History
By Heather Lemétayer, founder of the English Speaking Ladies Group of Toulouse, now known as Toulouse Women’s International Group.
I have several times been asked how the ESLG came to be and this year, our 20th Anniversary, seems an appropriate time to answer that question.
When I first came to Toulouse at the end of 1980 I was very unhappy. It was not the first time I had lived out of England and I did not feel I wanted to repeat the experience. However, such were the circumstances that it seemed the right thing to do. So we came. Just like many of you reading this, I left my children (then 19 and 22), my cats, my home, my job, my friends and relations. My husband Jacques was totally immersed in his new job and in any case didn’t really understand my feelings, although he did his best. I felt BEREFT. Indeed, no-one knows how near I came to returning to England.
Then, after a few weeks, we went back to the UK to our daughter’s graduation ceremony and, on the return flight, I met a girl who lived near me in Blagnac. She was very kind to me and I have always been grateful to her. She introduced me to several people and I began to make friends and to attend the Anglican Church which further widened my circle. Life was looking up!!
But I began to feel more and more strongly that there was a need for an organisation to help English-speaking ladies to contact each other and to adjust to life in France. However, I found no real support for the idea from those to whom I mentioned it and I wasn’t brave enough to go it alone. One day I was talking to some members of the Anglican Church who were much more encouraging and one of them, Dick Thornborough, offered to print out invitations for me. So using the church mailing list as a base, I sent out 56 invitations to a meeting at my house on the 19th February, 1985 to discuss the formation of an English-speaking ladies group. 26 ladies came and so the ESLG was formed.
The name chosen at that meeting was simply “The Ladies Group” and initially it was run very informally with no subscription and no official committee but it was always very democratic with no one person taking decisions and always open to anyone interested in joining. We grew quickly and in 1988 we registered as an Association Culturelle under the name of “The English-speaking Ladies Group of Toulouse”. From then on we ran on more formal lines. I headed up the group for the first 3 years and was chairman for a further two.
To start with we held monthly meetings, with demonstrations and talks given by members, e.g., cake decorating, painting on wood, history of Toulouse, the Cathars. Our first guided tour of Toulouse was in May 1985 and proved so popular that it was for many years an annual event, as was the strawberry tea, hosted so elegantly by Margaret Smith from 1987. We also organised many visits – to a chocolate factory, the foie gras market, vineyards, Martres Tolosane potteries, orchid nurseries, “La Dépêche” headquarters, the meteorological office, to name but a few.
Soon we were holding meetings twice a month with a monthly ‘tea ‘n chat’ at which children were welcome, and handicraft, quilting, and painting groups were formed.
Once the group got off the ground I began to think it would be good have a Christmas Fair to raise funds for charity but I could not find anyone willing to run it so finally, after a lot of persuasion, many promises of help and an offer of a venue, I went ahead and in 1987 our first Christmas Fair was held. It was small enough to take place in the basement of the home of Vi Hastings but was very well attended and from then on it became an annual event. After a few years we were overtaken by our own success and the event grew too big for us to cope alone so we opened it up to other English-speaking associations and to a few artisans, all of whom contributed part of their takings to the charities chosen by our members. Subsequently it has been held in Cornebarrieu, Brax, Blagnac and now La Salvetat St. Gilles. It is a lot of work but I would like to think that the pleasure of working together for the benefit of others will continue to result in enjoyable anticipation and a happy occasion for us all.
The ‘Welcome and Help’ section was always very important to me, with particular emphasis on welcoming new members and helping anyone who was sick or had other problems. To maintain contact with the members we issued regular newsletters with a programme of activities until, in 1991, Margaret Smith suggested that we start our own magazine and also produced the first address book.
The first magazine, published in April of that year, was a tiny A5 booklet but the next one was in A4 format, as it is today. A large team participated then, comprising many of our long-standing members, but none of us could have realised that the “Grapevine” would become such an established part of the group or indeed such an asset.
Of course, nothing is perfect and we made many mistakes but now it gives me great pleasure to see how the group has developed and grown over the years. I should like to pay tribute to past and present chairmen, the committee and members who have done so much to make this such a successful organisation. My aim was, and still is, to help other women who come out here, perhaps feeling very alone, to find comfort and companionship with kind, thoughtful people and I feel that the ESLG is fulfilling this role admirably.