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| Graham Coomber. Stepping down after steadying the RSGB ship. |
I stuck-out membership of the RSGB for three long years, and left in 2015. I joined just after Peter Kirby - the MD prior to Coomber - had left the society in early 2011 under a big cloud that saw him leaving employment there, and eventually, under threat of legal action, paying an alleged debt said to amount to £41,000, back. Mr. Coomber, of course, was not involved in any of this alleged wrongdoing.
But this was quite a cloud to escape. Others at the RSGB top table had been up to rather misguided activities - notably the use of members' subs to buy a vastly expensive antenna tower, notionally for the Bletchley Park site, before planning permission had been considered.
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| A big Luso tower was never going to make planners smile - and they didn't. |
When that permission was refused, the society was left looking like a big, fat lemon, quickly moving to try and rid itself of the expensive white elephant for a fraction of the price they paid for it.
Bletchley itself became another, very sore point for the RSGB members. A hut was bought to site the National Radio Centre for a vast amount of money that, under depreciation rules, quickly became next-to-nothing as an asset.
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| The RSGB's National Radio Station. Controversial and expensive. Image via CQHQ blog. |
Despite repeated, optimistic assertions from the society, it was clear from their own published statistics that only a handful of folk were going through the NRC's doors on any given day. The claim that this was a good way to recruit new hams and new members was always, frankly, ridiculous. It was also the most expensive way imaginable to achieve those aims.
During the NRC's opening ceremony, then-Minister Ed Vaizey made a point (at about 2m 32s in) - laughed away as an unimportant point by the society invitees - that the hobby attracted a "certain demographic". In other words, overwhelmingly retired, white, middle-class men. That's why PR material sent to me for handing out at a school consisted of (i) a stick of red-and-blue banded RSGB rock and (ii) a blue pen with gold RSGB lettering. Hardly inspiring, relevant - or indeed healthy - for today's kids.
Some suspected that the NRC had been conceived by some as a rather good, DX-attractive site from which to operate a world contest-class station, mostly for their own feeling of wellbeing, and thus another taking of the membership for a very big, expensive ride.
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| Why did the RSGB claim it supported the 'K' RSL, when meeting minutes showed it opposed it? |
Indeed, the feeling that the RSGB is led by contest-hungry bigwigs could be seen as reasonable when one considers the opposition the society presented to the 'K for Kernow' campaign.
Whilst superficially supportive, documents obtained by this blog reveal an immediate opposition to the concept. The Cornish societies have been very diplomatic in public in their response to OFCOM's decision not to grant a permanent RSL. But, privately, people have told me my blog posts on this issue are "spot on" as to how they perceived matters. More specifically, they think the new RSL was seen as a threat to contest operators unduly influencing the RSGB. OFCOM looked like incompetent idiots by performing not only an U-turn on the matter, but a perfect S-turn as well.
So it would never do to simply pin all the blame on Kirby. The RSGB had become wayward in the contempt some had, through their almost unilateral decisions to spend money as they saw fit - towards members.
Enter Graham Coomber. The steadying hand for the RSGB in a time of crisis.
Under Coomber, a considerable amount of soul-searching took place at the society. Coomber certainly saw an end to financial dubiety - so far as the accountant's statements allows us to know (the then accounting firm for the society didn't raise the debt with the wider society until it had reached a point where it was a sore thumb sticking out.)
For the past few years, Coomber has been the polite, perhaps rather establishment yet calming influence on the society whilst it pulled its pants back up over its bare backside. In that, Coomber was just what we needed. There haven't been any particular controversies that I'm aware of since Coomber took over.
Not that Coomber was entirely free of controversy. The right to privacy means that, even for a member paid-for society like the RSGB, we don't ever get to know just quite how much the MD gets paid. We're only glibly told that "one member of staff" gets "more than £60,000". That reporting limit has recently gone up by £10,000, but I haven't seen the latest accounts, so can't comment.
£60,000 and, maybe, a lot more, is a lot of money to most people. The society didn't really welcome my enquiry about it, saying that Mr. Coomber was in early, and went home late, working weekends and evenings, answering letters and emails, blah blah blah. Try that justification on a top-tier NHS nurse, who gets just £28,000 a year.
I can't quite remember what the calculation was that I made some time ago now. I seem to recall that about 11% or so of the annual subscription went to paying one person's salary.
Whilst Coomber is simply taking home what the society decides to pay him, I do think the society should be much more open and move beyond accounting and data law, and publish the exact salary. It could easily gain the permission of the MD to publish - and now, when recruiting a new one - would be a good time to obtain it.
Given we already know that it's more than a large amount of money, publishing the exact figure will be no more a breach of anyone's privacy, in my view, provided, as present, the name of the person isn't published.
Graham Coomber fielded a number of sometimes rather irritated questions about my pet interests: accountability, promoting the hobby beyond its own incestuous circles, and accepting ordinary members into running the show. Always impeccably polite and prompt in responding, Coomber nevertheless struck me as simply keeping the boat unrocked.
Those dead hands of oppression from the past also made their precence felt during Coomber's watch, when I enquired how much input they'd made into changes to the planning system and associated consultations of late. Despite a lot of hot air and some futile, angry attempts to show Wales was no different from England in planning law, the basic answer was: the RSGB had made no input into the relevant consultations. So much for the RSGB defending its members interests in that vital arena. For me, living in Wales, it inevitably smacked of an Anglocentric society, having little awareness of anywhere outside middle England. It's quite telling that I've never seen any accommodation for the Welsh language at the RSGB.
Another dead hand appeared when I asked why an online search for news about ham radio in the mainstream press yielded, astonishingly, zero results, I was told the society was addressing this problem by appointing a new PR person. I was happy to hear that at the time. Yet, two or more years on, there's still precious little, if anything about ham radio appearing in the newspapers, TV or other places where people who've never thought about ham radio might have their interest pricked.
So, well done, Mr. Coomber, for getting the RSGB back onto some form of steady course. You were the right man for the right time.
But what of the future? Quite a few of the old guard are still lurking in the corners where less light shines. It is to be hoped that those folk, who some claim are obsessed with contests and points-earning, don't appoint a new MD that allows the old ways to return. I'm sure we won't see allegedly criminal debts being run up again, but there are other ways to run a bad radio society.
As always, this blog, and plenty of others, will be keeping a close eye on how the RSGB develops in the coming months and years, and whether it becomes sufficiently representative of its members that I might consider re-joining the society.
Time will tell...
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