Wigan Ukulele Club 15th Anniversary

Wigan Ukulele Club celebrated its 15th birthday this Wednesday. Founded by Stephen Corless in 2009 so probably one of the longest established ukulele clubs in the country, the first meeting of the club was at the Railway Hotel Pemberton on July 1st.

Following Stephen's advert in local press and on radio 14 people turned up for the first monthly meeting. As interest grew meetings became twice monthly then weekly and as members increased the club moved to larger premises and for several years met at the Crooke Hall Inn.

Wigan Council had provided two grants which paid for a laptop, projector and printer and later some PA equipment. By now the club had a performance band that were playing at church halls and other small venues. In 2012 the club were approached by the committee of Wigan’s twin town Angers in France to play at their festival. A trip to Ireland followed to play at the Ukelele Hooley festival at Dun Laoghaire near Dublin in 2013. And a second visit to Angers was made in early 2014. We were performing at larger venues such as the two-day Southport Steam rally at Leisure Lakes, Mere Brow, and the Fylde Vintage & Farm Show.

Stephen stood down as chairman in 2014 and the committee appointed him as Honorary President. Paul Roberts became the new chairman. Membership had reached well over 100 which was far too many for the room at Crooke, and the club began to meet on two nights, with about half of the members continuing Wednesday evenings and the others now enjoying a Tuesday night club. Joint meetings were held quarterly at the Ravine at Pemberton. Eventually though this proved problematic, and a separate ukulele club Phoenix Ukulele was formed from the bulk of the Tuesday night members. Wigan Ukulele Club continued to meet on Wednesday evenings. In 2015 we held a Ukulele Festival at Crooke with big names from the UK ‘Uke world’ performing, including The Mersey Belles, Phil Doleman as well as Wigan’s own Chonkinfeckle, AD Cook, and Ric McCormick together with, Michael Adcock and Rob Collins.

As well as our performance band Paul Roberts formed a Ukes in School s group that visit schools in the area and play to encourage children who are learning to play the ukulele. This group continues to play at schools throughout the region.

Paul Swift became chairman in 2015 and we moved again to our present home at Wigan Sports Club. We still meet here on Wednesday evenings at 7.30 and play until 10pm.

In August 2015 we performed on all four days of the Southport Flower Show and have continued to play there (on an ever-larger stage) each year.

In September 2016 we invited members and friends from other local uke clubs to join us in a weekend at Llandudno. Over 100 people attended, we had an entire hotel to ourselves and performed on the promenade and on the Great Orme raising money for Llandudno Lifeboat. We have since returned to Llandudno on three more weekends.

Over the years we have recorded five cd’s, four of which we still currently sell at gigs and online. Production costs are met by club funds and all proceeds from the sale of cd’s goes to our charity fund.

We are very proud of our fundraising activities and the generosity of people watching and listening to us play has enabled us to support many charities. We now raise around £13,000.00 a year which we distribute to varies good causes. Our main charity beneficiary is Wigan & Leigh Hospice, but we also regularly play to support the Air Ambulance, Rosemere Cancer, Rainbow Hub, Llandudno RNLI, Southport Lifeboat Derian House and Macmillan as well as other national and smaller local causes. Wigan Asda have been very supportive and allow us to play in their foyer each Christmas where we collect for the Hospice. And last year we played a 12-hour Ukulele Marathon at Asda and raised £2000.00 for Children In Need. We will be repeating the 12-hour strum for Children In Need this November.

The club is flourishing. We currently have close to 80 members. We have a website www.wiganukuleleclub.com with lots of information as well as a Facebook page with over 670 followers. We have bookings to play around 50 gigs each year ranging from the large weekend rallies and shows to small church fundraisers and private parties.

And, most importantly of all, we enjoy ourselves. We are open to accepting new members and run a series of six weekly classes for beginners twice a year.