GLASGOW’S Junior Chamber of Commerce had a protracted birth, its first chairman, C.A. Oakley, wrote in the Glasgow Herald on the morning of its annual Colquhoun Dinner (left) at the City Chambers in February 1958.
The ‘senior’ Chamber of Commerce had rejected approaches in 1929 and 1935 to establish a junior body. It was only in 1937, at the Merchants House, that a draft constitution for a Junior Chamber was adopted, by a slender majority of 20 at a meeting of 250.
The new group formed 12 committees and had within a few weeks attracted 245 young men, making it the largest Junior Chamber in Britain. “This position has been held ever since,” Mr Oakley wrote.
“At the outbreak of the war the membership was 400. Now it is over 450 and the Glasgow Junior Chamber of Commerce has become the largest in Europe.”
At that evening’s dinner, over 300 of them, he added, “will listen to their chairman, arrayed in a tobacco lord’s red gown, and others as they eulogise Glasgow’s splendid past and expatiate on her bright prospects.”
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