GoldWings North Wales logo

More than twenty former North Wales Wings Members (including most of their 2008 Members) met recently to form a new and independent GoldWing club called GoldWings North Wales. This effectively replaces the GWOCGB North Wales Wings Region (NWW).

Although it was still nominally a GWOCGB Region, albeit a small one, by mid 2008 only about half of those who attended NWW Meetings regularly were Members of GWOCGB.  And they were the ones who were most active and who held some of the key roles which kept the Region going. Allowing people to please themselves whether to join the national club was a modus vivendi in NWW which might have continued indefinitely had it not been for the intervention of GWOCGB’s National Committee. The Committee took the initiative during 2008 to insist that non-Members of GWOCGB must not be allowed to hold any Regional Office nor even continue to attend Meetings.

At the recent NWW Regional AGM, their long-standing Rep (Chairman) stood down because he was not willing to continue trying to run the Region on that basis. Another NWW Member offered to stand in his place but then declared her intention to run the Region strictly according to GWOCGB Rules, so that the non-GWOCGB Members of NWW would no longer be permitted to attend meetings unless they agreed to rejoin or join GWOCGB.

GoldWings North Wales was formed as a consequence of this and has 24 Founder Members. It is therefore already larger than NWW was before the bust up.

Some GoldWings North Wales Members, perhaps as many as a third, are likely to also renew their personal GWOCGB Membership, at least for the time being, because doing so might make it easier or cheaper to attend GWOCGB or GEWF events, but GoldWings North Wales is now their primary GoldWing Club. Their new Club raises no objections to any of its Members also being a member of other GoldWing or biking clubs and nor should it; when we join a bike club we are doing so for friendship, and friends don’t seek to tie each other down. Few if any GoldWings North Wales Members are likely to continue attending NWW Regional Meetings as well; the centre of gravity and the continuity of fellowship among Wingers in North Wales has definitely shifted to the new, independent Club. North Wales Wings (as a GWOCGB Region) has a new website which might suggest that it is business as usual under new leadership, but in practice the Region has probably now folded.

So that NWW former Webmaster, who is also the BLP Webmaster, Nigel Mackintosh, is not unfairly impugned, let it be known that he has behaved like the generous person I know him to be throughout the dissolution of NWW. When he found himself, as a non-GWOCGB Member, banned from NWW Meetings (so it would no longer possible for him to continue running its website and adding new photos and other material) Nigel promptly offered to transfer the domain to the new Rep, so that NWW could continue to use it. She seems to have decided that a clean break was called for and refused, preferring to ask the GWOCGB webmaster to create a completely new website for her under a new domain name. Make no mistake, it was the new Rep’s decision to switch the NWW website to a new domain name and she was under no pressure at all from Nigel to do so.

Fortunately for all Wingers, in the UK and abroad, the structure and content of the old NWW website, which was extremely popular for its professional appearance and its huge resource of photographs, is being recycled and will re-appear shortly at www.goldwings-northwales.org.uk as the new Club’s website.

The replacement website for NWW can be found at www.northwaleswings.co.uk.