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Originally Posted by Bluemerle
I belonged to the YCs. It was great fun and a wonderful marriage bureau. Events were organised regularly. I organised a Miss Young Conservative Competition and had two MPs (including Keith Joseph) to judge it. It was very popular.
There were speaking competitions, inter branch quizes, hog roasts, balls, and Conferences.
We had a day out on a canal boat, (which had a bar naturally), went to see the Blackpool lights and shared a train carriage with the girls from a local mill. That was fun 
Weekends at Swinton Conservative College where we rubbed shoulders with the future leaders, debated policies etc.
Life was fun in those days. :wink: |
Those were the days, Margaret.
By the time I joined in 1970 things had fallen off from the peak (Beaconsfield YCs once had 1000 members) but we still had plenty of fun and the big national YC conferences attended by 1000+ really came INTO phpbb_their own while I was active. I was once a judge of one of those Miss YC contests BTW. No, I was not offered bribes in kind
Occasionally things got out of control. We were banned from a hotel in Bournemouth after water-filled condoms were exploded round the premises, a wardrobe demolished and someone did a Tarzan act on the chandeliers. I sat on the 'inquisition' over that one. :evil:
The key point, however, is that the political success of the YCs was based on
social success. I met my wife through the YCs as did thousands of other people. It was better and much more successful than YF, IVC, 18+ and all the other rival 'non-political' youth groups.
I don't know whether you could ever recreate that kind of ethos now. Probably not. But anybody who starts by thinking that pure
politics will do the trick is very much on the wrong track.