Clothes are Optional

 (This letter is reproduced here with permission for wider accessibility - RB)

An Open letter to British Naturism’s EC, from Duncan Heenan (former Treasurer).

Richard Daniels’ ‘Chairman’s Report to the Executive Committee August 16th 2008’ makes a number of statements which should not go unchallenged. It is not so much a Chairman’s report as a self-praising apology, and does not actually address any of the serious issues CCBN faces, but rather wallows in personal self pity. It is typical of the  personal style of ‘leadership’ I have witnessed during his terms of Treasurer and Chairman, and the reason why he is leaving CCBN in such a parlous state. It is the job of management to organise, not agonise.

I now address each of his paragraphs in order.

I agree with his opening, that CCBN is in trouble. I do not agree that this is new. CCBN has been in trouble for some years, though he and others have chosen to ignore it or cover it up until it is probably too late to do anything effective.In his second paragraph he states that he has tried to ‘bring people together’. He has not. On occasions he has calmed down fights by compromises and fudging or postponing issues. This has merely been papering over cracks and makes problems worse in the long run because they are not tackled. Looking for superficial harmony and friendship is not the same thing as proper management. Symptomatic of this is his hurry to get every meeting over and get away, whatever issues are deferred and left unaddressed. Even getting him to arrange meetings all has been a struggle when, as Chairman he should have been driving matters forward.

The third paragraph echoes several private conversations I have had with Richard, and reflects a severe difference of view over priorities. He seeks sympathy for his choosing to put CCBN ahead of his family and personal life, and considers doing so morally worthy. I have considerable sympathy for the personal and financial problems he has faced, but not for his response to them. I take a different, and more focussed view. I have suggested to him several times in the last year that he resign rather than allow competing pressures on him to dilute his attention to everything. When faced with the same decision recently I chose to resign rather than remain as Treasurer in circumstances where I knew I would not be able to do the job properly. This shows respect for CCBN, not contempt. I have a wholly clear conscience regarding both my family, and CCBN. Richard has chosen to continue in an office he could not perform properly, and he says himself this has had a similar deleterious effect on the other aspects of his life. I believe that the right and strong thing to do, when you find you can not do a thing, is to admit it, move over and let someone else have a go, who can. Instead of doing this, Richard has hung on stubbornly as a lame duck Chairman, exerting a wholly negative influence, as evidenced by the number of people who found they can not work under his regime, and have themselves resigned.

Richard Daniels’ next paragraph beggars belief. He says, the BN ‘change agenda’ was ‘conceived and established prior to [their] election’. Of course it was! It was in our Election Addresses, widely publicised - and was the reason we were elected by the members. It is the voting members who wanted it! As I said at the AGM, if the EC do not see the writing on the wall it will be the beginning of the end of CCBN. Sadly that seems now to be the case, led by Richard Daniels himself. He says our ideas were based on a misconception of the amount of work and commitment required of other EC members. Not so. We knew well the amount of work required. The trouble is that the necessary amount was not being done by many EC members, and able volunteers were too few. Too many EC members have been passive, simply turning up at EC meetings once in a blue moon, behaving in a negative and recidivist way , and doing very little in between. There are a few notable exceptions to this, but it apples to most of the Regional Reps, and is a major reason why the Regions are so dysfunctional. It is Richard Daniels’ responsibility as Chairman to make people effective; or if he can’t, to change them. On that front, all I have heard from him are fatalistic statements about not upsetting people – even when they deserve to be upset. It is a Chairman’s job to attract, retain and motivate the people on the executive, and volunteers. Their failure is Richard Daniels’ failure. As for his snide comment about the Treasurership – it was he who refused my help in that role for a full year before my election! A year wasted, directly because of him.

The next paragraph is mere mouthing of platitudes, none of which Richard Daniels’s own ‘leadership’ assists at all. I fear that the continued presence of  EC ‘stalwarts’ he refers to are viewed by many outsiders as a reason not to get involved.

Next paragraph, no comment.

In the next paragraph, Richard Daniels refers to an undercurrent of criticism towards him. Yes there has been criticism of him, from many sources. In my case I have criticised him when I think he deserved it, and to his face. I do so here also. He admits… ‘I have not been as dynamic as I could have been’. A masterpiece of understatement! He also says ‘I don’t profess to know the answers, I don’t have a vision, but I do have a passion for Naturism’.  This is rather like saying ‘I don’t have a clue how to run a brewery, but I like drinking beer, so I should be the Chairman of Carlsberg”! Why stand for a job if you don’t think you have the answers or even a vision? This is the basis of the problem, and why he should never have held the job, and why he has shown no vestige of real leadership. Not content with that, he has been repeatedly negative and unhelpful to those who do have both a vision and some of the answers, and who were elected by the members to put them in to action. Not only negative and unhelpful, but strangely coy about his own activities which some feel represent a potential conflict of interest, such as his commercial relationship with Andrew Welch and his reluctance to bring Mick Ayers to impartial justice. This lack of openness has fostered a constant climate of mutual suspicion which has been highly counterproductive to progress. Time and again I have tried rapprochement on these issues with him, only to be met by resentment, pettiness and a sulky lack of communication resulting in a reluctance to conclude issues. As usual he concludes this paragraph with a ‘hope’ for the future, but absolutely no plan to get there.

The final paragraph is another exercise of saying one thing whilst doing another. While praising the Forum as a means of communication, both Richard Daniels and the EC generally, rarely participate on it, nor do they accept the views expressed there as being representative. This would be acceptable if they did something effective to get the views of the membership, but they don’t. The regional system & the members reps., system do not work to represent the members properly. As importantly, the views of non-member naturists are given only lip service. My own initiative to properly survey opinion on the future role of CCBN was put on a back burner as soon as I left the EC, the reasons put forward being, as usual, lame excuses for the real ones - personality based judgments.

I don’t doubt that I shall be further vilified for writing this critique, and I shall be accused of doing so out of spite. I admit that one motive is frustration. Richard Daniels is one of the most frustrating people I have ever tried to work with. I am not surprised that others have given up in the face of it. I hope that for those who are staying on the EC after the AGM, this exercise in seeing themselves as others see them will lead to a self appraisal, and possibly a change of direction. I hope this because I want CCBN to survive and thrive, though time to achieve that is running out faster than some may admit.

It seems that all that I started in my short period in office has been undone within days of my leaving. I did not leave in protest – I was staying in protest, to try to do something about it. Unfortunate happenings in my family mean that I felt I had to go before I could see through much of what I had hoped to achieve. The EC had approved all that I had started, but that same EC is now overturning it all, showing that its commitment to change and reform was never real. Getting the small changes started was like walking in glue when faced with some of the plain stupidity I had to face from parts of the EC. It seems that stupidity has won, simply by staying there.

The position of Chairman in CCBN is, in my view invested with too much power. In the hands of inadequate or dishonest people this can be disastrous. I believe it is one of the  main reasons why CCBN is in trouble now. The legacy of Mick Ayers lives on in CCBN’s financial weakness, over-large overheads, poor organisation, falling numbers, and the general contempt in which the EC is held by so many members. His appointment of Andrew Welch turned out to be an ill conceived experiment which badly failed to produce the promised results, but which was perpetuated too long simply because it gave a few individuals an easy life. Though Richard Daniels started the overdue process of cutting costs, this was done in an uncoordinated fashion, and bore no relation to any overall recovery plan - because there never was a plan. He did little to address the other underlying issues facing CCBN. The next Chairman is therefore faced with a huge task, probably greater than even he realises. He has less resources and less time than before. He desperately needs able people, new blood, to assist, but he is faced with a membership which seems to be dominated by either indifference or animosity. These will not be overcome by the tactics of the past or the tribal thinking of a small club. Time alone will not provide the answers. It needs a plan and that plan needs to be communicated to the EC and to the whole membership. I wish the next Chairman good luck, because he will need that too. He has rejected my pleas, made privately months ago, to start that process straight away. He has ignored my warnings about the instability of the EC. However, it is not too late to start.

If, as a result of speaking my mind, I am classed as ‘the enemy’ again, I shall be saddened but not surprised. The club mentality I have witnessed in the EC is one of the main bars to CCBN ever becoming a proper National Representative Body. Progress can only happen if the personality based decision-making is replaced with objective logic, and the small clique at the centre open themselves up to the wealth of talent within the wider membership which is available, but needs proper leadership to be used.

Best wishes for the future of naturism.
Duncan Heenan.

Another group of people calling themselves BNChange are going to have a go at rescuing BN, whose membership has dropped again this year. If you are still a BN member, I strongly advise you to read their website and vote for them:

bnchange.wordpress.com

BN has still not appointed a treasurer (vacant since Daniels became Chairman), even though one of the BNChange candidates (Duncan Heenan) is a well-qualified and experienced accountant and has offered to do the job. He is standing for Treasurer.

I have heard through the grapevine that both the unelected current Chairman (Richard Daniels) and the appointed Ressearch and Liaison Officer (Malcolm Boura) have been whinging about the amount of work they have to do and the lack of time to do it. In that case, why not involve other members to help? I made suggestions about how this could be done when I was on the EC.

Malcolm Boura has been co-opted as Research and Liaison Officer of BN. This is very good news. To the best of my knowledge, Malcolm is an honest, active, and dedicated person who will do his best for naturism. Unfortunately, he has to work with the rest of the EC. We should co-operate with him as fully as we can in promoting and protecting naturism.

However, I have cancelled my direct debit to BN, and unless something unlikely happens I shall cease to be a member when the current membership year ends. I think this is sad: I (re)joined in 1992, soon after returning to the UK.

It took some time for it to sink in that (unlike other organisations I belonged to) BN simply took my money and never asked for any involvement. In fact, when I started to make enquiries I found that my local region simply did not recognise my existence, as I was not a club member. I did try to do something about it, and, yes, I failed overall although I did achieve a few things.

My advice to others is this:

By all means, donate money to BN if you wish. But do not expect it necessarily to be used for what you thought it was for.

But do not be a member. Not until the organisation protects you with limited liability. Not until the post of Commercial Manager is properly supervised and assessed, and BN’s interest properly separated from the personal interest of the holder of the post. Not until there is a competent Treasurer in place who will ensure that the member’s money is accounted for without influence from vested interests. You will lose little by not being a member. You could lose more heavily by being a member.

In this article - click the link on the right - I describe a matter that I raised in EC and has not been resolved. The Commercial Manager is proposing to start (or maybe has started) commercial activities at the members’ risk.

For the public record, I have posted here the ‘BN memories’ that originally appeared in uk.rec.naturist. These describe, as factually as I can, my experiences on the Executive Council (EC) of British Naturism (BN) during 2004-6. There are things here that should be of interest to members of BN. See the links on the right.

In particular, nos. 4 and 5 describe the liabilities of members in an unincorporated association, such as BN is, and the financial shenanigans when BN ran out of cash in October 2005, just before the AGM.

Duncan Heenan was there, and he has written an account of the meeting which he has placed in the public domain. You can find it in the links on the right here.

As from 19 August I have resigned as Regional Representative for the North West Region of British Naturism. I was unable to attend the AGM on 22 October, but I understand that the chair refused to allow the reasons for my resignation to be raised or discussed.

In my resignation letter, I wrote: “I have made no secret of my dismay at the lack of financial and other responsibility on the part of BN management and the Executive Council that was elected by members to look after their interests. I am concerned that my membership of the EC has exposed me to financial, legal and ethical risks over which I have no control, and to which a majority of EC turn a blind eye.

“I am also aware of the attempt made at the last AGM [in October 2005] to deceive the members over membership figures and the financial state of the organisation in advance of a vote on membership fees. This deception was exposed by concerned members, yet the anger of EC members was directed at the members concerned, with no attempt by the EC to assess its own actions. I consider the interest of the members must be considered above others, and therefore I am dissociating myself from the EC in advance of the AGM this year.

“I am willing to collaborate, to the fullest extent I can, on specific projects that I believe will benefit naturism and naturists. However, I feel it is necessary to review my future membership of BN.”

I have posted detailed information in the uk.rec.naturist newsgroup, and on the website http://go-bare.org. I’ll also post them here as and when I can, but not in the main blog, as most people find politics boring.

Here are the links I am keeping on the site. Eventually, they will be integrated into the new-style site.

• Travel reports: South Africa (2005) (auch auf Deutsch), Little Crugwallins, Cornwall, England (2003, 2004 and 2006), Domaine de la Sablière, France (2000 and 2002), Iceland (2001, 2002, 2003, 2005), La Jenny, France (1997), The Netherlands (1996, 1997 and 2003-4), Cap d’Agde, France (1995), Morfa Dyffryn, Wales (1994).
• Some information for naturists/nudists visiting the UK.
• Naturist and clothing optional Bed and Breakfast and other accommodation.
• Email me

I decided to close most of my old ‘Clothing Optional pages’. Some of the articles were over a decade old. Instead, I shall take advantage of the newer technology of ‘blogs’ to post articles here as and when I have something to write. If the old pages are still relevant, I’ll update them and post them here.

Blogs had not been invented when I first put the Clothing Optional pages online in 1995! In fact, there were only a few of us around the world who were pioneering web sites about naturism and nudism. Ah, those innocent days…

I have left my trip reports up as they may well be of interest to prospective travellers to those places. See the links for the details.