Angels on wheels

THERE wasn't much champagne when the meals-on-wheels ladies celebrated their big anniversary.

It may be the 60th birthday of the Women's Royal Voluntary Service but for volunteers like Pat Claridge the Diamond Jubilee represents something of a make or break year.

Meals-on-wheels was the WRVS's big idea. It is this service for the elderly that has made it Britain's biggest active volunteer organisation. In Oxfordshire alone more than 700 volunteers operate the service.

So it will surprise many to learn that the Women's Royal Voluntary Service could soon find itself left in the cold when it comes to delivering hot meals to Oxford's elderly, in the face of competition from newcomers hungry for big profits.

For the WRVS found itself having to put in a tender to Oxfordshire County Council to try to keep the service it started. If it loses, it will left with just a co-ordinating role and effectively banished to just small villages. WRVS Thames Area Manager, Penny Feathers, was upbeat as the big birthday approached. "We feel confident that we will win the tender.

"We all now live in a world of contracts. We hope it will mean that the situation is properly formalised. That would be a real feather in our cap in our diamond year."

She accepts that many would find it inconceivable that anyone could deliver meals more cheaply.

But Ms Feathers ex- plained: "Although our volunteers do the deliveries, we have to purchase food from suppliers.

Cash-starved Oxfordshire County Council will certainly not be influenced by sentimentality.

The council recently had to put up the cost of a meals-on-wheels meal from £1.45 to £2.10 - an increase of more than 40 per cent.

The price hike means the social services department will save £237,000 out of the £5.6m it needs to cut from its budget. The rise has already led Eva Blacklock, chairman of Age Concern (Oxfordshire) to warn that many elderly people cannot meet the extra cost.

She said: "Many elderly people are giving up these meals because they cannot afford them."

On May 29 the Service will host a Diamond Jubilee Tea Party at Dalton Barracks, Abingdon, to be attended by the Princess Royal.

But today is definitely not the time for champagne. Food of love JOINING the Women's Royal Voluntary Service may not strike you as the best way to find love.

But that is exactly how it worked out for Pat Claridge, the former WRVS county organiser, now happily working as an ordinary Meals on Wheels volunteer.

Pat, a 54-year-old divorcee, of Church End, Standlake, near Witney, met the man in her life in a less than romantic setting, an office bustling with WRVS volunteers and drivers.

Roy Williams, 57, a retired insurance worker, joined the Oxford meals-on- wheels team after learning that they needed drivers. It turns out that men are not so rare in the Women's Royal Voluntary Service. They now make up an impressive 15 per cent of all volunteers.

Pat said: "Usually it is a case of wives volunteering then getting their husbands involved. But it was not like that for us. We met through the service.

"I was then the Oxford city organiser for the volunteers. So you could say I was his boss."

But she was happy to become an ordinary volunteer herself when the service's Woodstock Road office closed after an amalgamation with Berkshire.

Pat said: "I think we get as much satisfaction from meals-on-wheels as the elderly people who receive the hot food. I think it has become a more essential service with the passage of time." Many ways to help FLOOD victims forced to flee their homes over Easter learnt that the Women's Royal Voluntary Service's work goes way beyond delivering food.

Volunteers helped operate rest homes hastily set up for scores of people flooded in Kidlington and Ban- bury. Volunteers receive special training to support emergency services.

Other work undertaken by the WRVS includes:

Operating a tea bar at Bullingdon Prison, near Bicester

Running a books- on-wheels service for elderly people

Offering and organise holidays for needy families

Running a tea bar at the artificial limb centre at the Nuffield Or- thopaedic Centre, Oxford. WRVS facts

The WRVS was formed in 1938

In the war it was involved in assisting with evacuation

Nationally, the WRVS has a membership of 120,000

In Oxfordshire 770 women and 102 men are involved in meals-on-wheels

Pensioners in Oxfordshire were served up 154,000 hot meals by volunteers last year.

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