James4Nationwide

Elect James Sherwin-Smith to represent Nationwide building society members

Board

Rebels with a cause: standing on the shoulders of giants

Pictured: Shelia Heywood presenting a cheque on behalf of Nationwide to Buxton Mountain Rescue in 1989

As I canvass for nominations to support my own candidacy to stand for election as a Director of the Nationwide building society – I am naturally drawn to research those that have attempted this before.

Finding information on the who, when and why has proven an interesting research project.  The online mutual society register maintained by the FCA has some big gaps in its records – I have requested that more are digitised.  The society doesn’t maintain a large online archive of AGM results and minutes, annual reports etc. Few online news archives go back before the year 2000 (before the internet went mainstream).

Since 1980, I have only identified three candidates who were successfully elected to the board after receiving the requisite member nominations:

  • Paul Twyman – elected to the board of the Anglia building society after several attempts and considerable activism. He served on the Anglia board from 1982, joining the Nationwide board at the merger in 1987 and continued serving until 2002.
  • Sheila Heywood – elected after several attempts, who served on the Nationwide board 1988 until at least 1993. She was one of the first female directors of the society.
  • David English – a former Nationwide manager who was made redundant the year before and I believe was elected at the first attempt. He served on the Nationwide board 1993 to 2002.

Note that all three served at the same time for a period from 1993 until Shelia Heywood stepped down.

I have also identified several candidates that secured sufficient nominations to be entered on the ballot at AGMs but did not receive sufficient votes to elected.
[NB the following list may not be complete for the period 1992-1997 as I do not have a complete list of AGM voting results – entries for 1992 and 1993 were gleaned from newspaper reports filed at the time.]

  • Vivian Singh (1992-93)
  • Ben Jacobs (1992-93)
  • Michael Hardern (1998)
  • Andrew Muir (1998, 2001-02)
  • Alan Debenham (1999-2005)
  • Tim Tanner (2002-03)

I’m now searching to fill a gap in my research that picks up from where Michael Cassell’s book “100 years of Nationwide” leaves off and recent records (mostly online) begin.

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