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Calne Bentley Grammar School

Tips for Organising a Reunion

A Successful Reunion

Have you ever thought that you would like to go to a School Reunion but no-one has ever organised one for your year group or would you just like a few tips to organising a successful Reunion?

This page gives you some tips on each step of organising a successful reunion.

Who to invite

Make a list of who you should invite. Not just your old mates, put everyone down.

If you can't remember who was in your year group or your memory needs some help:

Check your Christmas card list and old address books.

Check out the CalneBGS Class Year Group page where you can find a list of the pupils in year groups from 1960 to 1968 inclusive. Dont forget your teachers, there is also a teachers group on that page. Your year group is the year that you started in the 1st year at the age of 11.

Check out the Bentleian magazines which give all the exam results. So check the magazines for when you were (or would have been) in the 4th year (some took exams a year early), 5th year, lower 6th, upper 6th and the following year (some retakes?)
The Bentleian magazines for every year from 1964 to 1973 are on this website.

If your group was on the 1967 group photo, check that out too and also take a look at the photo galleries on this website

Check out the Calne old students message boards on the Calne town website

Check out Friends Reunited but be warned that unlike this website they group people together under the year they left school, so you'll need to check every year from your class year group year through to the year after upper 6^th. For the class of 65 reunion I checked every year from 1965 to 1973. Quite a few pupils, being "RAF kids" left in the early years. Some even came back again!

If you give me the details, I'll advertise you're intention to hold a reunion on www.CalneBGS.co.uk and once the date and time are set I'll create a special page for your reunion.

Contacting

Probably the most difficult and time consuming, but lets start with the easy ones:

Contact all those that you're still in contact with and enlist the help of one or two of them.

For everyone you try to contact ask them to contact anyone that they're still in contact with because if they're not interested in a reunion, their old mates might be. Get them to check their Christmas card lists and old address books. Tell them about the websites at Friends Reunited, Calne old students message boards and CalneBGS. These websites will bring back loads of memories and increase your chances of them attending a reunion. 

There are some e-mail addresses in the CalneBGS Class Year groups, these were accurate when added, but the chances are that some of them will now be out of date.
Where it states via webmaster, I haven't received permission from those people to publish their e-mail addresses, but I'm quite happy to pass e-mails on to them.

Leave a message in the guestbook on this website referring to your planned reunion

If they are registered at Friends Reunited you can contact them there, however I've found that quite a lot of people do not respond. This could be because they haven't updated their details or maybe they signed up and never went back and have since changed their e-mail address.

Sign up at Friends Reunited, where you can add your reunion details. You can also refer to your planned reunion in your personal notes.

Many people leave their e-mail addresses when they leave a message on the Calne old students message boards on the Calne town website.

Leave a message on the Calne old students message boards referring to your planned reunion.

For everyone you try to contact ask them to contact anyone that they're still in contact with because if they're not interested in a reunion, their old mates might be.

If the name of the person you're searching for is not a common name try searching at Infobel, where I successfully found our old french teacher Mr Marrow. However if you're looking for a "Smith" you'll probably get tens of thousands of results.

If you have an idea where they live another place to search is UK Phone Book.

You can also try searching in the search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves etc, but I must admit I've had no success on these. Works for Poj Weston though!

They may have had brothers or sisters at Calne BGS who are signed up at Friends Reunited or in the Class Year groups at CalneBGS. I've succesfully contacted several people this way.

For everyone you try to contact ask them to contact anyone that they're still in contact with because if they're not interested in a reunion, their old mates might be.
Why do I keep repeating this? Because its the most important of all!

After setting the venue, date and time, there's also the local papers, see below for tips on this.

Setting the date, time and venue

Date
As many people will be travelling to the reunion a weekend day is likely to be be most successful. No matter what date you have a reunion it will never suit everyone, but hopefully you have now successfully contacted a few people, so get some opinions from them and decide a date between you. It may be that some people are travelling from abroad and these may be a major influence on the date you choose.

Time
Both afternoon and evening reunions have proved to be successful in the past. Some afternoon reunions have gone on into the evening and early hours of the morning too.

Venue
Successful reunions have been held at the Lansdowne Strand Hotel. Their contact details are on their website. They're quite happy to keep their bar open all afternoon for a reunion. It's highly recommended that you contact them in advance with approximate numbers or you may find that the bar will close. (Been there, done that!)

The class of 1966 had a very successful reunion with a tour of the old school. Contact information can be found on the John Bentley School website.

Once the date, time and venue are set
Contact the local papers such as the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald and get them to run a story on your reunion. This successfully found a few people for our class of 1965 reunion in 2004.

Update your reunion messages in the guestbook on this website, on Friends Reunited and the Calne old students message boards

Contact me and I'll add the details on your special reunion page on this website.

More tips for the reunion

For everyone you try to contact ask them to contact anyone that they're still in contact with because if they're not interested in a reunion, their old mates might be.

Take photos including a group photo and make a note of everyone's names. Send me the photos (& names) for your very own reunion page on CalneBGS.

Have a guestbook at the reunion, which will record contact information for future reunions. Then write a newsletter including the guestbook entries and send it to those who could not attend. I can also put this on your own reunion page on this website.
Previous reunion newsletters - Class of 1965 - Class of 1966

More tips?

If you have any other tips for organising a reunion, please let me know your ideas and the success you've had from those ideas and I'll add them to this page.