1. Messdeck Mirth. We receive a wide range of funnies from various sources throughout the year. Some are very good, some are crap and some, are unfortunately unprintable! (Remember, the PC Police are everywhere!) But for those we can publish, we will. We intend this to be a 'rolling' page with the latest gag replacing the oldest etc., and with the donor getting his name in lights to boot! So if you don't like the dit you know who to blame!
2. HMS Manchester - The Cruiser. We are also going to do a feature page on the 2nd World War Cruiser Manchester. We have fielded a number of enquiries about the "Big Manch" during the last year, and we have established a very good working relationship with their Secretary, Maurice Broad, with assistance being readily given and received on both sides. One such enquiry about the old Manchester netted our association a sizable donation. The full story of this boost to our funds appears as a separate article later on, whilst the actual amount appears in the accounts section of this newsletter, which is, as you know for shipmates only.
3. Personality Pen Pictures. As most of our shipmates are aware, all new joiners to the 2nd HMS Manchester Association benefit (!) from a Personality Pen Picture by way of an introduction to our motley ensemble. This is obviously detrimental to all our seasoned veterans who have been with us for a while, and so we intend that everyone who is on our books to be similarly praised (or stitched up!). This suggestion was inspired by the fact that we have some very good players onboard and some cracking dits to spin, and as usual, we will not let the truth come between us and a good story, with names and places only being changed to protect the guilty! This project will of course take a while to complete so some of you can rest easy…for a while!…and remember we may know more about you than you think!
4. Rogues Gallery. Due to the continuing popularity of the Rogues Gallery, we now find it necessary to divide this page into at least five sub folders - similar to the Re union page, so we can display the phots of a certain period more or less together, and these will be:-
1982 - 1985 The First Commissioners - those that started the "Mighty Manch" off on the right footing and did a trip down south. Black and White photography was still in existence then, and as you will notice some of your colour phots are starting to change colour and fade!
1985 - 1987 The Holiday Makers - including Global 86…of course!
1987 - 1989 The Professionals - those that converted the "Mighty Manch" from cruise ship back to warship against the backdrop of 10,000 Global 86 dits!
1989 - 1991 The Warriors - those that sailed away to where it was very, very hot! There is already a particularly good selection of phots submitted by Nick Athawes in this section…and we thought he was a wood butcher!
Post 1991 Which, for the time being we will call T'others.
At the time of writing we still have a number of phots to process, and some we are holding back as we need more info from the donors. We also have a few with format snags, all of which we are working on. It does help us immensely if any contributions could be forwarded in .jpeg format, with obviously approx date, location, and shipmates featured.
5. Advertisements. Our final additional page for the website at the moment will be an advertisements page - "Seabay" - that will be all embracing and will include details of the Forces Discounts Directory, which features details of those more enlightened companies and organisations that extend their discount schemes to retired HM Forces Personnel, 'Save as you grey', as well as details of our own slops. There will also be the opportunity for our shipmates to advertise any of their own business activities, as well as individual items for sale in the 2nd HMS Manchester Association community. This addition to the
website was prompted when we noticed the following Ex-Manchester items for sale on E-Bay:-
