Sark’s medical officer Dr Peter Counsell with – from left – Carnival Committee members Christine Audrain, Sarah Cottle and Puffin Taylour drawing the winning numbers for the Win a Million Pennies draw. (Picture by Bob Parsons, 0912265)
THE £10,000 winning ticket for Sark’s Win a Million Pennies charity draw was won by – strange as it may seem – a Christmas tree and the winnings went straight to the Professor Saint Medical Fund.
Early last month, Sark Estate Management’s Kevin Delaney announced that a £25 ticket would be bought for every Christmas tree collected by the company for recycling. He also promised that any winnings would be given straight back to the Professor Saint Fund, which subsidises the cost of prescribed medication for island residents.
The draw was held a week ago and Kevin let it be known earlier this week that the winning ticket – number 931 – was one purchased under the Christmas tree recycling idea.
‘It’s a win/win situation all the way round,’ he remarked.
‘I’m delighted because the idea meant that we recycled into usable compost a great many Christmas trees that might otherwise just have been burned.
‘Additionally, the Professor Saint Fund is £10,000 better off.’
If the comments made to me are anything to go by, the draw result has been extremely well received. In addition to the £10,000 winning ticket donation, the draw itself made an identical amount after other prizes and expenses had been deducted.
A further £100 was donated on the evening of the draw after Sark resident Kevin Adams disclosed that he had bought a number of tickets as a ‘donation’ to the Professor Saint Fund and the £100 won by one of those was also being given straight back to the charity.
The draw was organised by the Sark Carnival Committee – the body whose indefatigable members strive to raise funds for the medical trust charity – and the fact that it met its target of selling all 1,000 tickets followed a huge effort by committee members, particularly chairman Puffin Taylour and draw promoter Christine Audrain.
It was a hugely ambitious project for this small community and I am told that as the draw day dawned there remained 88 tickets still to be sold. The fact that the last one wasn’t bought until some 15 minutes before the draw took place shows what a Herculean effort was required to shift them and a huge amount of credit – and thanks – is due to Puffin and her hard-working crew.
The other two major prizes – £2,500 and £1,000 – were won by ticket numbers 833 and 175 respectively, while the 10 tickets ending in the digits 98 won £100 each.
I was interested in the online comments – on this newspaper’s internet site thisisguernsey.com – as well as those observations made directly to me by email regarding the reference in last week’s column to the number of tractors currently licensed for use in Sark.
It seems that unlike the win/win situation with the Professor Saint Fund, the powers that be here are faced with striking the almost impossible balance between the use of tractors to service the needs of the resident and tourist population with the need also to ensure that Sark remains as far as is humanly possible the haven of peace and tranquillity for which it is justly famed.
One of the most pertinent comments came direct in an email from a UK resident who visits here a couple of times a year. As she observed, how many daily motor vehicle movements would there be elsewhere if the Stocks Hotel redevelopment was being undertaken in say Guernsey or England? She suggests, and I agree, that the total would be very many more than is the case here.
That’s food for thought.
The email address for comment is fallesark@sark.net
Article posted on 5th February, 2010 - 10.00am
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