Let's 'Show' thanks to volunteers
OVER decades this newspaper has dedicated hundreds of editorial pages to cover the island’s three summer shows.
Times and tastes have changed, the shows have changed – considerably for the South, less so in the West – and coverage today is different to how it would have been presented decades ago.
The shows were not only a hub for parish life, but also one of the most notable days in the Guernsey Press office’s calendar. Half the office would decamp from Smith Street, and then Braye Road, for painstaking copying of results books for tented and animal classes. By the very early 1990s we were using primitive telephone connections to wire results back to the office in a ground-breaking move.
Shows get bigger, shows get smaller. But one thing that doesn’t change is the commitment from volunteers to actually putting the events on in the first place. Without those whose calling is to provide entertainment for the masses, and to ensure the viability of the event in 12 months’ time, and for years to come, the shows would disappear all too quickly.
We end this summer of glorious sunny days with the South Show talking of expanding, and the West and North celebrating successful and profitable weeks.
Thousands will be back next year to do it again, thanking those, without whom, there would be nowhere to go and nothing to see.