12:00pm Monday 19th July 2010
By Liam Sloan
IT MIGHT be thought of as a uniquely English clash of cultures.
On one side of the food counter, festival goers with all manner of exotic clothes, hair styles, and piercings.
And on the other side, frying sausages for them, are retired police officers, farmers, lawyers and businessmen.
Since 1997, members of Didcot Rotary Club have taken on the huge task of catering at Steventon’s annual Truck Festival, held this weekend, raising £20,000 each year for local and international causes.
With 5,000 revellers set to arrive at the festival site at Hill Farm, it is punishing work for the small army of Rotarians.
Club president Brian Key, 73, who retired as Didcot’s police superintendent in 1988, said: “It started off in quite a small way, using our own chip fryers. Now it is a huge logistical operation, that has got bigger and bigger over the years. We will cook two tonnes of chips over the weekend.
“We start early on Saturday morning and go through to 10pm, leaving the festival about midnight. Then we are back at 6am on Sunday doing bacon rolls and eggs.”
Some 90 Rotarians, including some from the Wantage and Faringdon branches, will oversee catering with Oxford Spires Young Rotarians providing Indian food.
Using money raised at Truck, last year the group gave grants towards the international polio eradication campaign, ambulances in the developing world, and provided Shelterboxes to earthquake victims in Haiti.
It also supported Didcot Guides, the Salvation Army Christmas Appeal, the local Citizens Advice Bureau and the rebuilding of Didcot Methodist Church.
Mr Key said: “A lot of the kids do not look quite like we used to in our days, but we have found them very polite and they stand patiently in queues for quite a long time.
“Among us Rotarians, there is a mixed view about the music. You get the headbangers, and not the sort of music we have grown up with, but there is good music out there.
“As long as people enjoy themselves, it is all good.”
Farmer and Rotarian Alan Binnings, on whose land the festival is held, said: “We are surprised how polite the vast majority of the people there are.
“Some of the festival have fairly way-out clothing and hairstyles, and with their faces and other parts of their body adorned with bits of brass and silver.
“It can easily make mature people put them in the wrong box, but in fact they are incredibly courteous.”
Festival founder Robin Bennett said: “Normally at every other festival you have commercial food companies, so as far as I know this is unique.
“It definitely does add something, and both sets of people find it interesting.”
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