Submitted to the PROBUS Global Newsletter, Spring 2022.

How well has the Simon’s Town Probus Club survived COVID and what comes next?

Robin Palmer

8 March 2022

Here is our response to the request for contributions to the PROBUS Global Newsletter on how individual clubs have coped with COVID. We have paraphrased the suggested topics slightly for relevance but otherwise address them in the suggested order below.

Background

Where and what is Simon’s Town, some might ask? This historic port and naval base is found in South Africa, on the False Bay side of the Cape Peninsula, which has Cape Town with Table Mountain at its head. Before COVID, tourists came from far and wide to view our endangered and unique African penguins on their way to Cape Point and are now beginning to return. Other attractions, besides hiking the mountains or ascending by cable way, include water sports, gourmet dining and wine-tasting, both locally and in the general area of the scenic Western Cape Province.  

Lockdown in South Africa arrived on 24 March 2020 with the announcement of a National State of Disaster. It was a particularly draconian lockdown, including at times bans from travel between provinces, going to beaches and even alcohol sales. At the time we were on the verge of holding our AGM and that had to be postponed; it will only be held this month, almost two years later. In the absence of a doable AGM, President Bruce Parker and his committee have had to remain in office the last two years, keeping the club ‘ticking over’. In the absence of monthly lunches with their speakers, and outings every two or three months – our normal activities for members – we have had to fall back on email and our monthly newsletter for inter-communicating. Virtual meetings by Zoom never caught on as a compensation for ‘live’ meetings with our members, but at least we were able to resume our lunches, with social distancing, from last October.

What outstanding things has our club done to keep it "alive" during COVID? 

Manco, as we call our Managing Committee, quickly realized that lockdown would prevent us from interacting face-to-face with our membership in the usual way and that Zoom would only work for our regular monthly committee meetings, yet we had to do something, or we might lose members. We decided therefore to concentrate on reinforcing the newsletter to maintain contact and morale.

For the first few months we concentrated on the history of our club, particularly as in 2020 our club celebrated its 30th anniversary. Don Ross-Watt, Club Secretary, and Robin Palmer, then an ordinary member of the committee, researched our history and published the findings in monthly installments, with illustrations. We also called for members to share amusing anecdotes from their own careers.

When we ran out of ‘history’ we ran another illustrated series on Artists of Probus Simon’s Town as there were not a few artists among the members and social members of our club. Now that we have run out of artists, we intend to include another feature on Mariners of Probus Simon’s Town, even though we have begun to return to normal (see below). Set in a naval base with a thriving adjacent marina, our club has never been short of retired naval personnel and yachtsmen, whose illustrated memoirs should interest especially those members who still do not feel safe yet to support regular lunches and outings.  

What has the club done since it began to meet "normally" again?

As the southern summer began last year, the Pandemic waned sufficiently in South Africa – and the Omicron variant that has taken over was mild enough – to re-launch regular lunches with speakers, and in February we organized a wine-tasting to a winery that offered out-door facilities. This month, lunch will be combined with the much-postponed AGM and, with a new committee, we will be able to consider ourselves back to normal, at least unless or until another wave hits, with a new variant. For the time being, as news of the safety of these gatherings spreads within the club, we expect attendance to also return to normal.

Another way to promote sociability following the two-year ‘drought’ has been to organize get-togethers involving social members. These are the wives, partners or widows of members who gather with us at local venues between scheduled outings, at roughly six-weekly intervals. The inaugural gathering at the end of January was highly successful and bodes well for the future of this initiative,

What are the future challenges for your Probus Club?

The main future challenge would be the mentioned possibility of a return to lockdown conditions. If that occurs, at least we will be accustomed to them, after the two previous two years. Thankfully, the Pandemic has not caused major mortality among members, bar a couple of tragic exceptions, and retention of members has been good. Lockdown made it impossible to induct new members, however, and so our numbers, formerly 59, have declined to 55.  

Another challenge we face is that of an ageing membership. The mean age of members is 80 years. This might have been mitigated if the past two years had been normal and younger members had been recruited at the normal rate, but this was not the case. Now there is the challenge of finding and recruiting younger members to maintain the viability of the club into the future. This aim will be difficult to realize if more waves of COVID arrive. In confronting the challenges of an organization for retired people in who are the most vulnerable to this mutating coronavirus we are surely not unique among Probus clubs worldwide.