Kingston Seymour Bridge Club began life in 2005 when Daphne Patrick, with help from husband Joe, started giving bridge lessons in the foyer of the village hall and then encouraging her students to continue coming along to play and improve their game.  Daphne usually taught a new, small group each year and the club grew slowly, typically getting three or four tables and playing just fifteen to eighteen boards on a club evening.

Then in Spring 2015, Joe suggested that we look at EBU affiliation, with a little more structure, and that process was completed in June of that year.

We appointed a provisional committee, produced a formal constitution document (based on an EBU template) and, perhaps more importantly, an etiquette document, intended to help less experienced (or slower) players to understand some basic house-rules which help the evening to run smoothly.  Our inaugural AGM was held in December 2015, the committee formally voted into office and Daphne unanimously voted an honorary life member in recognition of her significant contribution to the club.  Years later, in 2020, Daphne was very deservedly awarded the SCBA's Terry Girdlestone Cup for her outstanding contribution to bridge in the area.

As the club grew, we struggled (in fact, it was one of the biggest challenges facing that new committee) with balancing the desires of the experienced players to play more boards with those for whom a club meeting was an evening out, with an opportunity to chat to their friends – and for whom a hand could take as long as it took!

The etiquette document helped, we brought forward our start time a little, but probably the biggest factor in our getting to grips with slow play was the introduction of our BridgeTimer software.  That’s done a marvellous job, with an anonymous voice (rather than a real person!) nagging everyone that they should be on the last board of a round, not to start another one, or to move to the next table.

Our next major, technological, step forward was the purchase (with the aid of an EBU grant) of an eight-tablet BridgeTab electronic scoring system.  This saves the need for someone to manually enter all the travellers into the scoring system each week but, more importantly, it makes things so much easier for the players, particularly the less-experienced ones, to enter the contract, the lead and the number of tricks, with the system then calculating the score and allowing us to display the results within moments of the last table finishing their last board – and then, within another few minutes, pushing them up to our website.

We also, with the help of that EBU grant, bought a HandyDup card dealer – the baby brother of a full-function card dealing machine (such as a Duplimate), taking much longer to use but costing a fraction of the price and using exactly the same software to generate the hands and establish the achievable contract information which we now publish on our website with the results.

We now regularly get eight or more tables (and have bought more BridgeTab tablets and bidding boxes to support that growth), usually play 24 boards each evening and have grown to around 55 members, most of whom play regularly.

In the last few years, we’ve played a leading role in developing a ‘club cluster’ relationship with other local clubs for such things as friendly inter-club competitions, co-operation on training and on sharing equipment.  Some examples of benefits from that initiative are that the Nailsea club now share our scoring equipment and our boards are prepared on the Clevedon & Portishead club’s dealing machine.