The Trophies

Win a class at a Westcott show and you might go home with the Habgood Cup, the Kingsley-Jones Rose Trophy or the G.S. Dee Challenge Cup. Most winners never wonder who Habgood, Kingsley-Jones or Dee actually were. Several of the club’s oldest trophies are named after the people who started the Westcott Gardeners Club in 1955, or who stood behind it in its first years. The minute books tell us who they were.

Before the cups

The trophy tradition is older than the club. The Edwardian Westcott Horticultural Society (read its story) mostly gave cash prizes (£4,500 worth by modern standards), but its top award was a silver challenge shield (by 1907, a cup) presented by Messrs Toogood and Sons, the Southampton seedsmen, for the exhibitor who won the most prizes. It came with rules a modern show secretary would recognise. In 1907 W. Burrell scored 50 points, far more than anyone else, but because he had already won the shield, it went to the runner-up. Today the club’s RHS Banksian Medal has a similar rule: anyone who has won it in the last two years is not eligible. None of the Edwardian society’s trophies are known to survive.

Go back further still, to the Westcott Floral and Horticultural Society of 1857, and the special prizes were tools: a wheelbarrow from Mrs Barclay, a steel digging fork from the secretary, Charles March, a spade, a rake, and once a quarto Bible for the best potatoes.

The founders

F. Tupper Cup (Autumn Show, fruit)
F.H. Tupper was elected the club’s first Chairman at the founding meeting at St John’s on 4 October 1955, and he was still in the chair in 1959. He spoke for the gardeners on the committee that set up The Hut. He was still winning trophies in 1966 (see photo) and in 1967 he was still turning up to club film evenings with his own slides. It was Tupper who, in 1957, suggested adding an early summer show and an autumn show to the club’s calendar, so it is fitting that his cup goes to the best fruit grower each autumn.

Habgood Challenge Cup and Habgood Chrysanthemum Cup
No name runs through the club’s history like Ken Habgood’s. He was voted Vice President at that first meeting in 1955 and later became Chairman. He tried to retire at least twice (in 1966 he told members they would be electing a new Chairman, and they promptly re-elected him) and finally stood down in 1980, after a quarter of a century. In 1959, when the club launched its Early Summer Show, Ken went out and bought its first cup himself, for £2 17s 6d. Both he and his wife gave trophies to the club.

Early friends of the club

Dr R Kingsley-Jones Rose Trophy (Summer Show, roses)
Dr Kingsley-Jones gave his cup in January 1956, barely three months after the club was founded, which makes it one of the very first trophies the club owned. In October 1957, when the first President moved away, Ken Habgood asked the doctor to take over, and he was elected “by popular accord“, promising to do all he could to support the club. In 1958 the club decided to give pots of bulbs and flowers to the village’s old and infirm at Christmas. It was the doctor, who knew better than anyone who needed cheering up, who drew up the list. Five villagers received a flowering pot plant that first December. The tradition was still going strong in the 1960s, when committee members spent Saturday afternoons “until well after dark” delivering hyacinths around the village.

The family connection outlived the doctor by many years. Seventy years after he gave his cup, his wife was still entering the club’s shows, with an entry in the culinary classes in 2026. Mrs Kingsley-Jones died that autumn, and the club remembers her with great fondness.

Sir John Hay Challenge Cup (Summer Show, floral arrangement)
Sir John Hay gave the club a cup in 1959 “to be used as the Committee decided“. The committee chose to award it to the best all-round amateur across all three of that year’s shows. Today it goes to the floral arrangers.

G.S. Dee Challenge Cup (Summer Show, sweet peas)
In late 1958 Mr Dee of Balchins Lane sent in his half-crown subscription with a guinea on top (about £32 in today’s money), plus an offer: would the club like him to buy “a small trophy to be presented annually as a Challenge Cup for vase of roses or mixed flowers“? It has ended up with the sweet peas.

V. Hermes Challenge Cup (Summer Show, best exhibit)
William Hermes had given a trophy by the early 1960s and went on to serve as the club’s President through the 1970s. A Chairman’s report of 1966 praised the work he did behind the scenes, always “around assisting and encouraging”.

J.D. Dow Challenge Cup (Summer Show, cut flowers)
The minute books never mention Mr Dow, but the newspapers do. By the club’s very first show, in July 1956, J.D. Dow was one of its Vice-Presidents. He made a short speech before the prize-giving, praised “the drive and energy” of the Secretary, G.W. Pearce, remembered to thank the ladies who did the refreshments, and declared that the Westcott club was “in no way behind other clubs in the district“. Mrs Dow then presented the prizes. Within a few years he had given the club a cup as well, so the Dows were there at the start in more ways than one.

The Mansey Cup
George Mansey was elected to the committee in 1957, and he spent the next thirty years near the top of the prize lists. In 1959 he won the autumn cup with 33 points, one point ahead of Miss M. Strudwick. In the 1960s or 70s he took the club challenge cup, the chrysanthemum cup and best in show at The Hut on the same afternoon. In 1979, at the first show in the Reading Room, he was still on the committee, and he won best in show with a bunch of black grapes. Meanwhile Mrs Mansey ran the ladies’ committee and the catering for the best part of twenty years. George died in 1990.

Club Challenge Bowl (Autumn Show, best exhibit)
By the early 1960s the members had clubbed together to buy a “Members Challenge Bowl” of their own. It is very probably the bowl still awarded today.

If you know more about any of these people, or have a photograph of them, we would love to hear from you.