Anniversary Address 2003

This year the Anniversary is not celebrated on St George's Day because of the difficulties of the date of Easter and other public holidays, but this is not as late as the Anniversary Address has sometimes been delivered – as one discovers by consulting the dates in the Proceedings of the Society. In those historic volumes, the changing fortunes of the Society, as well as the preoccupations of the Presidents, are vividly – often sonorously – recorded. It strikes me, though, that in reviewing the year past, it is often not prudent to envisage the year ahead in similarly explicit terms. In the year of 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War, our President Sir Charles Hercules Read began his Anniversary Address with noteworthy complacency: ‘I am happy in meeting you again … to record a prosperous year. Although it has not been marked by any outstanding events, we have pursued our even course usefully, I think, and may regard our present position with a fair amount of satisfaction’ (Proceedings, XXVI, 165).