A 'Right' BB Weekend...

Starting off on Friday 9th October at North Bridge Leisure Centre the Halifax Battalion held their company section Volley Ball competition. Numbers were looking good with 9 teams; unfortunately for my mob we had the shortest team. The competition ran well with some close games and some not so close… But the lads all enjoyed it with the winning team being the 12th Halifax – New Hope Company.

After the Competition is was straight to bed (honest) as I was up early for the District Executive meeting which was hosted at the 1st Ossett Company. It was good to meet up with some old and new friends from across Yorkshire and Humberside.

On the way home I received a text from Big Al - another Officer at our company who informed me that our company section lads had lost their 7 a side football game today, the score being 7 – 4 (always next week…).

Later that night I was playing with Halifax BBGB Band at my companies Church at Boothtown to raise some money to keep the church open. It was a good night, we managed to pull out some different and contrasting acts from our members and the audience appreciated what we did.

That night it was straight to bed again (well eventually) and up bring and early for our Church parade. It was an interesting service with the lads up and down doing things that the minister asked them to do and I’m pretty sure they had a good time.

A quick dash down to Burger king (in BB uniform) for diner and then up to Salem Methodist Church – where the Battalion band rehearse and it was time to drag out what we needed for the Halifax BB Battalion Founders Day Parade.

Sadly the band has lost a few of it’s older members over this year, a lot of them getting too old to be in a ‘marching band’ – I say your never too old! During the week our Band Master had been on the phone ringing round to make sure that we’d have a decent sized band for the parade. I had been doing the same to make sure that we’d have enough drummers and we ended up with 4 snares, 3 bass drums and a pair of cymbals – enough to rattle a few windows on the way round!

We made our way over to the start of the parade to see a lot of smiling faces. The turn out for the parade wasn’t massive – but it was better than we had predicted. We set off through town past the Saluting Box with our President – Janet Mason and Sir James Hill taking the Salute and before we knew it the band were at the halt playing the lads in to church.

The service was taken by our Chaplain Paul Jagger and Sir James presented the 10 presidents badges and two Queens Badges.

That evening was the Battalion Joint Council at Salem Methodist Church and we were all out in force again, most saying ‘fancy seeing you here’ and ‘I haven’t seen you in ages…’. All part of the banter we have at Halifax.

The meeting was pretty good, some controversial topics discussed but all in all pretty good.

After the Joint Council we then had our sectional meetings to discuss any up coming topics. I have been voted in as chief scriber for the company section and I doubt I’ll be getting away from the job any time soon – the Officer before me did it for 25 years… The count down begins…

All in all it’s been a right BB weekend.

Can’t wait to get asked at work – ‘what did you get up to this weekend then?’

Robert Batty
Halifax Boys’ Brigade