literature Secretary and I have always sponsored people and had a sponsor. I still do service.

SYLVIA and MIKE

Sylvia (Deceased. Date unknown)
Sober 32 years in 2006

Mike. Sober 43 years in 2017

Recorded in November 2006

“You two need 24 Steps”

(Sylvia came in to the West Byfleet Meeting in l974. Mike came in a few months later after attending some Al-Anon meetings and then deciding that A.A. was more appropriate for his problem. Together they contributed to the Addlestone Tapes Service on which they discussed the Twelve Steps.)

Sylvia remembers: I RANG THE LOCAL A.A. number and spoke to Brigadier Hugh. I didn’t know, at that time, who he was but he told me I was drunk and I resented this, although I was. I hung up on him.

I knew a man called Jack, who I knew was in A.A., and I called him and Jack came around with his wife and they talked to me. Then Hugh rang back and told me a Twelve-Stepper, Valerie, would be around to see me that evening and Valerie took me to my first meeting and many meetings after that.

Very quickly Nell took me over. Nell was a very forceful lady and didn’t suffer fools gladly. She became my sponsor and she was wonderful to all my family. Nell, I think, might have been sponsored by Brigadier Hugh as Hugh seemed to be the first sober alcoholic around in Mid Surrey in the early Sixties.

Nell, later, was recruited on to the GSO Board and finally stepped down in 1978. She was, also, very active in organising the Tilford and Selsea Conventions and her life seemed to be dedicated to A.A. Nell used to tell Mike and I, “You two don’t need Twelve Steps. You need 24!”

On one occasion in my early days I remember sitting next to a lady at a meeting in Guildford and she asked me, “Is your husband pleased you are sober?” I nearly exploded with anger. I said, “Why should HE be pleased? He’s still drinking” The thought that she thought I should have stopped drinking for my husband really upset me.

Mike remembers: I WENT TO AL-ANON in the hope that it would help me cope with Sylvia’s drinking. There were ten women and me, and they all seemed to be picking on me so I quit and went to A.A. instead.

Sylvia says: My father was an alcoholic and had attended A.A. meetings in the early Fifties but he didn’t stay. My memories of my Father, at that time, is that when he went to these meetings he stayed sober and when he stayed away he was always drunk.

I also went to meetings in Brookwood Wednesdays and Brookwood Sundays. The Brookwood Sundays weren’t really A.A. meetings. They were just somewhere where you went along to for a cup of tea and a chat. The Camberley Meeting was actually in Frimley, in the bar of a church hall. We had all those signs, ‘Guinness is Good for You’ et cetera, staring down at us. We then moved to the larger church hall as more people came in and then to a health centre in Camberley

Mike says: What I particularly remember about that meeting was that there was a member called Tommy who used to just sit there and not say a word to anyone. He was very scruffy and in a very bad state and, eventually, he moved away from the area. Years later, I happened to be in Coventry on business and attended a meeting there. They asked me to do a chair and afterwards a very well-dressed man came up to me and said, “Do you remember me? I’m Tommy”. He now had an important managerial job in Coventry. This was one of the many miracles I witnessed in A.A.

Sylvia says: What I liked about A.A. in those days was, if you were not feeling 100% well, the word would get around and you would get a phone call from people anxious to help. Sometimes they knew what was wrong with me before I knew myself. Of course, A.A. was much smaller in these days and people seemed to have more time to help others

I remember when Camberley Wednesday Step meetings started in 1978. Squadron Leader Geoff, who was a tremendous help to Mike and I, was the Secretary and I remember that Jack, who Twelve-Stepped me, was there.

In those days when you became a Secretary you kept a book in which you entered the names of the speaker and all those attending. We also took flasks of tea and coffee with us as there were no facilities provided. All the meetings at that time were what we now call ‘drunkalogues’. Ockham Wednesday Morning was the first discussion meeting in the area.

People were very keen to volunteer for positions in A.A. A lot of members were acting on their own initiative and in isolation and, obviously, that had to change but I think that ‘the feeling’ in A.A. is the same.

Gradually, all the Services began to be built up and we got into schools and other places. We had one big public meeting but the attendance was disappointing. Not many doctors came to that event. I always felt it was difficult for doctors dealing with alcoholics. One doctor said to me, “What can A. A. give alcoholics that I can’t?”

I was very good at paperwork so I was co-opted on to GSO Administration. This was sometime in the early Eighties. I can’t remember exactly what year but I was there for that summer.

I suppose the biggest change in A.A. is the number of people coming in, especially young people. I am quite relaxed about the people coming in with cross-addictions, as long as we stay within our own Traditions.

One difference is that many people are coming in from rehab centres and they are pretty sober when they get to us, unlike many of us who were often drunk when we first came to our first meeting. In the early days everyone was so desperate to get sober and this was reflected in the sharing.

My favourite A.A. literature was the Big Book but I only liked the recovery part of the stories. I also liked The A.A. Way of Life which was later re-named As Bill Sees It and also the Twenty-Four Hours a Day book. I always carried the ‘Just for Today’ card everywhere with me.

Mike: These were my choices, too.

EILEEN T.

(Deceased (2015)

41 years sober in 2015

Recorded in November 2006

“A.A. more like a family”

I CAME IN through a phone call I made to Redcliffe Gardens, the A.A. General Service Office at that time. I had been to see a psychiatrist at the Priory on the previous day. At that time the Priory was exclusively dealing with mental illness. I rang Redcliffe Gardens at 11 am on a Saturday and by Saturday evening I was at my first A.A. meeting at Jenner Road, Guildford.

Irish Joe gave me my first cup of tea and a man called Charles was in the Chair. He was talking about Step One and I identified immediately. I picked up ten telephone numbers that evening and I felt as though a brick had been removed from my shoulder.

I quickly got a sponsor, Eileen, and later, Valerie, who, subsequently, was on the Board of GSO. I was going to Conventions straight away and attended the Selsey Convention in 1974, the year I came in. The other meeting I went to was Ockham on a Wednesday. At that meeting Fraser, who was a long time sober, donated a beer mug as a pot.

The Ockham meeting was started because it was just off the A 3 so travellers could just make a small diversion and could be at the meeting in minutes. It was a morning meeting and was called the ‘Doughnut Meeting’ because the man who started it was Chester, an American, and he initiated the American tradition of coffee and doughnuts. My three regular meetings at that time were Guildford (Saturday), Ockham (Wednesday) and Woking (Friday). I think Tony F. and Valerie started Woking (Friday) meeting.

Another meeting I went to was Cobham, Monday afternoon. This was started by Daphne and South African Sheila in 1980. The Guildford Saturday, Jenner Road, meeting later moved to Guildford Cathedral around 1975. At that time I think there were about twelve meetings in the area and they varied from ‘straight chairs’, to discussion and step meetings. I understand there were no discussion meetings in the area until Chester started them in 1972 at Ockham

The characters I remember from these days were Cliff, who was very outspoken and the best Twelve-Stepper ever. He was tough but caring. He had his own ideas, though, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with the Intergroup and insisted in sending the group’s money straight to GSO.

Incidentally, when the Mid Surrey Intergroup split from Southern Region I was the person who suggested the new name, Mid Surrey.

Valerie and Lisa, who was Chester’s girlfriend and, later, his wife, were very strong members. Liz was, also, an active member and she talked a lot of good sense. Other people that come to mind are Irish Joe and Brian, who ran a book publishing company. There was also Big Derek, who was a writer.

I also started the Friday, Walton meeting with Sailor Bill and I have served in most positions in A.A., as Secretary, Treasurer, and GSR but my first job was emptying the ashtrays.

Regarding attitudes to A.A. in those days, I think alcoholics were generally looked down on. People did not have the understanding of the illness which they have now. We had a regular meeting at a local mental hospital but the doctors there had no time for us, although they did let us have one evening a week to talk to the patients.

I suppose A.A. is much the same now as then, as it always will be if we follow the Traditions, but what I remember from those days was that people were very caring and would do anything to help you. I don’t find that now, although I suppose we were fewer in number in those days, therefore A.A. was more like a family but the Oldtimers could be very tough and they didn’t just suggest that you did service: they told you!

My favourite literature was the Twelve and Twelve and the Serenity Prayer. I read the Big Book on holiday in Germany when I was only six weeks sober and it frightened me so much I had to come home immediately, even though I identified with it completely.

ANN S-P. (Cobham Ann)

46 years sober in 2017

Recorded in December 2006

“I used to pray for leprosy”

MY FATHER WAS IN THE INDIAN ARMY and life there was very social. There would be the usual round of cocktail parties at which alcohol was plentiful. These were very social occasions and, although I was only a child at that time, I was impressed about how everyone seemed to enjoy themselves at such occasions

In 1952, I moved to Hamburg and started working in the Foreign Office there. I was sharing a flat with three other girls. I was twenty-two and we entertained a lot so there was a great deal of social drinking.

I met my husband there. He was a keen sportsman and part of what we called ‘The Orange Squash Brigade’. He didn’t drink much at all. He was the Ski Champion of the Combined Services. We moved to London and moved into a little house he had in Staines but he was posted to Dorset so I only saw him at weekends. I had just become pregnant and I knew no-one in Staines and the house was very isolated. I was very lonely so that’s when the drinking really took hold. I was drinking and hiding it and my husband, because he wasn’t a drinker himself, didn’t notice it.

Later, when I had two other children, I would tell my husband when he came home that I had a hard day with the children and that I had taken some aspirins and was feeling tired. I would then go to bed but I would lie upstairs, terrified that he would find my bottles and come up and kill me.

He would say, “You will have to stop taking these aspirins. You are beginning to act strangely”. He still hadn’t spotted I had a problem, although he did, eventually.

I went to A.A. on the 14th of March 1966 at Madeira Road, Byfleet. I was taken there by a lovely lady called Joan B. who Twelve-Stepped me. I was very apprehensive that some scruffy old lady would turn up on my doorstep and I was astonished when a white Merc sports car turned into my drive and a very elegant lady stepped out. I felt she couldn’t be an alcoholic but she told me that she had spent all her days drinking in an old dressing gown which stank of gin There were very few women at that meeting and everyone seemed so much older than me. I felt I was too young to be an alcoholic.

Joan adopted me. That was the way it was then. They didn’t wait for the newcomers to ask them to sponsor them. She told me that she was my sponsor and she called me everyday as I was very shaky in those early days. I went to Brookwood, Guildford and Byfleet meetings but, after four weeks, I decided that I wasn’t an alcoholic. I hated that idea of being an alcoholic. I used to pray every night that I might have cancer or leprosy; anything rather than alcoholism. I went to very few meetings in that first year and Joan always stayed in touch, although she didn’t pursue me.

I was having trouble with my mother-in-law and I was drinking secretively. Sometimes I would go to bed during the day and leave the children on their own. I tried to stop for three weeks and couldn’t do it. After two years I became terribly depressed and in 1968 I talked to Joan on the phone and told her about my situation.

I told my husband I had had a ‘slip’ and he was so terribly shocked that the next time I slipped, I didn’t tell him—to spare his feelings! I binged for sixteen months from April 1970 to June 1971. I felt nothing. I didn’t talk to anyone. Then one night I saw a programme on TV on which people kept repeating, “The Good Times Are Coming” and this had a profound effect on me.

I finally accepted, in my kitchen, that I was an alcoholic. It just happened.

I went back to A.A. and I started to do service. I was Secretary at the Ockham and Cobham meetings and I have been a GSR. I did Twelve-Stepping, although I don’t do that now. I feel the best Twelve-Steppers are those who are closer to the last drink.

My first convention was the Clacton Convention and I hated it but I wasn’t really sober or accepting at that time. My second was the Tilford Convention in 1968 in Joan B’s garden in Woodham Lane, Byfleet and I liked that. Joan B. was an incredible woman. She had a sponsor, Mona, and was absolutely committed to A.A. In fact, in Joan’s early days Mona wouldn’t let Joan go to certain meetings in case she heard the wrong things shared. Mona pushed Joan into doing a lot of service in A.A. and, not only was Joan involved in Tilford Conventions, but she was also a Convenor at the Selsea Conventions.

Joan was more than a friend to me. She died in Arizona in 1998 from emphysema and I miss her greatly.

This programme has been wonderful for me. I have found it good for my humility.

The change I see in A.A. today is that there is more emphasis on the programme than there was back then. Also, it is good to see all these young people coming in. I felt very young and out of place when I came in to A.A. in the Sixties and I was thirty six at that time. Later, I started a Young People’s Group and all of us were in our late 30’s and 40’s! This was in Byfleet but it collapsed after only three meetings.

MIKE S.

Sober 34 years in 2006

Recorded in December 2006

“I kept coming back”

I CAME INTO A.A. at a meeting at Bank Station in London and I knew immediately that I was an alcoholic. I went to meetings for three years in Guildford and Byfleet and then my dog died and I stayed away for a year but I didn’t drink.

I never really understood the programme but I just kept coming back. My wife, Ann, whom I met at the Camberley meeting, came in through a twelve-week course they used to run at Rooksdown Hospital for people with drinking problems. They got all sorts of big personalities in there. Rooksdown Hospital was a department of Basingstoke Hospital. Ann was a trained nurse and understood how the programme worked but I never did. We were sober and married in A.A. for twenty-eight years until she died.

When Dick K. first phoned us up, he asked, “Which one of you two is the alcoholic?”

I went to the Saturday night meetings at Guildford Cathedral. I enjoyed all the meetings except one which was in Liss. At Liss, they wouldn’t let you share anything other than your drinking. I had been an adopted child and I wanted to share about that but they wouldn’t let me. You were only supposed to talk about alcohol but I was at a meeting in Farnham recently where five out of nineteen people at that meeting were adopted and we were able to share about that. So that’s a good thing.

I think A.A. has changed so much. People seem to have really got the programme now and the Steps which didn’t seem so important in my day. People then just said, “Keep coming back”.

I was a Secretary at Byfleet and I was doing that job for three years as we couldn’t get anyone else to take it on. I took over the Coldingley Prison meetings from Tony F. who lives in Devon now. Jacko started the Coldingley meetings, then Dick K. took over, followed by Bill R, then Colin the Roofer, then Tony, then me.

Tony is credited with starting the Addlestone Tapes Service but that is only partly true. What happened was that I recorded some chapters of the Twelve and Twelve for another member, Blind Jackie, who, obviously, couldn’t read the book, and Tony saw the possibilities of providing tapes to members and followed through. He did a great job.

I was out of A.A. for some years after my wife died but I met a fellow member in Farnham Library and she said, “Why don’t you come back to the meetings?” so I went to a meeting with her in Farnham and now I go to two meetings in Farnham and one in Ockham every week.

I feel now that I can be particularly helpful to ladies between 25 and 40. I always felt I got along with women rather than men They seem to recognise that at my age I represent no threat to them and they seem to feel that they can ask my advice—for what that’s worth!

CARMEL Mc.

27 years sober in 2007

Recorded in July 2007

“I had my hair done”

I WAS BORN IN IRELAND IN 1942 and I had my first drink when I was twelve years old. Then, when I was 14, I signed ‘The Pledge’—never to drink alcohol—but drank again when I was sixteen and felt very grown up. I had left school at thirteen to help my mother at home, bringing up the family, and my education suffered as a result of that. By twenty, I was married and by the age of twenty-four I had three children under the age of three. I moved to Aldershot in 1968 and apart from nine years from 1989, when we moved back to Ireland, I have lived in Aldershot ever since.

I came into A.A. on 15th January 1981, to the Farnborough Wednesday meeting. I had been very drunk on the previous Sunday and went to see my priest who told me I was an alcoholic. About seven years before this I had seen my doctor and she told me that she thought I was an alcoholic but I didn’t do anything about this. Previously my husband and I were having big arguments about my drinking but now he had stopped speaking to me completely. He didn’t seem to care anymore and he told me I had to do something about my drinking or he was leaving me.

He insisted I go and get help and I went to another doctor. I told him that my husband was complaining that I was drinking too much and this doctor put me on Antabuse and told me that I should only have two drinks a week at weekends.

A week before my first A.A. meeting I was trying to call A.A. through the local telephone operator and, finally, she gave me a number in Farnham which turned out to be the number for a man named Seamus.

His wife came to the phone and she told me Seamus was out but would call me back. She was very helpful and talked to me for ages. I gave her my telephone number then started to worry that these people in A.A. now had my number and might start calling me at all times. Seamus called back the following day and arranged to take me to the Farnborough Wednesday meeting. Seamus scared me at first, but he was enormously helpful in my recovery.

I had had my hair done to go to this first meeting. I was all dressed up. I expected them to tell me that I wasn’t really an alcoholic and, at first, I thought everyone was speaking in codes. I kept hearing words, like ‘programme’, and ‘steps’ and ‘defects of character’ which I had never heard before but I got hope and what I took home from that first meeting was that alcoholism was an illness; that I had an allergy and I was so grateful to hear that because I thought I was going mad.

Bob the Pipe was very active in the area at that time and he sent me to the Basingstoke Step meetings. There were no Step meetings in Farnborough at that time. I had reading problems and always tried to sit next to someone who could help me if I stumbled when reading a passage in the Big Book. I got myself a sponsor in my first year and, although she is not my sponsor now, we have a good relationship.

I saw many new meetings start up. Aldershot Discussion was on a Saturday and was started in 1985 by Roofer Colin, Peter the Bike and Martin the Monk. Martin wasn’t really a monk but he did work at the local monastery. What I remember about that meeting was that Martin tried to get us to stand up and hold hands at the end of the meeting when we said the Serenity Prayer and there was a great outcry about that and the idea was dropped.

Ginge, another very active member, started the meetings in Cove in 1985. The first Big Book

meeting in Mid Surrey was started in Church Crookham, the meeting which is now called Fleet, on Mondays. This was started by Wayne, an American, and South African Davie. I remember regular members at that meeting were Margaret, Kate and Jean. It was a very small meeting and we used to read just one paragraph from the Big Book and then discuss it. We could even interrupt the reader if we didn’t understand what was being read.

The thing I am most grateful to A.A. for is that it gave me self-worth and I never had that before.

I am more aware than ever of the illness of alcoholism. I have lost members of my family through this disease but there is good news, too. One of my daughters has been in the Fellowship for fifteen years and I am very proud of her.

The advice I was given in the beginning was “Stick with the Winners” and I have always tried to do that. In those days when there weren’t so many meetings we often used to come back to each other’s homes after the meetings and continue talking.

I have done service in A. A. I was, first of all, the Tea Person and I thought I was the best Tea Person in A. A. I was so pleased to be doing that service. I have been a Secretary and a GSR and I was, also, Intergroup Treasurer.

The big event which stands out in my memory was my first A. A. New Year’s Dance. That was great but I am not a great fan of conventions. I find them too social; too watered down but that’s just my opinion.

I think A.A. now is stronger now than when I came in. It is more varied with more young people coming in.

ANGELA W.

Sober 48 years in 2017

Recorded in July 2007

“Too young to be an alcoholic”

I CAME INTO A.A. IN 1969 when I was twenty years old. I had my first drink when I was eleven. I was an incredibly depressed child and that first drink made me feel good. We were an Army family and I saw visitors coming to our house and having drinks and going away happy and I was attracted to that. From then on I used alcohol regularly to make me feel better.

By the age of nineteen, I had tried to commit suicide three times and finished up in St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park in London where I, finally, decided I wanted to live more than I wanted to die. By this time I was, most of the time, in and out of ‘blackouts’.

At that time I was working as a freelance in flower arranging which I still do. I was taken to meetings by various people for the first week. These meetings were all in Central London. I can’t remember much about my first meeting. They had to, even, help me hold my cup of coffee but I felt there was something there for me.

I went to meetings in Central London and I really struggled to stay sober. At that time the meetings were attended, mainly, by men and they were, mainly, middle-aged. They couldn’t believe I was an alcoholic. I was too young, they said. They kept asking me, “Are you sure you are an alcoholic?”

Not only was I very young but there were very few women at these early meetings. But these men had a strong message and they gave me valuable advice. This was ‘living advice’. They took me under their wings and really looked after me. There was more fellowship in those days, I think.

After three weeks, I got myself a sponsor. I found myself standing next to this member at a bus stop after a meeting and I was so desperate I asked her to be my sponsor and she agreed. We didn’t do any Steps for another two months and then she began to take me through the programme.

We had ‘meetings after the meetings’ then. We used to go to a fish and chip shop and talk for hours. It was owned by a very nice Greek who often had to ask us to leave as he wanted to close up and go home.

I moved to the Farnham area in 1974 and it was a big culture shock. I came from the big London meetings to small ones in Guildford and I felt that the Guildford meetings were all very watered down and I missed seeing the drunks. It was a rare occasion when a drunk didn’t come in to a London meeting waving his bottle.

I started the Tuesday Farnham Morning meeting in late-1979. I have to admit this was in a spirit of self-interest as I had a young baby at the time and I could walk to the meeting and bring him in his carry cot. The other person who helped me start this meeting was Lisa, an American. And another American, Helen, who was an actress, also came. Eileen was a regular member. There was only three or four of us and it developed slowly. It is still not a very big meeting but it is much loved. Farnham Thursday opened a few years later in 1980.

The big events which I remember were the Tilford Conventions which were very popular and we once had a big public meeting at Church Hall, Farnham, on which we all worked on very enthusiastically and which was a great success and attracted doctors and probation officers and others.

What I remember about the early days was that the only reading, at the meetings, was Chapter Five. Nothing else was read.

I have always done service. I was Intergroup Treasurer and I have been a Group Secretary and a GSR. I have also done prison service. I think, I hope, that my service has borne results. I once did a talk for the BBC ‘Women’s Hour’ programme on alcoholism and we seemed to get a lot of people coming into A. A. after that.

There have been changes in A.A. of course, and, mostly for the better. First of all, attendances are now almost equally girls and boys and young people are coming in now. That’s great.

I am not too keen on all these other fellowships which have adopted our programme. I think there are too many of them and I worry about our programme getting adapted and watered down. I am also not keen on all these special meetings in A.A.

You will gather I am an A.A. purist. I believe totally in the Big Book. It has everything in it for me.

VALERIE L.

Sober 45 years in 2017

Recorded in November 2006

“Everyone did P. I.”

I CAME TO MY FIRST MEETING on 13th March 1972. I had been in hospital in Northampton. My brother is a doctor and he found me very drunk at home and booked me into the hospital. My contact with A.A. was through the hospital. A recovering alcoholic came to see me and brought me a Big Book.

My dearest friend had a husband who was a recovering alcoholic, Larry, and he had a sponsor, Fraser, who was a very active member of A.A. in Guildford and wonderful at Twelve-Stepping. It was Fraser who took me to my first meeting at Jenner Road in Guildford on a Tuesday night.

My view of alcoholics at that time was that they were the dregs of Society—that sort of thing. I was deeply ashamed that this had happened to me but I thought that I might be an alcoholic. One of the people I remember at that meeting was Nell. She was another very active member who later groomed me for service.

I bought every book I could find on A. A. and alcoholism. I thought that, if I was going to be in A.A., I should throw myself into it. I had a sponsor within weeks. Her name was Joan but she died and the person who helped me most, and taught me to fully understand the programme, was another Joan: Joan B., who later emigrated to America, to Arizona, and died there.

There weren’t many meetings in those days. Jenner Road was the first one as far as I know . I think it was started in the Sixties. My understanding was that it was started by three people: Brigadier Hugh, Canadian Bill and Big John M. may have been the third member. Both Bill and John had much longer sobriety than Hugh at that time.

Some of the meetings at Jenner Road could get very disruptive. We often had the ‘River Boys’ as we called them, come in. These were the people who drank down by the river and lived in the local hostel. They were often very drunk and noisy. Many of them got sober. Among them was a woman, Marie, who was sleeping rough, but she also, eventually, got sober too and she became a very great friend.

The meetings were big—about thirty people or so—which, for that time, was huge, and they were all Speaker meetings. The first Discussion meeting was at Ockham and was started in 1973 by Chester, an American, at his house and then, later, at Ockham Parish Hall. Another Speaker meeting was at Brookwood Hospital on Wednesday nights. There was also a Sunday afternoon meeting at Brookwood but this wasn’t really an A.A. meeting. It was more of a ‘drop in for a chat and coffee. I was Secretary there for a while. I also went to Byfleet Thursday and Ockham Wednesday morning meetings and I did Prison Service at Coldingley Prison for two years.

Another meeting opened at Jenner Road on Saturdays and that transferred later to Guildford Cathedral as we couldn’t always get the room at Jenner Road every Saturday. Paula and I started another meeting at Horsham. Paula was also a very active A.A. member and together with Tony F., Liz C. and myself, she started the Addlestone Tape Service in 1980.

The biggest changes have been in the types of meetings. Now we have Step meetings, Discussion meetings, ‘As Bill Sees It’ meetings and I think that is a good thing. We only had the Speaker meetings before Ockham started. I loved the Discussion meetings there.

In the early days we didn’t really have an organised P. I. Service. Everyone did P. I. I have served as a Group Secretary, I was a Regional Rep and I also served on the Board of GSO at Redcliffe Gardens, taking over from Nell.

In all my time in A.A. I have never known a group which had to close because it couldn’t pay the rent. Somehow the money was found and that tells me a lot about A.A.

Footnote. Valerie L was the Chair of the meeting which established South East Region as the first Region in the U.K.

BOB (the Pipe)

(Deceased around 2013)

Sober 29 years in 2013

Recorded in July 2007

“I de-alcoholised eight pints of beer”

I BEGAN DRINKING AT THE AGE OF 16. I only drank beer and I didn’t drink during the day. Mostly, I didn’t have any trouble. I thoroughly enjoyed my drinking which lasted over thirty-three years and I would drink between twelve and twenty pints a night. During that time I had married and had a child but that didn’t stop me. It was only in the last three months of my drinking that things started to go badly wrong and I couldn’t understand it. In 1978, I was breathalysed and the reading was 243 milograms which was very high.

I went to my Doctor for a heart check. I was now going to have to use a bike to get to work and as the journey involved eight miles there and eight miles back I wanted to check if I was fit. I was surprised when the doctor told me I was an alcoholic and that if I didn’t go to A.A. he would section me.

I phoned up the telephone number for A.A. and the man I spoke to, who, later, I found out to be Brigadier Hugh, asked me for my address and then passed that information on to the Secretary at Camberley meeting. Twelve-Stepping was a bit different in those days.

So in August 1978, two months later, I went to the Monday meeting in Camberley to prove the doctor wrong. I didn’t like that meeting but the following Wednesday I went to the Farnborough meeting and I fell in love with the place.

After a fortnight of going to meetings, I kept hearing about not having one drink. I never ever had just one drink but I still tried to have just one. I poured out a beer at seven o’clock and made it last until eleven o’clock and that was the most miserable experience of my life. A fortnight after that I decided that it was the taste of alcohol that I liked so I de-alcoholised eight pints of beer and drank that. The result was I had a bad case of diarrhoea for a fortnight.

On Sunday, August Bank Holiday 1978, I had my last drink and then I started to go to meetings every night of the week. I went to Farnborough, Reading and Basingstoke and in 1979 I began to do Telephone Service in Reading. We hired a room at the Elm Park Hall. Then in 1981 the Manual Telephone Service started at Guildford and I was on duty the first night with Elaine. Ginge and Joyce did the second night. And Seamus and Carmel did the third night. In 1989 we moved the Telephone Service to Farnborough and Elaine was the Chief Responder of the RCF 24-hour Service which started on 1st April 1985.

I started the Friday Farnborough Step meeting in October 1980 which, originally, was at Cove but later moved to the Community Centre in Farnborough. The originators of that meeting, apart from myself, were Billy (the Chef), Tom, Joyce, Elaine and Norman. The reason why this was started was that the Wednesday meeting was getting too big (over 30 people) for everyone to get a chance to share. The Friday meeting was a straight Step meeting except that every fifth week we discussed a Tradition. There had been an earlier Step meeting in Farnham but that had closed.

In 1990 some of us felt that there was a need for a lunchtime meeting in the area so Angela M. and I started one at the Catholic Church in Ley Road, Hawley but we ran into trouble there. Although we were getting good attendances, a lot of the alcoholics were still drinking and making nuisances of themselves and the church authorities, quite rightly, asked us to leave. We went to the Community Centre and then to the Holy Trinity Church, Hawley, where the meeting still runs today.

A word about the Cove meetings. There was a meeting in Cove started in 1981 and in 1986 two other meetings were started. We wanted to have our own intergroup. The proposers called GSO and were told that a minimum of three groups were required to qualify as an intergroup. So another intergroup was formed, known as North-East Hants, which didn’t survive..

The changes I see in A.A, are the usual: younger people, more women, fewer bicycles in the car park, more cars. There were only three people in the Farnborough Wednesday Group who had valid driving licenses. It was common to offer a lift home to those people who didn’t have a car.

People were more willing to do service then. There was a lot of Twelve-Stepping. I don’t know if there is any real Twelve-Stepping done nowadays. I think suffering alcoholics are just told to go to a meeting. I don’t think people go out to see the suffering alcoholics any more.

Also, in the early days, before the ‘Moment’s Silence’ at meetings, Secretaries used to say “while we gather our thoughts and remember why we’re here”. Now there are extra words added: “and those suffering alcoholics who have not yet found these rooms”! Where did that come from? My opinion is that those suffering alcoholics are outside of the Fellowship.

As regards the A.A. literature I read. The Big Book and on my first Christmas in A.A., I was presented with the ‘Guidelines of A.A. in the UK’ as a Christmas present. I still have it. I also carried a ‘Just for Today’ card and I really liked a pamphlet called ‘Twelve Steps to a Slip’ which helped me. I was also told to read A.A. Comes of Age before I accepted the position of GSR at my group. It wasn’t suggested. I was TOLD.

DERRICK H.

Sober 46 years in 2017

Recorded in July 2007

“We clung to each other as though our lives depended on it”

I WAS A PATIENT in Sandown House, Graylingwell Hospital in Chichester in 1968. Sandown House was one of the early treatment centres. Dr Rathod, a highly respected psychiatrist, who had previously worked with Max Glatt at Pinel House, was the psychiatrist in charge. It was Dr Rathod who was, subsequently, responsible for providing A.A. with its first meeting room in Crawley.

As patients in Sandown House we were regularly bussed to meetings around Sussex: my first introduction to A.A. It was also in Sandown House that I was given a ‘cast-iron guarantee’: “Don’t drink, Derrick, and your life will get better”. No promises of restoring broken relationships, of resolving what appeared then as insurmountable difficulties; just that “Don’t drink and your life will get better”. A promise which I have been able to pass on to others on countless occasions.

Coming in to A.A. that year, I attended meetings in Horsham once a fortnight, Purley, Croydon and Haywards Heath. The Haywards Heath meeting was started by Bill S., at that time the General Secretary at GSO. Most of my subsequent recovery was around South Surrey and Sussex. My first contact with Mid Surrey would have been at the Guildford Jenner Road meeting on a Tuesday.

Jenner Road was a big meeting. On some occasions there were so many of us that some of us needed to sit out in the hallway. What I remember about Jenner Road is what would, probably, be best described today as an ‘Old-Fashioned, No-Nonsense A.A. Meeting’. It was very gutsy, very much to the point and, at times, very rowdy. Some drunks would sit, fiercely clutching their bottles, defying anyone to even think of taking those away from them. As long as they didn’t create a disturbance, that was O.K. There was always a chance that they might hear the message and that they were there at all was something. If they did become a little too noisy, a couple of Oldtimers would quietly take them outside, make them a cup of coffee and talk to them. All the problems got handled properly and, sitting watching, we newcomers started learning what A.A. was all about.

In 1994 I opened the Dorking Wednesday meeting together with a lady called Sheila. It was held in St Martin’s Church Hall and was an offshoot of the Dorking Friday meeting. I seem to remember that there were disagreements (not uncommon) at the Friday meeting so some of us opened another on Wednesdays. Then, as now, meetings often started that way. There was also at that time another meeting at Brockham on a Friday but I am unaware of what happened to that and I understand that it is no longer there.

In those days meetings were extraordinarily smoky. To a man we seemed to all be serial smokers: cigarettes, pipes, and cheroots. Doing a chair one night in South Croydon, the smoke was so thick that I couldn’t see the other side of the room, but the group shared a terrific camaraderie. We cared very much about each other. Simultaneously, we were, certainly in A.A. terms, very naive. On one occasion, when one of our group went walkabout and it was rumoured that he was drinking again, we toured the town, the pubs and the hospitals. We had, again in A.A. terms, so very much to learn. What we did possess, however, was commitment, the kind of commitment that is, perhaps, today, occasionally lacking.

An analogy I have often used is, that we were akin to shipwrecked sailors clinging a lifeboat—“stick close to the boat and you will be O.K. Go too far off and the sharks will get you”. We clung to each other like our lives depended on it, which, of course, they did.

It was David M., a long time A.A. friend, who, in November of 1992, asked whether I would consider editing Share magazine. After a couple of weeks of consideration, I agreed and started what was, to subsequently prove, to be the most gratifying and ‘growing’ period of my life. Share staff worked, then as now, as a team and that, in itself, was in a steep learning curve; working with others who didn’t always, necessarily, agree with what the editor proposed, taught me a little more about myself.

In 1992, the magazine was still a ‘scissors and paste’ affair, a form of magazine production I had encountered back in the early 1940’s. It was very time consuming, very old-fashioned and very expensive. We were fortunate in having on the team a young man, Malcolm, who was very much a computer whiz. Throughout 1992 Malcolm taught me the rudiments of desktop publishing. As a result the team was able to bring costs under control and to actually put Share back into the ‘black’ and its appearance up into the Twentieth Century. We were able to use half-tones and even colour.

My time as editor coincided with A.A.’s Fiftieth Anniversary and we produced a special celebration issue. In doing so we met many Oldtimers, those who came into the Fellowship during the 1950’s. Editing Share was a privilege I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

BERYL H.

Sober 29 years in 2007

Recorded in July 2007

“The Meeting was Somewhat Rougher”

I RANG GSO AT REDCLIFFE GARDENS LONDON in 1978 and went to my first meeting at Dorking on a Monday at Dene Street in the health centre there. I kept going to that particular meeting because I believed—in my early alcoholic confusion—that I was permitted to only attend the one meeting in my home town. Later, discovering the Jenner Road meeting in Guildford, I became a regular there. Jenner Road was quite an experience. The meeting was somewhat rougher than Dorking; not as smart, but far more real. There were a lot of drinkers there and it wasn’t unknown for fights to break out.

At that time I was one of the few people in A.A. in the area who still possessed a driving licence so I ferried everyone around, travelling to perhaps six meetings a week: Crawley, Redhill, Croydon and the Guildford Cathedral meeting on a Saturday night. Later, Frank R. and I took turns being Secretaries at the Dorking Monday meeting and, later still, one of my first sponsees, Gill D. took over as Secretary there.

TONY F.

46 years sober in 2017

Recorded in August 2007

“The man who wrote the ‘Who Me?’ pamphlet.”

(Tony F. was the member who started the Addlestone Tapes Service in 1980 together with Paula and Mike S. They first put forward the idea of producing tapes for the Fellowship at an Intergroup meeting in November 1979 and got the Intergroup’s approval. The first tape was produced in January 1980 and in the first year it sold the grand total of 15 copies. Since that time these tapes have now produced sales of 40,000. In 2006 Tony passed the legacy of the Addlestone tapes to another member, Chris at Falmouth, who continues to produce them. Tony was told that the first meetings in Guildford were early in 1956. They were held in a private house and were organised by Brigadier Hugh McK. , the same Hugh who was very active in telephone service in Woking. The first formal meeting was at the Guildford Institute in December 1955. At that time Guildford was one of only thirty-two meetings in the UK.)

I WAS DEPUTY CONTROLLER OF SERVICES at the University of London and one day the Principal sent for me and told me that both he and the Vice-Chancellor were of the opinion that I was abusing alcohol or drugs. He told me to make an appointment with the Director of the Institute of Psychiatry, Professor Sir Denis Hill. Two days later I had to admit to the Principal that I had not made the appointment and was given 24 hours to do so or my contract would be ended.

When I first met Sir Denis we had a long talk and he gave me a physical examination. I hotly denied I had an alcohol problem and, just as I was leaving, he said to me, “ If you ever need an umbrella, here is the name and telephone number of my Registrar, give him a ring”. Three weeks later I called him in desperation and arranged to see him at his Friday afternoon clinic. For the next eighteen months I left the university at lunchtime on Fridays, walked to the pub outside Waterloo Station and then about 2pm conveniently caught the 68 bus to Camberwell Green, drank in a pub until 3pm, then walked to my 3.15pm appointment. After my appointment, I called in at an off license nearby, bought a half bottle of whisky and then caught the train home.

After eighteen months of this nonsense I was told they could do nothing more for me and they hoped I would go to A.A. I was introduced to a man called Stan who was an A.A. member and who was running an outpatients group for thirteen and fourteen-year-old alcoholics. This was in 1970 so they were having trouble with under -age drinking even then.

I got to my first A.A. meeting in February 1972 at Jenner Road, Guildford and was befriended by Squadron Leader Geoffrey, who later became my sponsor, but I continued to drink for my first seven months in A.A.

Then one Saturday afternoon I left the family home—they were glad to get rid of me—and at 1.30am on the Sunday morning I was found sprawled in the middle of a main road in Woking by a motorcyclist. I spent the next two days alone with Geoffrey and I never drank again.

The Principal and Vice-Chancellor were incredibly supportive. The Principal said to me, “Tony, don’t go flying around trying to make everything right. Enjoy your life”. After that he used to give me all sort of responsible jobs to do. I must say he was marvellous.

Geoff used to kick my backside into service in A.A. He said, “Tony when you go into the meeting are the chairs out? Are the ashtrays in place? Is the tea ready? Well, that is what these people do for you. Now it’s your turn”. There was a lot of tough love in those days.

I did all sorts of service. I was a GSR, a Group Secretary and a Treasurer. At a convention, Brigadier Hugh, Fraser and Geoff told me that I was now the Intergroup Rep to the new Southern Region which was having its first meeting in 1974. No asking. I was told.

Southern Region was vast. It extended down to Penzance in the South and then from a line from Bristol across to Reading and the East Coast.

We generally met at Swindon and on the first journey I was taken by Nell in a car with Valerie and Eileen. Nearing Swindon, we had to make an emergency stop as the engine overheated. I diagnosed a broken fan-belt and invited the ladies to contribute a pair of tights with which I could make a temporary repair—which was done. As we drove into a garage forecourt on entering Swindon an A.A. van pulled in and the mechanic was able to make a permanent repair.

Southern Region was too large and it was decided to split it into smaller segments in 1978. This was the start of Regionalisation of A.A. in 1980. South East Region was a splinter from Central Southern Region. There were four intergroups involved: Central Southern, South East Region, Solent, and Southdown. We had a meeting at Dorking in March 1980, which Bernard M. and Valerie L. chaired to decide about this split.

The new Chair was Don from Portsmouth and I became Treasurer with Valerie L. acting as Secretary pro tem. Various groups sent Reps and we had our meetings somewhere in Crawley.

The meetings I attended, apart from Guildford Tuesday, were Guildford Saturday, Brookwood Sunday, Camberley Monday, Aldershot Wednesday and Walton Friday.

I was active in starting the Addlestone meeting which originally met in the Methodist Church before moving to the Health Centre. At that time the doctors’ offices were left unlocked and drugs went missing. We had a letter from the authorities concerned, telling us this and from the tone of their letters, we felt we were being accused. So we decided to remove ourselves from the problem and joined up with the Chertsey Group.

There was a meeting at that time at the old Beechcroft Hospital and I used to take newcomers to that meeting. I don’t know when it started but it was in existence shortly after I came into A.A. in 1972. One of the newcomers I took there was Joan P. who, later, did a great deal of work in A.A. I remember that I Twelve-Stepped her on St Valentine’s Day. Joan remembers this and has sent me a Valentine’s card every year for the past twenty-seven years.

I got into all sorts of trouble when I was drinking but, by far the worst was the incident with the Queen Mother’s tiara. The Queen Mother was Chancellor of our University and every year we had the Honorary Degrees Ceremony. The format was that the Q.M. would arrive in evening dress, wearing her tiara, for the initial reception. Then she would go to the Vice-Chancellor’s suite and change into her academic robes and cap to present the honorary degrees. She would then change back again for another reception.

I was given charge of her tiara to keep in my office safe while she wore the cap and gown. When I placed it in the safe, the safe door was very heavy and I gave it too hefty a push, crushing the tiara so that I was left with a handful of extremely precious diamonds.

The Principal had to take it to the Queen Mother who said, “What is that?” “It’s your tiara, Ma’am,” replied the Principal. “Oh dear,” said the Q.M. and handed it over to her Private Secretary, who was very good about it and phoned me the following day to say that the damage was not as bad as was first thought and that it could be repaired.

Many years afterwards, my wife and I had the honour to be invited to a garden party hosted by the Q.M. I saw her talking to Sir Yehudi Menuhin but she broke off from her conversation with him and came over to my wife and said, looking at me, “I’m glad I didn’t bring my tiara today”.

The characters I remember in A.A. in these early days were my sponsor Geoff, and Fraser and Peter L. When he was drinking, Peter’s wife kept a very close eye on him to watch his drinking but Peter cleverly circumvented that surveillance. He had a second windscreen washer bottle containing gin, fitted under the bonnet of his car with a tube leading through to the driver’s seat, and he would drink through this tube.

Brigadier Hugh was also a real character. He had finished his drinking career as a bundle of rags in a Singapore bar and was discharged from the Army. Hugh was the only telephone responder in the area for about ten years and ran that service, and his Guildford meeting, with military efficiency. He would call me up with a Twelve-Step request and say, “Here’s the chap’s name and address. Get there as soon as possible and report back to me at 20-hundred hours”. And he wasn’t joking!

Then there was Marie, who was an army colonel’s wife. She was just a little thing. Very pretty but her drinking came to a crisis point when her husband and another high-ranking officer were walking back to their barracks one day and noticed that there was a crowd of soldiers hovering around the entrance to the barracks but making no attempt to come through the gate. They soon found the reason. Marie was hanging out of her window with a shotgun levelled at the soldiers. Marie finished up down by the river in Guildford drinking with the ‘down and outs’ before she, finally, got sober and became a very valuable A.A. member.

The differences I see in A.A. now, from those times are, of course, the people who are coming in from the treatment centres. They believe they know it all—they have ‘done’ the first five Steps in two or three weeks at those centres. They don’t seem to realise that there is a lot more to A.A. than that. Of course, anyone who has made the effort to stay sober has to be encouraged but often these people drift away. They think they have done the programme and it’s all over now.

I also don’t like the bad language I hear in meetings now. I can swear with the best of them but I don’t because A.A. is not the place for that.

Also, some of the guidelines worry me. This one about having to have two people go out on a Twelve-Step. If I got a call at 10.am to go out in this area it would probably be about 8 o’clock in the evening before I could find someone to go with me and, also, here in Devon, I might have to travel fifty miles to pick them up.

I didn’t like the Big Book at first when I read it until Geoff suggested that I read the Book only two or three pages at a time and treat the various chapters as letters addressed to me, for example:

“Dear Tony, Rarely have we seen a person fail…”

That worked for me but I still like the Twelve and Twelve book and the ‘Letter to a Woman Alcoholic’. I read everything I could find in A.A. literature. Of course, I have a particular liking for the ‘ Who Me?’ pamphlet which I wrote in one lunchtime after the format had been discussed at the morning meeting of the then-Literature Committee at Conference, of which I was Secretary. It was agreed at an afternoon committee meeting and approved by the Conference the following day.

WELSH JOHN

34 years sober in 2017

Recorded in February 2008

“I threw £25 at him”

I HAD BEEN A SOLDIER and did a fair amount of drinking in the service. I didn’t think that alcohol had any great effect on me. I thought I was comfortable and at ease with alcohol. I even believed that into my early recovery. Afterwards I realised just how big a part it had played in my life. One instance was when one man lost his life through my drinking. I thought I just struggled with life in general.

I left the service, went into ‘Civvy Life’, got a job and was relatively successful, but I would often go into the office and drag colleagues out for a drink and get them drunk.

The day our lovely baby was born, I dropped my wife off at the hospital then went on to a nightclub and misbehaved myself. My wife had gone into labour and the baby was born and I still hadn’t shown up at the hospital, but I woke up the following morning with terrible remorse.

My wife came home and told me she couldn’t take it any more. I used to say very outrageous and wounding things to her when I was drunk.

So she left home and found a flat and I woke up one morning and I didn’t know where my car was. I knew I needed help and I phoned A.A. This was in 1982 and Brigadier Hugh took my call. He gave me the number for a Mike M., who was a solicitor in Haslemere. Hugh told me to call him, saying, at the same time, that he would call Mike and tell him to expect my call. I still couldn’t find my car so a friend took me to Mike’s offices.

Mike was talking to a large beefy man so large that he almost blocked the doorway. Mike asked me if I had a drinking problem and I told him that I thought I had. Mike replied, “You only think you have? You better be absolutely certain.” Then he asked me, “Can you listen?”

He told me his story: locked wards and other disasters. And he told me about recovery. And that was it!

He then introduced me to the beefy man whose name was John. John had a huge building business in the area and he, too, was an alcoholic. He was also an ex-marine so we had something in common.

John took me to a meeting in Godalming on a Friday night and I completely identified with the person doing the chair. The room seemed to be full of jolly people and they were having a raffle. In my grandiosity I bought £40 of tickets and won every prize so I was totally embarrassed but I kept only one, an electric blanket.

In those early meetings I was noisy, crass and vulgar but no-one told me off. I got to meetings every day that first week and John would say to me, “Have you had a drink this week?” I answered, “No”. He asked, “Have you found your car?” I said I had. “OK then I will see you on Friday at Godalming.” I asked if he would pick me up as usual and he said, “No, now make your own way”.

Mike was at the Saturday meeting and he told me to keep my mouth shut and ears open.

I was sober about fifteen months but I was President of Haslemere Rugby Club and I was still going into pubs; eating not drinking. Then I was asked to go to Hong Kong on business, and on the plane I started drinking again and I drank for what I thought was a few weeks. I shared this in an open meeting which my wife Jackie attended and when I shared this Jackie stood up and said, “Stop right there. He drank for seven months and three days.”

I started going to six meetings a week and did service. I made tea, organised Christmas parties, did anything to keep me involved. I became Secretary at Midhurst Tuesday meeting and I presided over that meeting like a sergeant major. I remember that two members once had a stand-up fight at that meeting.

My first sponsor was Diver Graham and he and his wife came to dinner one evening. He said that he had brought a present for me and produced a writing pad and pen so I could start doing the Steps, because I had not been bothering with the programme. At that time I thought I knew it all. I had tried to do the programme on my own in a cursory way but I hadn’t asked for any guidance.

I was Secretary at Haslemere and I started the Hindhead meeting. The hub of A.A. in this area was Liss. In that meeting there were hundreds of years of sobriety in the room. I also started the meeting at St John’s Seminary in Wonersh and sponsored Patrick who was a seminarian and, later, became a priest.

Patrick used to say, when asked about the difference between religion and the Alcoholics Anonymous programme, that religion was for people who didn’t want to go to hell and A.A. was for people who had been to hell.

I would like to say I had a smooth and gentle ride to a calm sober state but I didn’t. I struggled. Even after fourteen years it seemed to me that everyone seemed to have better sobriety than me. I would go anywhere to any meeting for a message. Fear was still dominating my life.

One day I was standing on the corner of a street in Farnham and I burst into tears. I was fourteen years into recovery at that time. At that moment Postman John came round the corner and asked me what was the matter? I replied, “I don’t know”. Then I poured out all this crap that I was feeling.

John told me that he had had professional counselling from a counsellor who was an alcoholic and used the A.A. programme and he suggested that this might help me.

I contacted a man called Alan in Weston-super-Mare who had worked in an addictions clinic there and had just set up his own practice.

I had arranged an appointment for 9am so I had to get up about 4am to be on time in Weston. I got to his office early and was pacing up and down outside when he arrived five minutes late, which infuriated me. I also noted that he dyed his hair and that also upset me. I was really seething. Then he asked me why I had come to him for help and this annoyed me.

He then asked what Step I was on and I told him Step Four and he asked me “What about One, Two and Three?” and that upset me. Then he asked what was on the first page of the Big Book and when I answered ‘The Preface’, he said, “No, the first page of the Big Book is blank and that is all that you seem to know about this programme”.

That did it. I threw his fee, £25, at him and stormed out, slamming the door behind me.

But driving up the motorway I suddenly felt very bad about my behaviour and I phoned him and asked him to see me the following day, which he agreed to.

I didn’t feel much better that day but I was willing to listen. Over the next six months Alan took me up to Step Five and my life changed. I was listening, listening, listening.

He told me, “John, do you do much Twelve-Stepping?” and when I answered, “Yes,” he said, “Do you take them to meetings?” and I said, “Yes”. Then he said, “ I think I know what your problem is. You are taking all these newcomers into the Garden of Serenity but when they go through the gate, you are not going with them”

I knew I was saying the words to these newcomers and these words were having some effect but I wasn’t doing any work on myself. My time with Alan was helpful and we became friends. He was eighteen years sober at this time.

My life got better. I stopped being negative and judgemental. I had always felt passed over in life. I remember Gurkha Tony telling me that when he was in the army he had received a letter stating that he had been ‘selected for no future promotion’ and that’s how I felt.

I got myself another sponsor, Ben, who was a publican and I did Prison Service at Coldingley. I sponsored an inmate there who had been sentenced to ten years but, because he was a frequent offender in prison, finished up doing twenty-seven years. He eventually got out and was seventeen years sober when he died.

Some people say A.A. has changed but I don’t think it has. I am never surprised that the same questions come up at Conference as were being asked twenty years ago. This is because the new people want answers to the same questions. This is good as it proves to me that A.A. is consistent.

I spend a great deal of time sailing and, wherever I go in the world, the meetings are basically the same. Consistency is, I believe, our great strength. I have little time, I must say, for exclusive meetings.

We must never be afraid to say, “That’s not correct” if a meeting is not being run properly or if untrue statements are being made.

As to which literature helped me, it has to be the Big Book, particularly the ‘How to Handle Sobriety’ piece at the back of the book. I should also say that I am a great admirer of Joe and Charlie. Their tapes have been an inspiration for me.

I love everything about this programme and try to live it every day. I have just started a meeting at the Yacht Club in Falmouth Harbour in Antigua.

1 (In February 2008.)

MARGARET (Nanny Margaret)

Sober 33 years sober in 2007

Recorded in July 2007

“These men were very kind to me”

I CAN’T REALLY REMEMBER when I started drinking. I just drank and it sort of crept up on me. I lived in Godalming but I was working in Kent when everything came to a head. My boss confronted me. He was very angry. I had been stealing money and drink from him and I had stolen a particularly good bottle of his claret. That brought things to a head. He told me I had to go and that was my rock bottom.

The upshot of this was that I went to a meeting in Tunbridge Wells but I had no idea about my drinking and I went to the meeting with a bottle of gin in my handbag. I heard only the differences at that meeting but nobody asked me if I had been drinking. They just welcomed me, warmly.

One of the members told me that I would benefit from going to the Graylingwell unit at Chichester which was part of a hospital dealing with alcoholism, and I did. This was a terrible culture shock—plain formica tables and everyone grabbing for food. But, eventually, it became like a holiday camp for me. Twice a week we were pushed off to A. A. meetings in Brighton and I thought, “Oh, lovely. We’re going to the seaside”.

But at one of these I heard an American member do a chair and I identified with him. They had a Sunday afternoon meeting in the hospital and I, later, became the Secretary but I still didn’t know what I was doing.

After two months I arrived back in Godalming, penniless and homeless. Someone put me up in their home and, gradually, things got better. From that time on, I haven’t had a drink, a day at a time.

A friend in these early meetings, John, told me, “No matter what, Margaret, just get to your meetings”. I was so scared. I borrowed a friend’s car and went to the Wednesday meeting in Haslemere and the Tuesday meeting at Jenner Road, Guildford.

Both of these were very men-orientated meetings but these men were very kind to me. I remember one man coming up to me and saying, “You’ve been to this meeting before. You came with the Graylingwell people, didn’t you?”. I was amazed that anyone would remember me! It gave me a brilliant feeling. Everyone was so kind.

After a while I started to ask if there was anyone from Godalming at the Haslemere and Guildford meetings as I was keen to car share but there was no-one.

Then, out of the blue, I got a call from a lady called Joan J. who had just moved into the area. Joan had tried A.A. before but she was still slipping and sliding. She asked me if I was interested in starting a meeting in Godalming and I said that I was. I contacted the Unitarian church in Godalming and I received a very warm welcome. They asked me how many people I expected to come but I couldn’t tell them because I had no idea about how many would turn up. So they said I could have the small room which would take about twelve people. We agreed and settled for a Friday night meeting. At our first meeting we had six people and Cobham Sheila, did a great chair. The meeting expanded to around fifteen people, at which time we moved to a larger hall. Joan J. became Secretary and she and I became good friends up until her death.

But we had a few problems at that meeting. The church had asked us not to park our cars on the grass verges and not to throw our cigarette ends in the rubbish bin but many of the new members ignored this and, as a result, we lost the hall.

The irony of this was that many of these new members opened a Monday night meeting at the same place and they were permitted to stay! The Friday meeting moved to the United Reformed Church.

I loved A.A. I was overwhelmed by the welcome I received when I came in from people who I had never seen before. There was love in these meetings. I got a sponsor almost immediately, who was Sheila D., and she was an enormous help to me.

One occasion I particularly remember was being asked to be a speaker at the Tilford Convention. I agreed but I was petrified and, as I sat up there on the platform, trembling like a leaf, I saw the woman who had Twelve-Stepped me sitting right in front of me and that gave me great strength.

I have done service as a Tea Maker and a Treasurer, a Secretary and a GSR. I found the Intergroup meetings could be a little exhausting at times. These would start at 8 o’clock and, often, not finish until midnight.

I think A.A. is very different now from my early days and I worry about the attitudes of many of the people coming in from the treatment centres. I always cringe when I hear someone say, “Well, I have done the first Five Steps in four months”. I don’t think that is possible.

I also hear of people who are sponsoring others when they, themselves, have been sober only a short time. Some of these people haven’t even done the Steps. That is wrong. These people seem to take their sponsees as prisoners.

Something else, I notice, is that the illness is not the priority at some meetings. I hear women sharing that their washing machines have broken down or they have had an argument with a neighbour, as their main problems.

I remember there were some great characters in A.A. in the early days; people like Little Ken, Brigadier Hugh, Van, Cliff and Cobham Sheila. They made a great impression on me and I don’t see many characters around today.

Apart from the Big Book, the Twelve and Twelve and the Twenty-Four Hours a Day book, I seemed to read just about everything I could find on alcoholism. I have a whole collection of books which includes Sobriety and Beyond by Father John Doe and A Primer on Alcoholism by Marty Mann. I also carried the ‘Just for Today’ card and the pamphlet ‘Footsteps’ wherever I went.

Being accepted into the Fellowship was, and is, a wonderful experience for me and, getting my laughter back—that was brilliant.

JOE McP. (Irish Joe)

43 years sober in 2017

Recorded in March 2007

“OK I’ll try it”

I CAME INTO A.A. IN 1973. I used to drink with a Scotsman, also named Joe, Joe McG., who had been a boxer. We used to get into many arguments when we were in our cups— sometimes about things like the 1745 Scottish Rebellion. Of course, I would be on the side of the Jacobites in that argument, Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that. Joe was a bit rough but he was well read and when he was drunk he used to quote George Bernard Shaw at me.

Anyway, one night in the Surrey Arms Pub (it doesn’t exist anymore) he said to me, “You’re an alcoholic. Why don’t you go to an A.A. meeting? I think you would like it”. I said, “O.K. I’ll try it”.

So we made an arrangement for Joe to meet me at my digs and we would go to this meeting together on the Tuesday at Jenner Road, Guildford. However, Joe didn’t turn up at my digs and I went to the meeting on my own. It was crowded and there were some young people there from Rooksdown Hospital. When I say young people, they were about the same age as I was at that time—twenty-eight.

Brigadier Hugh was in the chair and I think he was around 30 years sober at that time. He came up to me at the end of the meeting and said, in this very military voice, “You have some very good friends in here, my good man”.

Joe McG. turned up later at the meeting. He had had a pint before he came and he didn’t share at that meeting but Joe was the man responsible for getting me to my first A.A. meeting and I thank him for that. He was sober eleven years when he died.

People spoke to me at that meeting and they gave me literature. Irish Mike told me not to worry. I was in the right place. I never stayed away from A.A. after that but I drank on three more occasions. I admitted to my relapses at the meetings and, finally, I got sober on the 23rd November 1974.

I had started drinking when I was seventeen. I grew up in a small croft in the Sligo area and after two years I knew I was drinking alcoholically. Then I joined the Irish army.

By the age of twenty-four, I was working in a mental hospital in Birmingham. I left there after about five months. The money I was earning there as a trainee psychiatric nurse was certainly not enough to sustain a man who was drinking alcoholically. When I left there I got a job on a construction site. I have worked all my life on construction sites. The work was heavy and so was the drinking but I was never sacked for my drinking. It was only when I started to get sober in A.A. that I started to get the sack. Strange that!

I went back to Ireland on a ‘geographical’ and I worked for a man who was a heavy drinker so I got away with my drinking there. A lot of these foremen and gang-masters were heavy drinkers and I used to drink with them.

I came back to England—to London. I had an old school friend who was living in Guildford and I went to see him. He got me a job locally and I have been in Guildford ever since.

When I came in, I can remember there being only three meetings in the area and all of these were at Jenner Road on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Saturday one transferred to Guildford Cathedral shortly after I finally stopped drinking. This was just before Christmas 1974. The Tuesday meeting at Jenner Road was the big one. They got crowds of around twenty people, which was a lot of people for those days.

The Jenner Road meeting later moved to Vaughan House in the Chertsey Road sometime in 1994 but, later, closed down around 2000 or 2001, I think, which was a great pity as it was the longest-established meeting in the area.

Brian R., who started the Sunday Waterden Road meeting with me, was a book publisher and sometime in 1998 he bought the Jenner Road property for use as his office. In January 1999, he held a one-off A.A. meeting in his office as a mark of respect for the old Jenner Road meetings. This was in the same room where he had come into for his first A.A. meeting in 1976.

I remember Scots Danny and Eric C. were there and John the Rat-catcher was in the chair. Brian R. died, suddenly, in September 2005 and that really shook me as we were very close.

Now I have a story about the start of the Waterden Road meeting. Brian and me felt that there was a need for a Discussion meeting in Guildford and, also, there were no Sunday meetings in the area and Sunday was a long day without a meeting. So Brian went to see the Vicar of the church in Waterden road, about hiring the church hall. The Vicar wasn’t really interested. He didn’t know anything about A.A. and he showed no interest in letting us have the hall. Brian asked if he could leave our Big Book with the Vicar but the Vicar didn’t seem interested so Brian asked him if he could, at least, glance through it. The vicar said that he could leave the book but he could not promise to read it. When Brian returned, a week after, to collect the book, the Vicar had been ‘converted’. He was so impressed by the book that he offered A.A. the use of the hall, rent-free. Eventually, because of our Tradition of being self-supporting, the price of £1.50 was negotiated and it remained that for many years.

I got a sponsor after five years. He was Mike and he was an ex-army officer. It took me three months to write my Step Four and about forty-five minutes to do my Step Five with him.

I have never sponsored people, myself, although I have helped many. I have heard people say that I am their sponsor but that is not true. I may have helped them but I have never claimed to be their sponsor. For example, I didn’t feel that I had the experience to advise married men on their marriages, being single, myself.

To a married man, having difficulties with his marriage, I would probably have said something like, ”Well, if you are unhappy, why don’t you leave?” which probably wouldn’t have been the right thing to say.

I feel A.A. has definitely changed but I can’t say for the worse. Lots of women are coming in and a lot of young people, which is good. There are a few other differences, too. In the early days you weren’t encouraged to state your A.A. birthday date. They said it was not good for the ego. Certainly there were no ‘chips’ given out for every year you were sober.

Once Brian and me were going to a Farnham meeting in his car and I told him I was five years sober. Brian said that, in the States, they gave out these chips for every year you were sober. He said, “Joe, if you were five years sober over there you would be a hero”. A hero? Me?

I visited the U.S. over the past twenty years and I have attended meetings in Hoboken, just up the road from where Frank Sinatra was raised.

The local meetings here in Guildford used to be for only an hour but that had to be changed when the meetings got so big that there wasn’t enough time for everyone to share. So that’s when and how they were extended to one and a half hours.

Many people were helpful to me in A.A., especially all those middle-aged Surrey housewives at the Guildford Wednesday meetings. As a single man I really appreciated that.

BLIND MICK (Female)

Sober 26 years in 2017

Recorded June 2007

“My friend passed the message but didn’t get it herself”

I DRANK FOR MANY YEARS and I was with a partner who drank even more than I did. We went to SADAS for help. It was an alcohol and drug counselling agency and I never did understand what the initials were for.

I was moved to Greenbank House in Epsom where we were taken to A.A. meetings and I hated A.A. There was a bunch of us who just sat there, scowling and looking at the clock even when we had only been in the meeting for five minutes. I came out of Greenbank and stayed dry for fourteen months but I was not going to meetings. I had a friend in Greenbank who went to A.A. regularly and she started to bully me into going and, after a while when the pressure was off, I started to enjoy them. It is so different when you go of your own accord.

That friend drank again and in June 2007 she died. She was four days younger than me. She passed the message but she didn’t get it herself. I am so incredibly grateful to her.

My first sponsor was a man and he could quote huge chunks of the Big Book, the Twelve and Twelve and other A.A. literature but, after a few years, he drank again. To my knowledge he is still drinking. He was a highly intelligent man but I think he probably complicated the programme. Some people said, “Instead of sitting on his intelligence, he should have sat on his backside”. Maybe, that’s true.

Anyway, I got myself to meetings regularly and I am still plodding along to the meetings in St John’s and Send. I consider those my home meetings.

I notice the usual changes in A.A. over the years—more young people, more women, more addicts and co-dependants but that’s part of society now and why shouldn’t A.A. be part of society? I think we should change as society changes.

We seem to have added a few extra sayings in A.A. When I came in we simply said, before the moment’s silence, “While we remember why we’re here”. Now it’s gone to “the suffering alcoholics in and out of these rooms”. Also, “Ninety meetings in ninety days?” Where did that come from? I can’t find it in any A.A. literature. I think if anyone had said that to me in my early days I would have panicked, although, thinking about it, I probably did that many, anyway.

JOHN C.

29 years sober in 2017

Recorded in July 2007

“They didn’t wait until you volunteered”

I STARTED DRINKING AT AN EARLY AGE. I was very keen on cricket and there was always a social side to the game so I did a lot of drinking there. My alcoholism was a gradual thing. It crept up on me over thirty years. During that time I got married and had four kids. I was in the family business. I am a butcher.

Things were getting very bad and the other family members were trying to buy me out of the business. I never really had any intention of stopping drinking but I realised it was going to be easier to stop than to carry on. I went into treatment in Clouds in Wiltshire.

I was a periodic drinker. I would drink heavily for about six months and then taper off. At Clouds we were taken to A.A. meetings twice a week and I also went to the Clouds aftercare meetings.

I suddenly realised one day that I hadn’t had a drink for over a week and from that point on I never drank again.

I went to my first A.A. meeting in 1984. I had been to see a doctor who was a friend of the family but I didn’t go for myself. I went because my wife was nagging me. The doctor told me there was an A.A. meeting in Egham. I went to that meeting and I heard a chair which I had wanted to hear. It was full of all the differences from my kind of drinking so I couldn’t see that I was an alcoholic and it was another three years before I came back to A.A.

That meeting was at Egham Literary Institute. It was on a Friday. It was a council venue and the rent was £5. I remember Irish Teresa being there but I can’t remember who else was there. The meeting closed in 1990 as the council wanted the hall for a museum.

At that time I was a regular churchgoer at Christ Church in Virginia Water so I went to see the vicar with the idea of transferring the Egham meeting to Christ Church. It just so happened that the vicar’s brother-in-law was in A.A. and so the vicar knew what A.A. was all about and he was happy to give us the church hall for £5 per night which it still is.

Chris was the secretary of the Egham meeting at that time so he continued as Secretary at Christ Church. We were in a small room there at first but the meetings became so large that we had to move to the big hall and now the church has built an extension and we meet in there now.

Regulars at those early meetings were German Woolf, Waterboard Tony and John the Lottery, so-called because he won the National Lottery. This was a ‘round-robin’ meeting where we shared around the room.

Some of the differences now are that there are more young people, more women. No smokers. There was a lot of smoking then. I was a smoker myself but I always went to no-smoking meetings. It was a good discipline for me. I didn’t volunteer for service in A.A. but if I was asked to do anything in A.A., I would always do it. In those days you were given jobs. They didn’t wait until you volunteered. I think people in A.A. were tougher then. Tough love.

I remember that I was particularly worried about Steps Eight and Nine—making amends. But I got through those eventually. I found that I changed gradually through my time in the Fellowship. Not only are the things that I did when I was drinking not acceptable now, but, also, the things that were acceptable to me in my early sobriety are not acceptable now. As they say, the road gets narrower.

My reading was the Big Book and the ‘Just for Today’ card and I read the Twenty-Four Hours a Day book every morning.

This interview, though included here, was not included in the Mid Surrey Memories book due to the fact that it was mislaid.

BRIAN L.

Deceased

45 years sober in 2007

“There was only one meeting a fortnight”

(At the time in 2007 when I interviewed Brian , he was in the early stages of Altzheimer’s illness yet he managed to find his way back in his memory to relate his experiences. He was also the only person I interviewed who had, personally, met Bill W)

I started going into pubs when I was still at school. I would have been about fifteen at the time but I looked older. I was caught and got six of the best with the cane. Then a year or so later I was caught again in a pub and this time I was given six strokes with the birch. I tell you how serious that was. There had to be a doctor present when you received the birch. That time I was almost expelled.

When I left school, I was a year too young to join my Regiment, the Irish Guards, so I went up to Cambridge for an academic year. When I was at Cambridge my father made me an allowance of £5 per term for pocket money which was nowhere enough to keep me in beer. So, what I did was to organise a university dance band and we played at the Corn Exchange as a support for all the big bands That played there. I don’t play an instrument but I organised all the events. The musicians were paid £1 each and myself and the bandleader, who was the son of the Rumanian Prime Minister, Ceausescu, were paid £2 each and (here’s the attraction) as much beer as we could drink---and I could drink a lot.

After Cambridge, I joined the Irish Guards and there was certainly some heavy drinking in the Mess. When we were abroad I remember that a nip of whisky was four pence and a gin was three pence. I left the army after two years and went into the City which didn’t help my drinking one little bit.

I thought to go back and finish my degree at Cambridge but I didn’t fancy being an undergraduate so I went into the City and continued to drink. Things went from bad to worse and, although by this time I had acquired a wife and children, I couldn’t stop drinking.

I had heard about a professor in Pinner - probably, from my G.P.- This professor had a nursing home which treated alcoholics so on the 10th of January 1961 I checked myself in there.

The professor, whose name I can’t remember, gave me a book about alcoholism saying, “read this and, if you don’t read it, I want it back.” I covered the book with brown paper. I don’t know why I did that. I, probably, didn’t want people to see the title. I wouldn’t even let my wife read it. I told her she wouldn’t be interested in it. I did once hand it to her but before she could really read any of it, I snatched it back and said, “I told you, you wouldn’t be interested”

There were three other alcoholics in the nursing home. These were Donald, who was Scottish and the nicest and most gentle man when he was sober but when he had a drink he turned extremely violent. I never saw such a change in anyone as in Donald. Then there was Sunny, who said he was a big name in the City of London and he couldn’t go to AA meetings as someone might recognise him. Finally, there was Bapu who was an Indian Rajah.

The professor was very enlightened on AA for that time. He said that he only believed in two things to help an alcoholic, AA and vitamin B. He also invited AA members to come to the nursing home to talk to us and that is where I met a man called John who gave me enormous help in my recovery.

While we were in the Pinner nursing home we were taken out to AA meetings around Pinner in the professor’s Rolls Royce driven by his chauffeur who waited for us and took us back to the nursing home.

When I came out of the nursing home I started to go to AA meetings in Guildford, near where I lived. Donald also came fairly regularly but he would often stop coming and after about four weeks he would start drinking again. He was a bout drinker. Every time he sobered up, we would take turns sitting with him until he got better but, sadly, Donald didn’t recover. Eventually, he was sectioned and died later. Sunny drank again and also died as did Bapu who suffered from being surrounded by high living friends. So, of the original four patients in Pinner nursing home, I am the only survivor.

In those days, there was a great deal of camaraderie in AA. Everyone used to pitch in to help Newcomers. Everyone did twelve stepping, even our wives. On one occasion, my wife kept a suffering alcoholic talking for half an hour. He was in a telephone box and she needed to keep him there until I arrived to help him.

After I was about a year sober I approached my doctor and said, “Doctor, if you have any alcoholics who are patients, please mention that I am a Recovering Alcoholic and would be delighted to see them” The doctor was horrified. “Heavens above!” he exclaimed, “Don’t you think we had enough trouble with you without letting you loose on other alcoholics”

At first, I went to the Jenner Road meetings in Guildford and then some of us who lived in the Byfleet area started a meeting in West Byfleet. This was around 1968. We met in a church hall in Madeira Road. Actually, it was more of a large shed than a church hall. There were only about four or five of us. The most amazing thing that I can remember was that we had a man who was a regular attender and when he died the local newspaper disclosed that he was actually, a woman. We were surprised as he hadn’t a trace of feminimity.

I can’t remember if everyone was dead keen to take Service positions but everyone was dead keen to do twelve stepping. I attended GSO a lot as GSR for the Guildford meeting and then, later as GSR for West Byfleet. There were no Intergroups at that time so it was the groups which were represented at GSO.

I also used to go to the First London meetings regularly but I still continued to go to Guildford and it was there that I met Brigadier Hugh McK, who, I suppose, has become a bit of a legend in this area. He played a big part in my recovery. Hugh dedicated his life to AA. For years he ran the telephone service all on his own and he was forever sending me pamphlets about AA and Alcoholism. Hugh spent a lot of time keeping in touch with Newcomers and Recovering Alcoholics by telephone.

One of the huge benefits I have had from AA is that in my business I was required to travel internationally and, wherever I went I tried to get to an AA meeting. I particularly liked the Australian meetings--very strong. When I first went to South America there were no AA meetings but, gradually, they started. I was at a bit of a disadvantage there as the meetings were either in Spanish or Portuguese but I went there, anyway.

The best experience I have had, which, probably, most people haven’t had, is that AA is wonderfully international and, although my Company paid for my hotel accommodation, I never really had to book an hotel. So many AA’s offered to put me up.

Now, I am more or less housebound so getting to meetings is difficult. I am eighty now (2007) and I have hearing difficulties but, whenever I am up in London I sometimes manage to get to a meeting.

There are so many meetings nowadays. When I came in there was the Jenner Road meeting once a fortnight and it was the only meeting around.

The books I read were the Big Book and the one the professor gave me but for the life of me I can’t remember the title… and, of course, all those pamphlets which Brigadier Hugh sent me.

FRANK O’D. (Boxer Frank)

Sober 29 years in 2017

Recorded in February 2012

“The Unsung hero of Scotland”

I CAME TO ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS this time on the 3rd of January 1988 and through the grace of God and this wonderful Fellowship I haven’t wanted to take a drink since then.

I first heard of A.A. because I had a cousin in Glasgow called Eddie from Toryglen, a district of Glasgow, who was in A.A. I was having trouble at home and my wife said to me, “You need to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. Why don’t you get in touch with your cousin?” I wanted to get my wife off my back so I went to see my cousin and I went to A.A. in 1972 to get my wife off my back—I had a back problem! After that it was a love-hate relationship with Alcoholics Anonymous until 1988.

My first meeting was in the Broomielaw in Glasgow, in Iona House which is a mission for seamen in the docks. It was on a Friday night and to be honest I couldn’t get identification because I hadn’t lost everything. I still had the big fancy house. I still had the wife and kids although she was on my back. That was in 1972 and she left me in 1977.

They say there are no such things as coincidences but there is. I was trying to stay sober but I couldn’t stay sober. I wasn’t doing the Steps and I hadn’t got a sponsor or a home group and I wasn’t doing the programme. I was ‘visiting’ Alcoholics Anonymous from 1972 to 1988 but my life was going down the slopes. I would start to get better then I would slip back again.

In 1983 I decided to give a pint of blood to one of these vans that go around. I was three months dry. I wasn’t sober. So I gave a pint of blood and then I got a letter from the Blood Unit at St Vincent Street in Glasgow asking me to come in and see them. They had found out that I had a rare blood group which could save babies’ lives. They explained to me that these were babies suffering from a condition where the plasma from one pint of my blood could be broken down into small phials and that each of those phials could save a hundred babies’ lives. These babies were known as ‘blue babies’.

You see, often women would have their first baby and they would be alright but the second baby was often a’ blue baby’ and these ‘blue babies’ usually died in their first six weeks of their lives but if they were able to inject these babies with this plasma they could save their lives.

So I said yes I would give blood. But I couldn’t do it because I kept getting drunk. So between 1983 and 1988 I could only manage to give six pints of plasma in five years and it wasn’t until 1988, when I did, finally, get sober, that I was able to give plasma every two weeks. It gave me a sense of purpose—go to my Home Group every week and to go to the Blood Donor Unit every two weeks.

What happened was between 1988 to 1998, whatever the weather (and you know how it can rain in Glasgow) I never missed going to the blood donor unit. I gave four hundred and fifty pints of plasma and that plasma saved forty five thousand babies’ lives.

The Scottish newspapers picked up on that and they published a story about me and I was named as the ‘Unsung Hero of Scotland’ in the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail. That honour wasn’t thanks to me. It was thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous that I was able to go along every two weeks because I was sober.

I had got a sponsor and I had a programme. It was through doing this that I was voted the ‘Unsung Hero of Scotland’ in 1998 and I had to go to the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow where they gave me a lovely presentation in the shape of a thistle with an inscription which said ‘Unsung Hero of Scotland’. On the platform that night I gave credit to the Twelve-Step programme I was in. I didn’t name A.A. but I said, “I stand here before you tonight a very humble man and I give thanks for the Twelve-Step programme that has given me my life back”.

I had been going to meetings since 1972 but I was just a man in the room. That’s how I explain it.

I had started to go to a regular meeting in Rose Street in Glasgow on a Sunday morning and I had seen this man there. His name was Jimmy. I liked his manner and I asked him to sponsor me and he did. He told me to get a group, not just the group that he was going to; to find my own group. I found a group in Govanhill in Daisy Street and I was in that group for nine years before I went to America. By this time I had got myself back to work as a master chef. That was what I qualified for. Jimmy said to me, “You’ve got to come to me every Thursday night, son” and that’s what I did. Every Thursday Jimmy would have my dinner ready when I got to his house and when we finished dinner we would do the work on the Alcoholics Anonymous programme. Through Jimmy I learned that I suffered from a spiritual malady and a mental obsession.

Thank God, I’ve still got him in my life today. Nowadays we talk about how many blue pills he takes and how many pink pills I take for our illnesses!

At that time, 1988, I would say there were about 250 groups in Glasgow. Now there are more than 400.

We had all kinds of meetings back then but these, mostly, were what we called ‘bread and butter’ meetings where people talked about their life-story but I never felt comfortable with these meetings. I wanted to hear about the solution so Jimmy and me went to Step meetings, Big Book Study meetings and Discussion meetings, which in Glasgow are two hours long.

The format of the Glasgow meetings is entirely different. They have the Preamble, then a speaker talks for about fifty minutes, then they break for twenty minutes for tea and coffee and, sometimes, sandwiches and then they have another fifty minutes when the body of the hall speaks back to the speaker. The other thing about these meetings is, that if you are asked to do a chair, they ask you to bring someone along with you who is your sponsor or someone who knows you and who can vouch that you are on the Twelve-Step programme, and that person chairs the meeting.

From 1988 I got my life back. I got my self- respect back and from there I started to get a job.

I have been married three times. The problem with my first wife had nothing to do with me and alcohol. We just had a breakdown of the marriage. We were both too young when we got together. My first wife gave me five kids so I don’t say slanderous things against her because it’s not very pleasant for the kids and she is their mother. I make a joke about it. I say, “We bought a waterbed and we just drifted apart”.

So I had these five kids and that’s when my alcoholism started because life was unfair. Here I am with five children to bring up. I looked after them during the day with the help of my mother. Then I was left on my own with the alcohol and this lasted for four years and after four years I was going downhill fast. My mother said to me, “Why don’t you get back to work? I’ll give you a hand with the kids after school. Maybe you could get a part time job?”

I got a part-time job and through that job I met a marvellous woman called Margaret who was my second wife. Now Margaret stuck with that marriage. She was the one who told me to get to Alcoholics Anonymous. Margaret didn’t know what Alcoholics Anonymous was about but she thought it would help. Margaret stuck with that marriage for seven years and in that seven years there was violence. I am not proud of that. That’s where my alcoholism was taking me. Thank God that Margaret got out of that relationship because either I would have killed her or she would have killed me. That’s how violent that marriage had become. When she married me she took on a man with five kids. That woman had a heart of gold but how she was after seven years with me? Well, she was a different person. I had turned her into that person through my alcoholism. Today, thirty-four years later, Margaret is one of my best friends, thanks to A.A.

I then went to Alcoholics Anonymous but I didn’t get sober for another ten years. My marriage to Margaret finished in 1978 and I was back in control of my money because I had no-one to account to. After that, all my money went on drink and I went downhill. I was really a tramp when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous but I got sober through the guidance of my sponsor, Jimmy, and a Higher Power.

Shortly after that I wanted to do more in Alcoholics Anonymous, not just washing up the cups and saucers. I needed commitments so I went to Intergroup and I became Telephone Liaison Officer. I got very involved in that. Then I went to Region and I went to the General Service Office in York. I went down the line.

I got my self-respect back. In my drinking days I was going to boxing shows and I was kidding on that I was refereeing and I was kidding on I was judging. They were throwing me out of half these shows because I was turning up drunk. But now I had my self-esteem back and I went back to the boxing and, using my meditation, I was able to do the refereeing and the judging again. That’s where I got the name of Boxer Frank. One of the shows was on television and a couple of days later I went to a meeting and there were some people standing outside the meeting and they started shouting, “Oh, there’s that guy who was on the television the other night. Hey, Boxer Frank!”

So, through the boxing I then became President of the Scottish Ex- Boxers’ Association. 1998 was a big year for me being voted the ‘Unsung Hero’ and all that. Then in 1997 and 1998 Benny Lynch, Scotland’s most famous boxer, was accepted into the Hall of Fame in America and, as President of the Scottish Ex-Boxers, I was asked to go over there and pick up the Hall of Fame Certificate.

When I was over there I met this young girl, Louise, and I gave her my card and said if she was ever over in Scotland, give me a ‘look’. Two weeks later she phoned and said she wanted to come to Glasgow. So she came to Glasgow and the next thing was that a relationship started. This girl had two children, one was 16 and one was 14. I had my own business by this time in Glasgow called Main Event Caterers. I worked for the Hilton hotel group, mostly, and it was easier for me to move to America than for her to come over to Glasgow. So, in 1999 I moved to America and in 2000 we got married. We would have got married in ’98 but she was waiting for her divorce to come through. She and her husband had been separated for five years but they had never got divorced because neither of them was going to get married again. Well, one month before our first anniversary, Louise was involved in a car accident. A car went into the back of hers and she got whiplash. After the whiplash she went into depression and depression can be a killer. She got medical help with her whiplash but she was in denial about her depression. So on the 24th of July 2001, thirteen months after we got married, we had a couple of rows. One day she was up and she was nice, the next day she was down and she was rude. The only reason that I could think of was that it was her change of life but we were both working and I thought things were OK.

On this Tuesday, the 24th of July, we came out on our porch. We sat on the porch and she made me a cup of coffee and we were discussing what we would do on the weekend then, all of a sudden, she just looked at me with tears running down her face and said, “Frank. I can’t live without you’. She was sitting so close to me. Then she put a gun to her head and shot herself.

I have to tell you this. It’s part of my story. That was the 24th of July 2001 and on that Friday night and Saturday morning her body was lying out in the undertaker’s parlour for people to pay their respects prior to cremation. I saw these two guys outside. They approached me and asked my name, “Are you Frank O’D.?” I said, “Yes”. They were from the Deportation Agency. They were giving me ten days to get out of the country. The situation was that I had been allowed to come into America as I had been sponsored by my wife—it’s not like an A.A. sponsor—and after we married I became a resident and could work in America but I was not a citizen.

That meant for the first two years of my marriage, if I got sick or if I became unemployed, I couldn’t get state benefits. My wife would have had to support me. That’s where the sponsorship comes in. We were thirteen months into this sponsorship so it was eleven more months before the sponsorship was complete. Somehow, the Deportation Agency got wind of this. If something happened to your sponsor they had a legal right to ask you to leave. As my sponsor, my wife, had died I was no longer a resident.

My bosses were at the funeral parlour that night and they said, “Frank, We’ll fight this” but my lawyers were business lawyers not deportation lawyers

I want to say this: I go to meetings and hear people saying they’ve got a sore toe and they are thinking of taking a drink, or the budgie has died and they are suffering. When my wife put the gun to her head that night I couldn’t remember what the telephone number was to tell the police.

Was it 999 or 119 or 191? I was dialling every number I could think of and I was in a hot fog. I must have dialled a dozen numbers before I got through. When I got through to someone they asked me whether my wife was still alive? I said, “I don’t know”. They asked if I would I go and check? I don’t know whether she was alive or not. I thought I felt a pulse. Then they told me to put some towels under her head to stem the blood until someone got there. The next thing was the police, the fire brigade and the ambulance were there. The police saw me and they put me in a car and took me to the Police Station.

This is an important part of the story and I want people to know it. I just want to emphasise that this is a lot more than the budgie dying.

So they took me away and started to interview me and they were saying, at first, “You encouraged her to do it. You said, “Go ahead and kill yourself.” I could understand their suspicions. They then put me on a polygraph four times. They then put me under an infrared machine to see if I had any burn marks or any residue on my hands from the gun. There was nothing! All this time I am asking, “How’s my wife?” and they are saying that they don’t know. They said they don’t even know what hospital she is in. They interrogated me from 7 o’clock that night until three o’clock the following morning when they finally released me from the downtown police station. I asked them if they would give me a lift to the hospital and they said, “No”. They were not a taxi service.

I came outside and guess what? Someone from Alcoholics Anonymous was sitting in a car. This was in Cleveland, Ohio. I should have mentioned that. I hadn’t been in Cleveland long but already alcoholics had made friends with me and this guy said, “Frank. Your wife is in the Metro Hospital and I’ll take you up there.”

When we got to the hospital I saw the family and other people standing outside. They were all crying. My mother-in-law put her arms around me but there was nothing being said to me. This doctor was waiting at the door and he said to me, “I’ll take you in” and we went up in the lift.

Louise, my wife, was on a life-support machine although she was dead. There was a priest there. They gave me an hour with her and after an hour the doctor came into the room and explained to me that, although she was dead, she was still on this life-support machine and I had to press the button to switch it off. Louise had one of those cards which stated she was an organ donor.

I have to tell you that this was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life because although she was dead I couldn’t do this on my own. The priest had to help me to press the button.

When I hear people sharing that they have lost their mothers or lost their grannies I feel that that’s Nature. Everybody dies. My sponsor told me, “Frank, the longer you are in A.A., the more you will see that the people around you are going to die because it’s a natural process but deaths, marriages, births, even the roof falling in, these are excuses for a drink but not reasons for a drink.

So this all happened and I was not fit to drive and this is where the Fellowship comes into play. For the next few weeks people were picking me up at my house, taking me to meetings and bringing me home.

I didn’t go to meetings and cry. It wasn’t, “Poor me, I’ve just lost my wife”. I didn’t do that but I did phone my sponsor, maybe twice a day and cry to him. The Twelfth Tradition tells us that there are things which we should only share with our sponsor.

I was also told not to share my problems at meetings. Meetings are for sharing your recovery. I went to the meetings to hear about the recovery programme so that I could stay sober.

People came by day and daily and the only time they left me alone was to let me sleep. People stuck by me. That’s when I found out about the kindness and the fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. People who didn’t even know me were phoning me up.

Now, about my deportation. My bosses did their best for me and fought for me from July to September and we all know what happened in that September: 9/11, 2001. The Americans went crazy and seemed to be deporting everybody. The Deportation agents walked into my work and put me in handcuffs. When I protested and said that I would pay my own fare back to the UK, they said, “You’ve had enough time to pay your fare. We’re deporting you”.

So they put me in Bedford Prison. All you get there is a mattress on the floor and I was there for two months. What they do then is to check which country you came from, in my case the UK, and then they check up with the British Government to see if you are a felon; if you are wanted for anything. If you are wanted in the U.K, the British Government will pay for your fare back to the U.K. but I wasn’t wanted for anything. My criminal days were in my drinking days and I had thirteen and a half years of sobriety at that time. So the American Government, after two months, deported me. When they arrested me on 1st December 2001 I was in my chef’s uniform so I had nothing else to wear but they allowed the Minister, who visited me, to bring me a suit and shoes and all that. He was the same Minister who married us and he was a lovely man. He loved boxing. When they deported me I was accompanied by two CID officers and they had me in handcuffs and I was put in this civilian plane and passengers, passing to go to the toilet, were looking at this criminal (me) in handcuffs with two CID officers.

I had made a phone call the night before, to Jimmy, my sponsor, and he said, “Where have you been, son, for the past two months?” I said that I had been locked up in a deportation prison and that I was being deported tomorrow and could I come and stay with him until I get fixed up? He said, “Certainly, son.”

But I thought that they would be taking me back to Glasgow where I came from but when the plane arrived I realised that we were in Gatwick Airport. They took my handcuffs off and I said to them, “I’m from Scotland, I should have been taken to Glasgow and they said, “This is Britain. We can dump you anywhere”.

So there I am at Gatwick Airport with some dollars which I had on me when they arrested me. I changed them into pounds. I had £26. I didn’t even have the fare to go back to Glasgow, even by bus, but I had a son and a daughter in Chichester so I decided to go down there. It was only going to be temporary until I got the money to get up to Glasgow. I stayed with my son for three days a week and with my daughter for four days to give them a break.

Because I was over sixty years old the British Government by law is not allowed to leave me homeless unless I want to be. That was in December 2001 and by January 2002, I had a flat given to me by Chichester Council.

In that same year I got cancer. The surgeon told me that that was because of the stress caused by my wife’s suicide. Then I started to make a lot of trips to the hospital to deal with this cancer. They only gave me eight months to live. I came out after my second operation and I told a lot of A.A.’s in Chichester, who had come up to visit me, that I was going to arrange an A.A. dinner. So I started what I called a ‘Founders’ Day’ dinner in 2002. This was in honour of Bill W. and Dr Bob.

In my head, I had only eight months to live according to the surgeons but I know that it is a Higher Power that decides how long you have got to live. I had accepted that it was a year since Louise had committed suicide and I didn’t want to live. I hadn’t the strength myself to commit suicide because I didn’t want to leave the pain of that to my family but I did pray every night that my God would take me. But people had been so nice to me that I told my daughter that I was going to do a dinner for A.A. but I would put the pot round and send money to Akron to the archives there. I wasn’t able to do this dinner because of the cancer but my daughter knew that it was a kind of Farewell and Thank You dinner. So I arranged to use the small hall under the block of flats where I lived. I did the cooking and my daughter helped. I catered for seventy people and sixty turned up and, when my daughter and I were doing the washing, up a member, Big Phil, who is now Chairman of our Intergroup, came up to me and said, “Frank, we’ll do this next year. This is a great idea”. I didn’t want to say to him that I might not be here next year but we’ve had a dinner every year since then to now, 2012. In fact, we had to move it to a bigger hall. It was so successful and that’s how Founders’ Day in Chichester started.

In 2009 the Archivist from Akron, Gail, was invited over to make a presentation at the Bristol Convention and she phoned me and told me. I’ve known Gail for years because I have been visiting Akron for twenty years. I couldn’t have afforded to bring her over because I was living on just the state pension. She had been over to Scotland the year before and I had gone up to Scotland to spend time with her and she said, “Next time I am in Britain, I am coming to see you”

So she was in Bristol and I told her that Chichester was only sixty miles from Bristol and would she come and spend some time with me. She said she would love to. I was only thinking that we would have a chat and she would talk to people at the dinner but she brought all her props and presentation stuff with her so she gave us a great presentation on the Akron Archives. We had a wonderful turnout and we made about £400 which we sent to the archives in Akron because Akron is the place where A.A. started and A.A. members go to Akron the way Catholics go to the Vatican.

Later I took her on the tourist thing. I took her to Stonehenge and I took her to Winchester to see the tombstone that Bill W. mentioned in his book.

I’ve been blessed. There is no guarantee when you join A.A. that it is all going to be plain sailing. Life is not all going to be a bed of roses but what we have is a programme to deal with life. A member, Joe, used to say, “ Life is not a bowl of cherries but I’ve had a few cherries out of the bowl”.

I’ve invested twenty-four years of my life in Alcoholics Anonymous. I sponsor a lot of people. That’s what keeps me sober. Last year I sponsored thirty-eight people. Also, on a Wednesday night, I take a Big Book Study group. I’ve been doing that for seven years.

I have been interested in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous since I came into the programme so I started to visit Akron every year ever since. The only year I missed was the year I was deported. You are not allowed to get back into America for the rest of your life once you have been deported but I fought that through the Embassy in London. It cost me £6,000 but then it was accepted that it was an error by the Deportation Agency and that it was not my fault. I could never go and live in the America again but I could visit it.

I still have trouble going through customs. The customs people take me aside and there is always a hassle but it’s worth it.

I was asked to speak at Bill Dodson’s group in 2008, he was the third man to get sober in A.A.—the man in the bed—on the anniversary of that group in Kenmore and that was an honour. Bill had started the group there back in 1951 or ’52.

Gail, the archivist, was at the meeting that night and she said, “You have to speak at a Founders’ Meeting at King School”. So she arranged that and in 2009 I had the honour of standing where Bill W. had stood and Dr Bob had stood, and many others had stood, on this podium. I felt very humble to stand there, a wee Scotsman, and to say, “My name is Frank. I am a recovering alcoholic and I am pleased to be here”.

Last year I was at Bill W.’s birthplace. They had done an extension on the barn and they asked me to be the speaker there.

In 1949 her church moved Sister Ignatius back to the seminary where she had been a music teacher but those people in Ohio recognised that this wee Nun was such a powerful figure and had done wonderful work with lcoholics so they sent her back to Cleveland Charity Hospital.

In 1952, business men in Akron raised the money to fit out a ward in that hospital to Sister Ignatius’s specifications and other members gave their services. Joiners came in, plumbers came in, everyone came in, and gave their services free of charge.

So from 1952 to until she died in 1966, Sister Ignatius ran the ward there The reason why it was called Rosary Hall is that the day it opened was the day of the Holy Rosary.

I started going there after I was allowed back into America and I go there every year and I got to know the director. I am honoured to have been asked to be a speaker at their sixtieth anniversary on 12th June 2012.

I‘ve been invited to many mysterious and wonderful places. I’ve spoken in Cincinnati, Chicago, Minneapolis and in New York. I’ve spoken in France, in Germany and in Belgium. I have even met the Queen at her Garden Party in 1995.

I talk for fifty minutes and, when I say what happened to Boxer Frank, they listen. It’s that powerful thing. I don’t care what your circumstances are, they are never going to be as bad as mine that day my wife killed herself. I had invested thirteen and a half years in Alcoholics Anonymous at that time but Alcoholics Anonymous has also invested in me and given me my sobriety and taken me to all those wonderful countries. I tell my sponsees there is nothing in life that should make them want to have a drink.

Now, just a word about my early days in Glasgow. There were plenty of characters around then. The person who made the biggest impression on me was a lady called Sadie who was my sponsor’s sponsor. Sadie just had a glow about her and if anyone was in trouble she was the one, after the meeting, who would go over and talk to them. When I came in to A.A. in 1972 (although I didn’t get sober until 1988), I was playing around in A.A. at that time but what I used to notice, for example, was there would be someone at the meeting sweating and shaking and bumming a cigarette and there would be someone in the meeting who would go out and come back with some tobacco, some papers and a box of matches for that suffering alcoholic.

You never see something like that now. We’ve all become too selfish. I remember there was a wee girl come in, a newcomer, and she said that she had drunk all her money and she had no money to feed her kids and she had to change her life around. Two women went out of the meeting and came back with two bags of groceries and they took her home after the meeting. I saw an awful lot of examples of that kindness. I don’t see any of that now. Of course, society is like that now. It is a sad thing.

Then, of course, there was Jimmy, my sponsor who was a great character and will be forty-two years sober on 1st of May this year. He told me that when he started going to the meetings that he made sure he had enough money to get there. That was his priority. So long as he had the money for the tramcar to get there, somebody would always give him a lift back. There were only six meetings in Glasgow at that time, 1972, and Glasgow is a big place. Today everyone is too busy to give you a lift or pick you up for a meeting.

There was a character called Barber John who used to pick me up with other alcoholics and we called his car the Recovery Wagon and we were out five times a week. After the meetings we would go back to his place or mine or somebody else’s, for tea and coffee. We would be talking until 3 o’clock in the morning and we had to get up at 7 o’clock to get to our work.

The first Telephone Service was started in Glasgow, not in London, and it was in St Stephen’s Church in Bath Street. What happened there was that four people would go in: two to answer the Twelve-Step calls and the other two to do the actual Twelve-Stepping so once a call came in one of them would jump on his bike and go off on the Twelve-Step.

So I don’t know where I am going with this story but there can’t be too many stories where someone’s wife committed suicide and then he took cancer but I can say that my greatest satisfaction for the past six years is when I do a PowerPoint presentation on the history of A. A. and a history of the Traditions.

I was doing these presentations verbally because I am dyslexic and Terry suggested we could do a PowerPoint presentation and one of my sponsees knew all about PowerPoint so we are doing that now.

Although I’m dyslexic I have a photographic memory and I can remember all the stories that the people in America told me about the early days of Bill and Doctor Bob. You pick up a lot of information that way. For instance, the copyright in the Preamble is not owned by the Fellowship. It belongs to the Grapevine. I have a book called Not God which is a history of Alcoholics Anonymous and it also tells of the Oxford Group and how our Fellowship started. It’s a marvellous book. So I use that and I do a PowerPoint whenever I am invited to a convention.

I think it is important to know as much about the start of Alcoholics Anonymous as possible because fewer and fewer people seem to know very much about it.

I see some people are being sponsored by, what I call coffee-shop sponsorship. You know what I mean, a cup of coffee and a chat after the meeting and when that sponsor thinks his sponsee is ready, he gets him down on his knees to say the Third-Step Prayer and after a few more cups of coffee he gets the sponsee down on his knees again to say the Seven-Step Prayer and that’s him recovered. Well, that’s not my experience of recovery.

I have to say I like sponsoring people and I think there is a way of sponsoring to the best of our ability which people don’t do today. When someone comes up to you or me and asks us to sponsor him, how dare you or I play God and say yes. We don’t know his circumstances. We don’t know what his religious convictions are. We don’t even know what medication he is on. The Big Book says that some people need hospitalisation before they can attempt the programme.

So I tell them, “Here’s my telephone number. Give me a call and we can arrange a date to meet and you have to come to me because we are going to work this together”. So we make an arrangement and he comes over to my place. I give him a cup of tea and I make him comfortable and I ask him to tell me his life-story.

I say to him, “I need to find your religious convictions because it is a God of our understanding and when I start talking about God it might get your hackles up and you don’t want to listen anymore.” I tell him he has to go to meetings but I stress it is not the meetings which will keep him sober. It is the programme that will keep him sober. I tell him, “I need to know what medication you are on”. Not because I am going to make a judgement and tell him to come off it. I am not a doctor. I could be taking his life if I said that, but I need to know how severe is his depression or what other illness he might have, and what I would like to suggest to him is that when he has done this programme he might like to go back to his doctor and see if the doctor might reduce the medication.

I have found that this works because I have been sober for twenty-four years and I have been sponsoring for twenty-three years. I have sponsored many, many people in A.A. and I have found that when I sponsored them in this way very few returned to drink.

At my meetings we meet every Wednesday and I go through the first 164 pages of the Big Book with the sponsees and then we spend a few more weeks on the Traditions which takes seventeen weeks in all. I do a Big Book Study twice a year. There were nine people when we started and now we have thirty-eight.

Now here’s an interesting fact. In 1947 there were a lot of non-alcoholics very interested in what we were all about. The First Preamble, known as the Old Preamble, was introduced in 1937 but in 1947 the editor of Grapevine introduced the shorter Preamble, primarily to explain to these non-alcoholics what Alcoholics Anonymous was about and what it was not about. It was intended as information solely for that purpose because quite a few non-alcoholics thought it was a good programme and they wanted to join.

The New Preamble is still used for information purposes. It began to appear in many publications and gradually it was accepted as the official Preamble. There were two differences from the Old Preamble. Those were the dropping of the word ‘honest’ in the sentence, ‘The only requirement for membership is an honest desire’. And secondly, the sentence, ‘There are no dues or fees’ was added.

When I came in, in 1972, in Glasgow there was no Intergroup, there was no Public Information, there was no Prison Service. By 1988 all these had been established.

The changes I’ve seen in A. A. are mainly about young people coming in. That’s a wonderful thing but because of the Health and Safety people, we can’t have young people under sixteen coming in unless they come with a parent.

In America we have people much younger coming in. They are drinking earlier today. There is a group I go to on a Tuesday night over there and it is called the Clark Group. There are usually about 300 people there and I can’t count the number of fourteen-year-olds that are there every Tuesday night and they are without their parents. There is a young girl who came in at twelve and she is thirty-two now and has been sober twenty years. That couldn’t happen here. I know certain people are worried about these kids being exploited but it is up to the group to protect any youngster coming in. You’re never too young to get sober

Another thing is that they talk about birthdays in A.A. There are no birthdays in A.A. There are anniversaries. We don’t have birthdays. Birthdays are our ‘belly-button’ birthdays.

The programme has stayed the same. Some say A.A. is changing. As I get older I get more sensible. I think it’s me that’s changing. I’ve grown up. You can’t go wrong if you stick to the basics, the Twelve Steps, Big Book Study, the Traditions, all that. The meetings haven’t really change and people are allowed to make mistakes.

My favourite books are anything on the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, Dr Bob and the Good Oldtimers, A.A. Comes of Age, Not God, Back to Basics, and Sister Ignatius’s book.

You hear some people say that Sister Ignatius’s book is not A.A. approved literature, maybe because it is Hazelden. It might not be A.A. approved but it is not A.A disapproved. Page 164 of the Big Book tells us that we only know a little, more will be revealed.

Published by the mid surrey intergroup of Alcoholics Anonymous

www.aamidsurrey.org.uk