This history is a work in progress. It is not definitive, but it does aspire to accuracy.

If any reader has any additional info to add, criticism or correction to make; or any item of interesting history they would like to offer up, please - don’t be shy.

If any member can come up with answers to the questions notated, WKIG would be grateful.

Please email the SECRETARY, WEST KENT INTERGROUP. ('contact details in Directory of Intergroup & region Officers')

WORKING DRAFT/ IN PROGRESS

THE AURORA HOTEL, GILLINGHAM.

MEDWAY’S FIRST A.A. MEETING

Thursday Gillingham is believed to have been the first A.A. meeting to open in the Medway Towns. It began life as ‘The Medway Group’, at the newly christened Aurora Hotel, formerly the NAAFI Club, currently the King Charles. According to Gillingham Laurie, who was 24 at the time, and whose first A.A. meeting on the outside this was, (his first being in Canterbury prison), the Aurora meeting may have been as early as 1967. (A ‘Medway Group’s’ contribution to GSO is listed in the November 1968 edition of News Letter, the then journal of A.A. in England & Wales) Laurie believes the meeting was started by Johnny ‘Dirty’ Burke and Bill B. Off-Licence Alf, Kangaroo Jim - a speech writer - Big Roy, Frank, Cliff, Parkwood Belfast Hughie, Reporter Sue, and Doctor Brian were also present. All of those moved on, so their fates are uncertain. Johnny B’s son followed his father into the fellowship, but in a grim confirmation of the maxim ‘like father like son,’ both died of active alcoholism.

Eric recalls, ‘The Aurora was my first A.A. meeting. February 16 th, 1972. It started at 8pm and was then being run, I think, by Bill B. and Alf. There was a falling out between them and Bill went off. I never saw him again. There were about a dozen people present, including Brenda from Gravesend, because there was no meeting there at that time. Much later’ continued Eric, ‘one of the ladies present at my first meeting - not an alcoholic but a professional with a vested interest - took an interest in me, and became my second wife.’

Though women members of A.A. were sparse in Medway at that time there was another female regular presence, Sheppey Iris, recalls Laurie, ‘and as memory serves, she couldn’t quite get the message.’

Gravesend Brenda remembers the Aurora’s ground floor room as having a long table running at its centre, possibly a reception room. She recalls there being about ten or twelve men, and remembers them as being very kind, and feeling slightly guilty for possibly inhibited their sharing. She has an abiding appreciation of the consideration and respect she was shown. ‘Bill B was very well respected.’ Brenda also recalls attending an A.A. meeting in the back room of an off- licence, owned by Alf, somewhere off Nelson Road. The meeting may well have been started as a splinter group resulting from the falling out between Alf and Bill B. mentioned above. ‘Having an A.A. meeting surrounded by wholesale quantities of alcohol, which no-one drank, offered a proof to the newcomer, that the A.A. program did work.’ Irish Pete, whose first A.A. meeting was also at the Aurora, remembers a driving instructor called Tom who got over religious, and who kept turning up at A.A. meetings brandishing a large cross.

The Medway Meeting passed through several venue changes, moving from the Aurora hotel to the gymnasium at St. Mary’s Infants School, Greenfield Street, then on to a room just along the road at St. Mary’s Primary school. There were no tea making facilities at the school so flasks were brought in. More than one newcomer thought - or hoped - that these contained iced vodka. The meeting then moved to a back room in church hall in Balmoral Road in…. (when did meeting commence at this venue?)

At the Balmoral venue’s peak it often attracted between 30 and 40 members, including Policeman John, Chocolate Peter and Pilot Brian. Laurie believes that Policeman John, who used to play chess with Father Porter, arranged the move from the school to the church hall.

After a good twenty years at the Balmoral venue, due to a rent increase, duress from noisy rehearsals by a musical am dram company, (and also with the idea of grouping up with the Wednesday & Saturday meetings, then homeless, having recently been asked to vacate it’s meeting room at Medway hospital) the meeting finally relocated to the venue of its dotage, and gradual expiration, The Sunlight Centre, Richmond Road.

In the penultimate year of its existence the meeting had introduced what many members considered to be draconian ‘oaths of allegiance’ to its steering committee’s decision to prohibit members of other named A.A. groups from taking on service positions. (Figure 1) The meeting also detached itself from WKIG, divorcing itself from the A.A. structure, and out of communication with GSO via mail shots, flyers etc. At one point it was even suggested that the meeting join East Kent Intergroup, until perceiving failings there also. Many A.A. members decided they didn’t wish to be involved in the meeting and by this time there were Thursday meetings in nearby Strood, Gravesend and Maidstone, so there was a lot of choice. It was only a matter of time before Darwinism got a grip. (Figure 2 & related sidebar, Medway Prohibition) But there were other, more practical factors to the oldest group in Medway closing down, not the least of which were the severely uncomfortable plastic chairs, which at the slightest pressure the legs slowly spread out the way a giraffe lowers itself to eat. That the discomfort of a chair has been nominated several times as an important factor in the meeting’s closure might indicate how pampered alcoholics have become since the original A.A. meeting in Medway at the Aurora started, 42 years earlier.

And so – quite literally – taking into account the chairs - due to a lack of support, Tetley Tom W., Marius (the meeting’s last secretary) Dean, and Gravesend Carol were the only members present at its final meeting, held on Thursday 17 th September 2009.

End