Many Congratulations to John Withers who has been awarded the prestigious Dimmie Fleming Award in 2020 for services to bridge. The awards are made specifically to publicly recognise those who have worked hard promoting bridge locally at County level. 

John has been a tireless supporter of the county for more than 20 years. Initially he was Membership Secretary for the County, trying to keep club lists up to date and collecting county subs from everyone – before the age of computerisation (we forget how much work that involved).

He also worked very hard on statistics relating to the introduction of P2P: who would benefit, who would lose out and at what level the county should pitch the county subscription.  Initially, Staffs and Shropshire county elected to collect from individuals via clubs in the first instance: and then John calculated how much should be added to the P2P to the EBU and, again, which clubs would lose out with the change.  His work enabled the county to diffuse any potential issues that would certainly have arisen without his work on this topic.

He was usually the representative of Wolverhampton Bridge Club at county committee meetings and a major player in the administration of that Club.

In addition, he was at the forefront of ‘computer’ scoring for the county and his club (Wolverhampton Bridge Club) and for coping with sending results to the EBU.  If there was any sort of computer problem (including sorting out problems with bridge scoring systems from other clubs) – John was your man. 

More recently he was at the forefront of starting up the county on-line bridge clubs, liaising with the TD for them and taking on the role of Membership Secretary for the two new on-line clubs. 

Over the years he has represented the County at various EBU national meetings, always ready to stand in for another representative in his/her absence.

Always a person willing to take on any task or problem.  John is a classic example of an unsung hero, and thoroughly deserves the nomination.