Brenda Wilkinson - Membership Officer
- The Membership Officer receives new applications for membership to the association.
- Issues renewal notices to the membership and deals with the renewal applications.
- The Membership Officer maintains and updates the Membership Database.
- Deals with all Membership matters related to the NAC.
- Produces the NAC Year Book.
- PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY
- Originally Brenda hails from the village of Penketh, near Warrington.
- Brenda’s enjoyment of music was evident from a very early age and every Saturday evening, when the family gathered together, she always announced ‘we’re going to have a concert’ and entertained them all with songs of the day, favourite hymns and the usual children’s rhymes. Although given the opportunity of learning the piano from the age of four - and not taking it up (much to her consternation now, because she is having to pay for her own lessons!) - her interest in music began when, in junior education she became a member of the school choir.
- This continued into senior education and when the county decided to create a choir, her music master gave her and a handful of fellow students the chance and they became members of the Lancashire County Youth Choir. The study of this choir culminated in a performance of Handel’s Acis & Galatea in Chorley Town Hall and Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. She was 15 at the time, Head Girl, and had ideas of further education and hopefully a career somewhere in music, but this came to an abrupt end with the death of her maternal grandmother and then her mother.
- In those days it was deemed respectable for young ladies to go into an office, so this is what she did, joining the Rubery Owen Group, a heavy engineering group of companies. She worked hard, studied and learned the hieorglyphical language of shorthand which she used to advantage by eventually teaching the subject.
- When she was 22, Brenda moved to the Lake District and it was there music re-entered her life after gaining a successful audition with Wyn Morris to join the Royal Choral Society, but plans for a move to London were blighted and somehow the journey ended in Leicester. Here she spent her musical time with the Leicester Philharmonic Society, singing under the batons of Norman Del Mar, John Eliot Gardner, Maurice Handford, Richard Hickocks, Owain Arwel Hughes, John Pritchard and David Willcocks.
- For the last 29 years Brenda has lived in Ashby de la Zouch, working for British Coal both at Bretby and Cannock until the industry closed. Following that she worked for a short while for English Heritage until she retired.
- It was here she joined her present choir, The Boundary Singers, and has been its secretary for 24 years, and she has been secretary for Midland East NAC Group for 15 years. She also belongs to a choir which is keeping up a chapel’s century old tradition of performing Handel’s Messiah each Christmas.
- Her taste in music is wide and varied, but she leans more to orchestral and enjoys the baroque period and, on the other side of the spectrum, thoroughly enjoyed the musical revolution of the sixties - well who wouldn’t, being so close to where it was all happening.
- In her spare time (which is rare) Brenda is passionate about gardening and is currently redesigning her own plot as well as that of a friend. She loves food and wine, history and reading. Some of the highlights of her travelling days were spending her 34th birthday in Siberia, flying over the grand canyon in a helicopter, and walking part of the great wall of China and seeing the terracotta warriors in Xian, but there are so many more.
Other Positions
- Midlands East NAC Group
- Midlands East NAC Group Secretary
- Secretary of the Boundary Singers
Email: membership.officer@nationalassociationofchoirs.org.uk
