Queen's Platinum Jubilee Fund guidance notes

Berwickshire

Community Celebration - Eyemouth Primary School

Eyemouth Primary School held a whole community event, a celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, for 70 years of service with an afternoon tea for the town, mirroring celebrations of the past for events such as VE day and The Golden Jubilee. This involved both a celebration day and a long-term growing plan to support learning and the community.

The day included showcasing work from different classes, games and performances and a free afternoon tea. All food was planned, prepared and made by our pupils with support from our kitchen colleagues. We worked with local partners and groups including; Splash, NHS, Whole Systems Approach, Rotary Club, Eyemouth Parish Church, Friends of Eyemouth Primary School, Eyemouth Early Years Centre, Adult Learning Group and Eyemouth Larder. The school sourced a polytunnel to implement a whole school growing program. This program includes classes having the opportunity to grow their own products, harvest them and then cook with them. Planting will start again in spring 2023 and we hope it allows us to support the community by giving products to the larder and support families that visit the Early Years Centre. It will enhance the learning opportunities for our pupils long-term and teach invaluable life skills which will support the pupils’ lives. Pupils will learn how to grow and cook food cheaper, sustainably and with less impact on our environment.

Over 750 people from both our community and neighbouring communities turned up on the day with picnic blankets and chairs etc. The sun was shining and the community enjoyed an afternoon tea, slices of Victoria Sponge in honour of the Queen from the bake-off competition, music provided by the classes, throwbacks learned from ‘Through The Decades’ topics, highland dancing, a visit from the Gala Queen and even a magician. It was hailed a roaring success, feedback was extremely positive from all of the visitors and this was sent to the Head Teacher via emails, through the school’s Facebook Page and from local councillor Carol Hamilton who came along to see what we had planned.  The main theme of the comments was how positive it was for the community to have an opportunity to get together and for the school to establish itself as the heart of the community once again after a difficult time during COVID-19 restrictions.

Cheviot

Commemorative Light – St. Boswells Village Hall

On Thursday, 2 June 2022, an ornamental light in commemoration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee was unveiled by the Duke of Buccleuch, the Lord Lieutenant (and hence the Queen’s representative) for Roxburgh, Ettrick and Lauderdale. Duke Richard remarked that the erection of a light was a highly appropriate way to mark this occasion, since Queen Elizabeth II has been "simply a true light in our lives” during her long reign. Interviewed by ITV Border outside the hall, he said it was “really special to come to see something that is going to be permanent. It’s about leaving something that will remind future generations of this extraordinary monarch.

In his own speech, the Village Hall Committee’s Chair, Douglas Oliver, congratulated local craftsman, Mike Fox, for his superb work in making the light and expressed his gratitude to architect, Mark Douglas, for helping to devise its specification and location, and warmly thanked Scottish Borders Council for the grant from the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Fund which defrayed the costs of the enterprise. Alastair Minnis handled most of the administration, and Allan Drummond contributed most of the photographs which feature on the Village Hall’s website, in addition to serving as main chef for the reception which followed the ceremony. Now, thanks to support of Scottish Borders Council, we have a light over the 2014 door which echoes the two which were erected in 1902 to commemorate King Edward VII’s Coronation, and showed people the way in and out of the doors at the Main Street side of the building. Henceforth, the light which commemorates Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee will facilitate access from Jenny Moore’s Road. The occasion was enjoyed by around 70 people, including Rachael Hamilton MSP and Councillor Sandy Scott, who attended the unveiling and afterwards enjoyed the buffet.

Eildon

Greenspace Regeneration – Selkirk Community Council

The site of what is now the Jubilee Garden was a prominent but sadly neglected piece of land at the junction of Tower Street (the A7 southern entrance to the town centre) and Back Row. The site had previously been planted with roses but had been allowed to grow wild, none of the planting was worth keeping and the soil was of terribly poor quality.

Our first action was to have 10 tonnes of topsoil delivered. This was dumped on the pavement and required the labour of 6 volunteers to shift it on to the garden which is a good half metre above pavement level, really hard graft. During the following week the soil was graded and rotavated and we were then ready to start planting. The plants were supplied by R & B nursery in Rosslyn and transported to Selkirk in a hire van, another day's work. The planting was carried out on 7th March and 10 days later we were ready to lay the turf down the centre of the site.

This activity was followed by an unseasonal drought which is where the goodwill and cooperation of the households around the site came to the fore as they allowed us to use their water to irrigate the planting and the newly laid turf which would have struggled to survive without this support. We are obliged to them also for supplying the electricity for lawn mowers and power tools as required.

The enthusiasm of the community for the project has been gratifying and when we've been working on the site we're almost overwhelmed by the compliments we have received from members of the public and local residents. The transformation has been remarkable and a great many people have commented on it!

Teviot and Liddesdale

Jubilee Celebrations at Burnfoot Hub – Burnfoot Community Futures

Saturday, 4 June 2022 saw us celebrating both the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and the first Denholm ride out in three years. We received funding from Scottish Borders Council Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Fund to enable us to facilitate this event and were able to welcome over 250 people along to celebrate with us.

The event began at 5pm and we had a large queue of excited people waiting for it to begin. It culminated with a visit from the Cornet and his party on their way home from the Denholm ride out at 7.30pm. It was a lovely, sunny evening which meant we could have all the activities outside. We also had tables and chairs in the car park to enable people to sit down, have a chat and enjoy their free picnic tea. It led to a great atmosphere with plenty of chatter from the adults and the children as they played.

Everyone enjoyed the entertainment on offer with both kids and adults loving the silent disco. The bouncy castles were busy and the face painters, tattoo artists and balloon modeller were constantly in demand. Children enjoyed making and decorating their own crown and had fun taking photos of each other in our photo booth. The crazy golf and garden games were also popular during the event.

We distributed 255 free Jubilee packs to those who attended which included a free picnic, activity sheets and some bubbles and jubilee bouncy balls for the kids.

Upon arrival, the Cornet and his party received a ‘nip’ courtesy of Burnfoot Community Council and Burnfoot Community Futures issued gifts to the Cornet and his Lass, Acting Mother and Father and Right and Left Hand Lasses. This year the gift was personalised by one of our volunteers who created a beautiful hand drawing on the home by Burnfoot Words.

We are once again, grateful to all our Events Team members and their helpers who organised and put together this event. 17 people gave 101.5 hours of volunteering to enable this to take place.

Thank you to all our staff and volunteers who made this event the success it was, thank you to the people of our community who came along and supported it and a huge thank you to the SBC Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Fund for their support and funding.

Tweeddale

Community Meal and Orchard – Greener Peebles

Our project was to celebrate the Jubilee by hosting a community meal in our garden, and plant a community orchard for local education on growing fruit. Our community meal was attended by over 70 people! It was a successful event with people of different generations coming along to celebrate together. Our event featured partnership working between Greener Peebles who hosted, Tweeddale Youth Action who provided the catering with Outside the Box, Tweedgreen and Greener Melrose coming along to speak about sustainability. We exceeded the third sector partnership work we aimed for and helped to strengthen local connections by opening a conversation about local climate action and food.

This project also enabled us to plant a community orchard. We planted six new fruit trees (2 x apple, 2 x pear, 2 x plum) each with a professionally printed information board mounted on wooded boards featuring fun facts about the fruit varieties which will benefit local people for years to come. The trees were planted in March with the help of Interest Link volunteers (we work with a group of 18 volunteers from Interest Link, monthly), Kingsland Primary (we hosted three school visits in March 2022, totalling 90 pupils and 15 teacher/parent helpers) and also the volunteers of the garden. These groups also helped us to plant a hedgerow of hawthorn for biodiversity and peas. We invited three local Beavers groups who all took part in a session to plant veg in the garden. It is brilliant to have relationships with the school and youth groups and now we have made this connection we will continue to invite the young people to return to visit the community garden twice a year, for spring planting and for autumn harvesting, so they can collect the fruit and eat and cook it! We envision the school group visits to reach a minimum of 150 pupils per year, plus 15-20 adults.

We currently run one annual skill share on fruit which allows us to care for our raspberry bushes. With the new fruit trees, we can increase this to two fruit skill shares per year, with the additional one to focus on the fruit trees. These skill shares are popular and we expect 8-12 people per year to attend each fruit skill share. New people each year learn how to look after the trees and we encourage volunteers who took part in the skill share previously to take on a leadership role and deliver the skill share themselves, using the knowledge they have learned which helps to build their confidence.