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30 years
Great music, great beer, great times
RAJF: 30 years old this year
Who would have believed it?
What started out as small scale jazz festival with a few barrels of real ale has tuned into one of the biggest music events in Chichester.
And we’re still here, 30 years later.
A while ago we gave a presentation to the Friends of Priory Park to tell them about the Festival, our history and why we do what we do. Here are excerpts from that presentation
History of RAJF
The festival was started 30 years ago by a bunch of volunteers from Chichester Priory Park Cricket and Hockey Club and it is still run in the same way – by volunteers, albeit highly experienced and knowledgable volunteers, all of whom are local and have been in Chichester for a very long time.
A bunch of amateurs
RAJF is effectively a sub committee of Chichester Priory Park Cricket and Hockey Club. There are about 10 or 12 of us at any one time serving on the committee.
We all work full time and therefore squeeze our festival responsibilities into our spare time. Most of us have served on the committee for around ten years or so. Some have served for the full 30 years – that’s more than you get for a life sentence these days. We therefore have a combined experience of around 200 years of putting on the festival.
We are backed up by a superb team of over 100 helpers who do everything from greeting you at the entrance, serving your beer, doing the washing up and cleaning up the park after the festival. Most but not all of these volunteers are connected to the cricket and hockey club. In all, putting on the festival takes thousands of man hours of work. It goes without saying that none of us are paid.
A friendly atmosphere
It’s worth drawing attention to the fact that we are all volunteers in part because this is one of the keys to the festival having such a gentle and friendly atmosphere. The helpers are there because they want to help and this rubs off on the event as a whole. We all get a great sense of satisfaction from putting on the event and the committee members push each other very hard to maintain and improve the high quality of the festival. We know that thousands of people look forward to the event each year and we want to put on a good show.
Being good neighbours
We take our responsibilities very seriously and spend a huge amount of time trying to minimise the impact of the festival on residents, business and visitors to the city.
For example, we have often been offered terrific bands who would be very popular and a great commercial success, but have turned them down because we are worried about the possibility of a younger, more drunken and slightly rougher audience attending the festival.
Most of our audience are between the ages of 25-60 and as a consequence we seldom have rowdy behaviour of the sort that you see most weekends in the city centre at pub closing time. We work hard to keep it that way.
We spend a large amount of time with council officials looking at environmental and health and safety issues.
Who benefits from RAJF
So who benefits from the festival?
There are four main beneficiaries of the festival
- the cricket and hockey club
- the sporting life of the city generally
- local charities
- the cultural life of the city
The cricket and hockey club
The cricket and hockey club have been in Priory Park for a very long time. The cricket section has been playing in the park since 1851.
The hockey section is a youngster by comparison. It came along 100 or so years ago in 1901. Until the early 90s we used to play hockey in the park at the weekends and, of course, we still have our clubhouse in the park which is well used every week of the year. Our cricket, of course, is still a major feature of park life.
In the seventies and eighties the game of hockey changed and it became clear that for Chichester to remain one of the south’s leading clubs we needed an astroturf pitch – the trouble was that astroturf pitches were and remain hideously expensive. We found out that public bodies like schools and college would, in certain circumstances, be eligible for public funding for an astroturf pitch via the lottery, but that the public funding needed to be matched by community funding.
We set out to raise that community funding and a beer festival next to our clubhouse was our idea of how to do this.
It worked well.
Community sports facilities
Over the years we have provided the community funding element for the 3 new astroturf pitches at the High School, Chichester Technical College and University College. Most recently we have funded the replacement of the High School pitch which, after years of use, like any other carpet, wore out.
In return for this the hockey club gets the opportunity to rent these pitches at certain times during the week, mainly on Saturdays. The majority of the week these fantastic facilities are used by other parts of the community – schoolchildren, college and university students, other sports clubs and the general public.
These facilities simply would not exist without the hundreds of thousands of pounds of community funding raised by us – the real and jazz festival. It’s taken us a very long time to raise that money, but the benefit to the city is a long term one.
The cricket and hockey club is a thriving one. We have over 300 members and currently run 15 teams on a Saturday afternoon. All these teams compete in the relevant regional or county leagues, most with some success. Even my veterans team have won a few games this year.
Coaching youngsters
One of the reasons for this strength is the amount of money real ale and jazz has invested in coaching, particularly the coaching of youngsters. Everyone knows that sport is schools is not supported in the way it once was and that kids who want to pursue a sport need to do so through sports clubs.
We recognised this and set up a comprehensive mini-hockey programme together with boys and girls teams and a proper coaching structure at every age group through to adult hockey. Hundreds of children have benefited from this over the years. And our club’s teams are full of home grown talent.
We also have a long standing coaching programme in place in the cricket section of the club and many children have enjoyed this. Monies raised by the festival have contributed many tens of thousands of pounds to these programmes.
Local charities
A third major beneficiary of the festival is local charities. We have given many thousands of pounds to local charities and community bodies over the years. We tend to favour local charities whose work benefits young people, although not exclusively so.
The city of Chichester
Lastly the cultural life of the city benefits enormously from the festival
It is one of the major cultural events in the city and is becoming one of the things for which people have heard of Chichester, along with the Cathedral, the Theatre, Pallant House and so on.
We know from our ticket sales records that the festival brings a significant number of people into the city from outside the immediate area which benefits hoteliers and other parts of the local economy.
The Festival is an important part of the Festivities programme. It complements the more high brow attractions that the Festivities organisers prefer and provides an event in the city centre where the audience is a little younger than most Festivities events.
Financially independent
It is worth noting that we have never asked for or received a penny in subsidy or sponsorship from the Festivities.
And we are pleased that the Festivities box office earns commission on the RAJF tickets it sells for us to help it meet the some of the costs of putting on the overall festivities programme.
We have been able to bring some memorable artistes to Chichester in recent years such as James Brown, Blondie, Simple Minds, Human League, the Pretenders and many others.
When most of use were kids growing up in Chichester there was nothing of the sort to see here, so now we’re all thirty or more years older, its great to be able to see world famous acts here in our own park.
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