Buckland Foundation Annual Report for 2014
THE BUCKLAND FOUNDATION IN 2014.
The Buckland Foundation had another year of development during 2014, including welcoming Dr David Righton, a previous Buckland Professor from CEFAS, as a member of the Board of Trustees. The Buckland Lectures by Dr Malcolm Windsor during October were very successful and the reports from Maud Kent and Hazel Munt brought two excellent Buckland-Smith Summer Studentships to a conclusion. Progress has been made in the Foundation’s archives and administration, including additional support from the Scottish Fisheries Museum in building the Foundation’s online presence. The financial position and assets of the Foundation have remained relatively sustainable, and initial considerations of how these can be enhanced have begun between the Trustees and their advisors. This annual report provides a little more detail on these developments.
At a more strategic level, discussions have continued between the Foundation Trustees and the Museum (as Scotland’s National Fisheries Museum) about the possibility of developing a creative, effective and informative display on current fisheries science issues and challenges, building on Frank Buckland’s recognised reputation as father of communication on fisheries science. Whilst this is still a firm intention, the Museum’s purchase of the Empire Cinema in Anstruther for its major store is currently being given funding and development priority, but the Frank Buckland component will hopefully be further considered by the Museum Trustees, as part of the potential use and role of the East Green building.
BUCKLAND FOUNDATION LECTURES.
The 2014 Buckland Lecture was given by Dr Malcolm Windsor, who following an initial career in industry, held senior appointments related to fisheries food and policy research before dedicating almost thirty years to establishing and managing the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation (NASCO) based in Edinburgh. The theme of his Buckland Lecture was Species without Borders : Science, Politics, Economics and Human Factors – A case history on Atlantic salmon management. Three very successful and well-attended lectures were given during October in the University of Edinburgh; Imperial College, London; and University College Dublin. The Trustees were especially pleased that Dr Windsor was able to visit Dublin to maintain the wider fisheries science community that had emerged in Frank Buckland’s time. There was international interest in the theme and message of this lecture, and through this the Foundation has been able to expand its international contact list, through which copies of Dr Windsor’s lecture has been distributed.
The impact of Malcolm Windsor’s 2014 Buckland Lecture suggests to the Trustees that there may be merit in requiring that all future lectures or presentations be capable of online storage and circulation, especially as the long-standing tradition of a printed monograph or book may no longer be either financially viable or even desirable to modern researchers and readers. It is also the intention of the Trustees that recent Lectures are made available through the Buckland Foundation pages on the Scottish Fisheries Museum website.
The Trustees have invited Dr Colin Bannister, a Buckland Foundation Trustee and Vice-Chairman, and Dr Carl O’Brien from CEFAS, to jointly give the 2015 Buckland Lecture as a core component of a second London Colloquium.
At the Autumn meeting of Trustees, a range of candidates for the Buckland Lectures beyond 2015 were suggested, and it will be the intention of the Foundation to have the next two Lecturers identified and agreed as soon as possible to enable longer-term planning and promotion.
With the kind assistance of Alaistair Ramsay, a member of the Museum, a comprehensive list of all the Buckland Professors and the subjects of their Lectures has been placed on the Buckland Foundation pages of the Museum website, and consideration will be given to placing summaries of the lectures on the site.
BUCKLAND-SMITH SUMMER STUDENTSHIPS.
In July 2014, the final report from Maud Kent, the Foundation’s 2013 Buckland-Smith Summer Studentship, on her project The Effects of Thermal Experience on Routine Activity Patterns at Different Temperatures in Late-Season Southwest Baltic Herring Larvae was completed and accepted by the Trustees, who regarded it as an excellent example of student research. The research was an innovation for the Foundation as it was the first time a second follow-on Studentship award has been made, and also in that the Studentship had been based outside the British Isles.
The 2014 Buckland-Smith Summer Studentship was awarded by the Trustees to Hazel Munt, a student in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Research at University College Cork to undertake a summer research project for the National Lobster Hatchery, Padstow in Cornwall. Her research project, supervised by Dr Carly Daniels, was on Habitat Suitability of Stage IV European Lobsters (Homarus Gamarus L.) for Use by The National Lobster Hatchery, UK Focusing on The Primary Release Site Padstow, England, for Long-Term Stock Enhancement. It was later submitted in autumn 2014 in partial fulfilment of an MSc degree in Marine Biology at University College Cork. The Trustees were impressed by the quality of the research undertaken by Ms Munt and it is hoped to make her report available on the Buckland Foundation website in the near future.
The Trustees at their Autumn meeting decided to offer two Studentships for the 2015 summer season provided funds were available. An initial candidate was identified following an enquiry to the Museum from a graphics design student who – having encountered Frank Buckland on the web – has expressed interest in producing graphics and associated material for the Foundation. This was welcomed by the Clerk and the Trustees who had earlier in 2014 confirmed a need to invest in a more professional expression of the Buckland Foundation logo and stationery, website, documents and hopefully poster pull-ups for us as backdrops to the Buckland Lectures and the Colloquium. A more general call for Studentships will go out in April 2015. A full list of all holders of the Buckland-Smith Summer Studentship will be downloaded onto the Museum website during 2015.
BUCKLAND MEETINGS AND CONVERSATIONS.
There were two meetings of the Buckland Foundation Trustees during 2014, at the Annual General Meeting in March and the now traditional Autumn meeting in October, both meetings being held in the Scottish Fisheries Museum, Anstruther which is now the registered office of the Foundation. There were in addition a number of meetings in St Ayles between the Chairman, the Clerk, and the Director and Curator of the Museum during the course of the year. The Clerk (who is separately a Trustee of the Scottish Fisheries Museum) continued to liaise between the Foundation and Museum in relation to developing the Buckland Foundation archives, displays and the role of the Foundation in promoting public awareness of fishery science and resource priorities within the Museum and coastal communities.
The success of the initial London Colloquium jointly hosted by the Buckland Foundation and the Fishmongers’ Company in 2013, and the very positive feedback from many of those involved, was much due to the ideas and drive of Dr Colin Bannister; and there was strong support to try to make this an on-going biennial event. The Trustees were strongly in support of this, and asked Dr Bannister to explore whether this would be of interest to the Fishmongers’ Company. When a positive response was forthcoming, plans were initiated to hold Colloquium II in Fishmongers Hall, London on 2nd June 2015. The second Colloquium will include A) an examination of the impact of EU stock recovery programmes, and revised Common Fisheries Policy MSY objectives, on the trends in North Atlantic fish stocks previously depleted by overfishing and climate change; and B) future changes in governance and regional fisheries management under the EU.
In support of this, the Trustees invited Dr Bannister and his CEFAS colleague Dr Carl O’Brien to be joint Buckland Professors for 2015, and for their talks to the colloquium to form the 2015 Buckland Lectures. It is now planned to accompany these lectures with short supporting talks on climate change, the aspirations of catchers and retailers, and the future of aquaculture, together with a series of facilitated discussions, all nested under the overarching title of “Securing the Supply of Food from Marine Fisheries”, a theme suggested by Dr Righton to broaden the appeal of the Colloquium. It is planned the colloquium proceedings will be published by the Foundation and the Company and made widely available throughout the UK and European fishery science community. The Fishmongers’ Company very generously provided an initial upfront £5,000 subvention to the Foundation to help prepare and promote Colloquium II.
BUCKLAND BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.
There is still a small but declining annual income from John Wiley Ltd through the sale of the published lectures, but the Trustees believe that such sales will taper off further over the years. The Clerk and the Museum continue to receive the occasional request for the books and monographs resulting from Buckland Lectures, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to meet these requests as stocks are no longer available from the publishers (most of which are defunct) or the Foundation archives.
A more important challenge facing the Foundation is how to promote and distribute Buckland Lectures in the future as the Professors are now generally restricting their lectures available to computer-based presentations, with a traditional book a rare exception (though one is currently in prospect). There is similar uncertainty about the proceedings of the first joint Buckland Foundation and Fishmongers’ Company Colloquiums, and other meetings and conversations. The Foundation is assessing both publishing on-demand and online publications to identify how best to disseminate the important conclusions and policy implications of the research that it promotes.
THE BUCKLAND FOUNDATION TRUSTEES.
The Trustees at the March AGM confirmed that Dr Richard Shelton would continue as Chairman of the Buckland Foundation and Dr Colin Bannister as the Vice-Chairman of the Foundation for the coming year, with Captain Paul Du Vivier RN as the third Trustee and John Firn as the Clerk to the Trustees. The Clerk suggested that there might be merit in having an additional Trustee appointment to broaden the knowledge, influence and reach of the Foundation, and this was accepted with Dr David Righton, Head of Science at the CEFAS Lowestoft Laboratory, being invited to become a full Trustee of the Buckland Foundation with an initial appointment from 2014. He attended the AGM, held in St Ayles, via SKYPE (which worked comparatively well) and then attended the autumn 2014 meeting. At both the 2014 meetings, the Trustees identified future candidates for Buckland Foundation Trustees, and these will be progressed by the present Trustees and the Clerk. A comprehensive list of previous Buckland Trustees will be compiled from the Minute Book and archives and be placed on the Buckland Foundation website.
ADMINISTRATION AND FINANCE.
The annual accounts of the Buckland Foundation are attached as Annexes A & B to this report. These show a degree of progress over the recent years, and confirm that the Foundation is sustainable and able to deliver the Trustees’ modest operational and developmental priorities. The present value of the Buckland Foundation Investment Portfolio, managed by Brewin Dolphin, has risen by just over 16% over the past two years to stand at £153,400 at 31st December 2014. Whilst this is a positive sign of recovery after the 2008 recession, it does not meet the longer-term progressive inflationary loss of the real value of the investment portfolio that has taken place since the original Buckland Bequest of 1880 or the 1977 Fred Smith bequest that launched the Summer Studentships programme.
The Trustees recognise that – in common with virtually all other similar long established charitable trusts- such maintenance of the real value of initial bequests cannot be achieved. Therefore, to develop the activities, influence and impact of the Buckland Foundation it will need to explore additional sources of capital and income. The Trustees asked the Clerk to give some thought to this for discussion at the 2015 AGM.
The Foundation’s income and expenditure for 2014 are set out in Annex B to the report, and the main item of note is that an upfront subvention of £5,000 for the proposed 2015 Colloquium II resulted in the halting of the monthly payments in from Brewin Dolphin to keep the Foundation’s annual income below the £10,000 required by the Charities Commission for this size of Charity. The Clerk has also continued to gently drift some payments to ensure a sufficient float within the HKSB account to meet all operational needs. One interesting income was a donation of £75 from a collection spontaneously made at the end of Dr Malcolm Windsor’s Buckland Lecture in University College London.
The administration and management of the Buckland Foundation and its assets continues to seek improvements that will both maintain and strengthen its assets base, and also enhance its presence and influence within the fisheries science community. Brewin Dolphin continued to provide effective management of the Frank Buckland investment portfolio, and at the autumn Trustees meeting a change to the investment management fee was agreed with Nick Liddell, who completed his 27th year as manager of the Foundation’s portfolio.
LINKS WITH BUCKLAND DINING AND OTHER SOCIETIES.
As in the previous two years, there were no contacts between the Buckland Foundation and the other UK and European clubs and organisations which had once hosted Frank Buckland lunches, dinners and meetings. There is a regret at this by the trustees, and it was suggested that such a Frank Buckland lunch or dinner could be explored as part of the proposed London Colloquium, but we have now been advised that this is no longer an option. Meanwhile, the Trustees maintain the tradition of a Frank Buckland lunch during its meetings in St Ayles, principally through the contributions of the present Chairman.
R G J Shelton. Chairman, The Trustees of the Buckland Foundation.
March 2015.
BUCKLAND TRUSTEES AND CONTACTS.
The Buckland Foundation Trustees as of 31st December 2014 were :
- Dr R G J Shelton, Chairman.
- Dr C Bannister, Vice-chairman.
- Captain Paul Du Vivier, RN.
- Dr David Righton. (From October 2014)
The Clerk to the Trustees is John R Firn. ( 079 1936 1689; j.firn@btinternet.com). The registered office for the Buckland Foundation, through which the Trustees and Clerk can be contacted, is :
The Buckland Foundation, The Scottish Fisheries Museum, St Ayles, Harbourhead, Anstruther, Fife KY10 3AB.
The lists of former Buckland Professors, Lectures and Publications are available on the Scottish Fisheries Museum website, www.scotfishmuseum.org/., together with news of forthcoming lectures and meetings. It is planned to progressively transfer key Buckland Foundation documents and papers onto the website as resources become available.
The Buckland Foundation is a Registered Charity No 277968.
