General Meeting: October 2024

The speaker was Reverend Alan Haydock. At first glance you may imagine our speaker had just stepped off stage from an Agatha Christie novel, or the Cluedo character “Rev Haydock in the billiard room with the spanner”!

The reverend Alan Haydock, aka Rural Dean, Rector, Canon, Vicar and other titles, delivered joke after joke in his droll, self-effacing and hilarious manner, seemingly with no notes. Many of his anecdotes unsurprisingly took a swipe at the hierarchy of the Church of England, as well the Roman Catholic and who can forget the one about the WC!

He himself was the butt of many of his one-liners, sometimes using phrases that could be twisted in meaning, but as he kept reminding us he was always so misunderstood! He had his audience laughing out loud.

Reverend Haydock has raised £125,000 for good causes. He has donated our fee to Crisis at Christmas. For a lad who kept repeating to his dad he was going to do “Nowt” he ended up quite a lot.

Marianne White