After exotic holidays in the former colonies forced him to miss the previous 2 lunches, the ebullient Gordon Wilson returned to chair the February Lunch and to introduce his fellow Glasgow Accie, Hugh Barrow, as guest speaker. Hugh was a relatively late, and most welcome, replacement for Glasgow Warriors forwards coach, Shade Munro. Clearly the word got out about Hugh’s speaking pedigree as 113 GROGs turned up to hear him - believed to be a record for a February Lunch. The first laugh of the day was when Gordon tried to convince the gathering that he and former schoolmate Hugh (a previous world record holder for the mile in his age group) had been athletically similar. Only the visually impaired might not have noticed how unlikely that was! Hugh’s 30 minute delivery was fascinating and was done without a single reference to notes. He took his rapt audience on a 150 year journey covering the history of Scottish rugby football and how it had evolved in its development from the round ball game with the early influence of such clubs as:- West of Scotland F.C., Glasgow Academicals F.C. and Queens Park F.C. Whilst underlining the contributions made by a number of private schools in establishing rugby, not too surprisingly for an “Ecky”, Hugh mentioned the Glasgow Academical Club at every available opportunity (and there were many!). He exploded the myth that rugby had been invented by William Webb-Ellis and praised the debt owed to the established cricket clubs which allowed the “new” sport teams to use their grounds. Hugh’s facts and figures were too many for this humble report but it was nice to hear the patriotic comment in the Letters page of a newspaper after the first ever Scotland-v-England international (which Scotland won) - “Flodden avenged”! He ended by emphasising the importance of the history of rugby and exhorted 'those who drink the water should remember those who dug the well’. Hugh was rewarded for his talk, and this thoughtful piece of philosophy, with prolonged applause, a GROGs tie and, of course, a bottle of the extremely scarce GROGs whisky.