IT IS NOW MORE THAN thirty years since the Scarborough Round Table was founded. The Table feels that whilst many of its earlier members and their memories are still available, some account of its own formation, development and work should be recorded.
A true record must be not merely an impersonally factual history, nor yet a nostalgically romantic story, but as far as possible a human account of the essentially human activities of a club in which fellowship and service are inextricably blended.
With an upper age-limit of 40 it is obvious that the active association of even the oldest of its present members extends only to the early fifties, some 15 years (including the war years) later than the founding of the Table.
Fortunately many of the founder and early members, long ago superannuated from the Table at the youthful age of 41, are now passing the succeeding decades of middle age in the less chronometric atmosphere of the Scarborough 41 Club. To many of them I am indebted not only for considerable sympathetic encouragement but for personal recollections of the Table of their day and for clarification of obscure points in such records as are available.
My own contacts with the Scarborough Table in those distant days were within the framework of the Area. If a personal word may be permitted (or, indeed, if not), it has given me a great deal of nostalgic pleasure to renew memories of those days.
The main skeleton of the story, is of course, the Minute Book, but it is a skeleton only, with none of the flesh that gives a human interest to bare bones. It has fallen to the lot of the present membership of the Table to cover the bones of later years.
This story of the Table inevitably stops at the point in time when the last word is being written. What has happened [vii] in the 34 years up to that point will be, I hope, tolerably clear to the reader. What will happen in the years to come is still clothed in the darkness of uncreated things. It will the duty of another generation to continue the story.
M.H.
Scarborough 1968-9
And I, according to my copy, have set it down in print …..
humbly beseeching all noble lords and ladies, with all other estates of what state or degree they be of, that shall see and read in this present book and work, that they take the good and honest acts in their remembrance, and follow the same. Wherein they shall find many joyous and pleasant histories, and the noble and renowned acts of humanity,
gentleness and chivalry.
William Caxton,
Prologue to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, 1485 [viii]
