"Sea Scouts" help with Xmas post

It’s a dark, cold December night down at the Newport docks, so why is 71-year-old Roger Swabey, a retired warehouse manager, visiting a drab pre-fab opposite a sleeping timber yard?

The answer lies inside: the headquarters of the 29th Newport Sea Scout Group, which has been turned into the sorting office for the town’s annual Scout and Guide Christmas Post. Run by Swabey, a Scout leader for 30 years, the annual operation is the principal source of fundraising for Scouts and Guides. Since starting in 1990, the initiative has raised more than half a million pounds through the sales of its own stamps.

As the lights flicker on, you can see banks of grubby but neatly labelled cardboard boxes filling up with Christmas cards bearing one of the specially designed and printed stamps, priced at 16p and depicting 10 local landmarks, including some of the bridges across the River Usk, which bisects this town of 140,000 inhabitants.

Swabey scoops up a heavy shopping basket overflowing with fat bundles of letters, and heads for his car. It’s a project that visibly energises this former merchant seaman.

“I’ve been bitten by dogs and I have sleepless nights, but it’s work that gives me a zing. For a month I go like Harry Clappers and have to think on my feet, just like I did when I was a warehouse manager,” he says.

Halfway into town we stop at Nathwani’s newsagent and general store. Along with Gibbo’s Fish and Chip shop, the Vogue hair salon, and a few other local businesses, the newsagent sells the Scouts’ Christmas stamps and collects the resultant mail in a posting box by the counter.

Ten minutes later, we arrive at a Scout hut in the centre of Newport known as Skip Jennings Hall, after a long-departed Scoutmaster who built it in the middle of the last century. Today it serves as the central sorting office for the 200,000 Scout Post letters handled every year. By mid-evening, it’s a hive of activity, as sacks, boxes and bags of letters arrive from 34 different collection offices around town, to be re-sorted into sacks bound for delivery to the same areas. There’s a Dad’s Army feel to the scene as Swabey barks instructions to the assembled volunteers, mainly of advancing years, but with a few teenagers helping out as well – including girls, of course. Admitted into the Scouts in the mid 1970s, they now comprise one in eight of the 400,000 young members.

Continued...

[The Daily Telegraph]

Obviously they're not really "Sea Scouts". (Just look at the picture, for crying out loud!) But then one wouldn't expect a mong from The Daily Telegraph to appreciate that. The list of actual Sea Scouts groups registered with the MoD is on the Royal Navy's website here. The website for the Newport Scouts and Guides "Scout Post" is here.

It's one of those things that really puzzles me (or at least it has in the past) - not just why the media lie about big important things (i.e. where they actually have an interest) but why they can't actually be bothered to get things right even when it'll make no difference at all to 99.99% of the population but it will cause considerable embarrassment or even offence to the tiny number who will actually care about these things.