History "The History of the VW Cabriolet Owners Club GB 1978 to 1999"

Compiled by :-
Club member - Chris Timms

We now have our own Club’s history written down for posterity! At last I have completed my version of the Club’s history. I have tried to look at it from a detached objective point of view but like most personal accounts it deviates towards the authors idiosyncratic preferences. Since 1996 when I started it I have slowly been researching the magazines and picking peoples brains to gather information. Terrie Barnes has been of great help in lending me photos and giving up her own time to talk to me about the early years of the club. Robin Smith gave me a large number of Club magazines to enhance my collection, without these reaserch would have been very difficult if not impossible.

The booklet is in A5 size and is 68 pages long. The front and back covers are in colour as are eight of the inside pages, there are 34 photos and a total of 121 different people are in the index!

If you buy one of these booklets you will also find some number crunching charts so that you can see who held which officers post when, be able to date your chassis approximately and have a list of the Club rules.

A book list of "favourites" of mine may help you to buy the VW book for reading in front of the fire during the closed winter season.

Also included are some Websites that you may find worth visiting (other than our own of course!).

If you would like to purchase a copy they are available through the club shop. Cost is £5.00+p&p from Philip Soleil - email philipsoleil@tiscali.co.uk or write by snail mail to:
Philip Soleil 1 Church View, Hartley Wintney Hampshire RG27 8LN

The Formation of the Club and its Early DaysTo ensure that the early history of the Club did not get lost in the mists of time the founder of the Club and our first President, Tim Barnes, put pen to paper and wrote an article for the Newsletter about how it all began. Entitled "The First Four Years" it appeared in the June 1982 Newsletter, below is an abbreviated version of the account which includes an up-date to the present.'The First Four Years' by Tim Barnes,

01/06/1982, Cabrio Newsletter.The formation of the VW Cabriolet Owners Club of Great Britain in 1978 was indirectly due to the magazine "Beetling" and the Club’s old friend Dennis Sockander, Chairman of the Svenska VW-Cab Klubben. "Beetling" published a small article in early 1978 about the Swedish Cabrio Club, giving a contact address for further information.  Having owned a Cabrio for a short while and not really knowing any other enthusiastic owners I wrote to the Swedish address and received a long letter in return from a certain Dennis Sockander.  Dennis told me that another English man, Geoff Barham from Redditch had also contacted him and giving me his address suggested that I contact him.  I didn’t have to as on the evening of the day that I received the letter Geoff phoned me.  To cut a long story short both Geoff and I were very keen to form a club catering for Cabriolets, so we arranged to get together at VW Action ‘78 and talk our ideas over.  The first Committee meeting was held on the 10th of December ‘78 and it was decided, amongst other things to have an annual subscription of £2.00 and that there should be no Club Rules unless they were found to be necessary.

The first proper meeting of the Club was at Stanford Hall Leics. in May ‘79 when our membership stood at the massive figure of thirty!  Fourteen Cabrios attended this meeting.  By July ‘79 membership had risen to forty-two.  A lot was learned in August ‘79 when six of us went to Sweden to attend a big Cabrio meeting and then of course there was Action ‘79.   In November a number of us visited the Karmann works at Osnabrück.  By the end of ‘79 membership stood at fifty-nine.
1980 saw our first International Meeting at Peasmarsh, a rise in membership subscription fee to £3.00 and our involvement in VW Action for the first time as an investing/organising Club.  Peasmarsh International was a great success with visiting Cabrios from Holland, Sweden and Germany.  This was followed by another Stanford Hall Meeting, a joint meeting with the Kent and Split Window Clubs at Warnham in Sussex, VW Action ‘80 and a joint meeting with the Messerschmitt Owners Club in November to watch the London to Brighton run.

1981 saw the second Peasmarsh International - a lot wetter than the 1980 event, but still a success. Draft Rules were presented to the Club, these to come into effect on Jan 1st 1982 with a few alterations.  The membership subscription once again had to be raised to cover costs - mainly newsletter printing and distribution - to £4.50.  A week after Peasmarsh the Club attended the Stanford Hall meeting, then a number of members went to Osnabrück for the three day meeting there.  Meetings in Kent, Suffolk and Norfolk followed throughout the year and of course we were at VW Action ‘81. The end of the year saw around a hundred members in the Cabrio Club.

The Newsletter is now called the Magazine and is a professionally printed colour one.  As can be seen by the above, the club started out in a small way and grew to about a hundred members in just over three years.  After 20 years the membership has stabilised at around four hundred. The club’s history has been written in a more comprehensive form and published as a small book (see above).

We still attend many of the shows and meet sometimes in the evenings for a meal at a local pub.  The "international" element of the club is still very strong, we are now linked to the national Cabrio Clubs of Belgium, Holland & Switzerland. Each year there is an International meeting in one country, Belgium 2002, Holland 2003, Switzerland in 2004 and England 2005. There are trips to France, Belgium and Holland every year with occasional journeys to Germany on a pilgrimage to either Wolfsburg or Osnabrück; in 2000 the Club went to Switzerland.