A group of young teenagers asked if they could do gymnastics during the summer holidays - Olga Korbut had been seen worldwide at the Olympic Games that year and many girls saw her as a role model in this sport. Mats and a vaulting box were borrowed from the school and so it began, “gymnastics” in the sunshine on the school playing fields.

This was developed and soon the girls were using the school equipment and the gymnasium in the evenings and Roland and Muriel Holton had to develop their coaching skills going as far afield as North Devon for their first ever course, and the girls were then beginning to look for competition within the County. They asked if they could have a name and chose “The Swallows of Helston” and decided they would like the Club Colours to be Purple and White.

Soon more equipment was essential i.e. bars, beam, mats, safety mats and the parents came forward and began helping with the fund raising. Other parents became coaches and everyone was a volunteer so all the money was ploughed back into the equipment. A small club for the very young was started in the Youth Club by Barbara Wearne - she had a group of helpers and the “Fledglings” were a great success.

We were lucky to get the first 12 metre square mat through a loan from the Sports Council but eventually we needed a sprung floor for competitions and through fund raising and sponsorship we achieved this in 1990.

In 1991 with the onset of LMS the cost of hiring school facilities was introduced. It was felt that the Club needed to find facilities where the equipment could be set out permanently and Roland took on a three year Lease of the current building. Rent and running costs required an expansion of the programme and the popular Mum's and Tot's groups were started and Recreational Gymnastics took off with a vengeance. The Club still continued with the Competitive aspect and included in this programme were the Boys section.

To help in the development one helper wrote to Littlewoods Charity and asked for assistance resulting in a feasibility study being done of expenditure and expansion over a three year period. This resulted in the Club receiving a Grant of £30,000 from the Foundation for the Sports and the Arts. This enabled the alterations to the factory with voluntary manpower and expertise where required being carried out.

The club moved into the Gunsmiths with approximately 100 gymnasts and the numbers soon increased until the present day. A strong band of Volunteer Coaches and dedicated Parents on the Fund Raising side have been instrumental in making The Swallows of Helston the great club it is today.

Part 2 History of Swallows  - by Chris Trevan
Chris Trevan became the Club’s Chairman shortly after it moved full time to the Gunsmiths premises at Water-ma-Trout, Helston.

My association started with the gym in the days when the Club was based at the school back in 1989. I can recall the frustrations of having to set up and dismantle the exercise floor in the School Hall and the valuable time that wasted every Saturday morning. When the newly acquired floor (which couldn’t be set out in its entirety) started to get damaged and Roland Holton reported to parents the situation with the revised school charging policies of £9,000pa, something drastic had to be done.

To prevent further damage to the floor it had been stored at the Gunsmiths on Helston’s Industrial Estate in an unused part of the building that still had all its former Lee Cooper Jeans sewing installations draped from the ceiling. The owner, Chris Price, had kindly agreed to give the floor house space and when Roland and Muriel went to check up on it Chris happened to ask them if they’d ever seen it fully laid out and been able to use it in its entirety. The answer was no, so a date was arranged for a few budding gymnasts to go and try it out.

One look at the kids on the floor and Chris Price said ‘this is it’. The club never looked back.

I remember my son’s first public display at a parents’ event in the Gunsmiths. He was mentored by Barbara Wearne, who had been with the Holtons from almost the very start of the club. There was no heating or artificial lighting; the non-performing gymnasts lay on concrete at the edge of the sprung floor in sleeping bags avoiding the numerous puddles from holes in the roof and the various redundant army vehicles and scattered ammunition boxes. It was basic but fun.

But by the July 1992 AGM a lease on 8,000 square feet had been taken. This had been made into a self contained unit, most of the dangling pipe work and other bits and pieces having been cleared out by an enthusiastic band of volunteers. At this AGM Roland reported that the club had “reached a stage requiring a more professional approach with detailed plans and strategies for gymnastic development and business/financial management”.

The brave leap into the unknown was producing results. In 1991 membership was about 93. Within 9 months of going to the Gunsmiths the registered number stood at 95 girls and 33 boys with an additional 30 pre-school munchkins and 49 tots who came with a mum or dad.

Immediately following that 1992 AGM there was a meeting in the Youth Club to constitute a formal management committee and I found myself emerging as its elected Chairman.

We began making plans. By the following year we had made so much progress with the Club that the Sports Council came to give us advice in June on formulating a project for the National Lottery that was due to be born in August 1994.

Roland and Muriel bowed out of the Committee at the 1993 AGM but the club made sure the apron strings were not fully untied, by making them the club’s first Honorary Life Members and they continued to represent the Club’s and Cornwall’s interests through their Regional and National service to gymnastics.

Meantime, Carole Weller who had been organising the fundraising with Gail Ashley and others persuaded her husband Kevin to join the boy’s coaching team and the significance of this will be seen later. It was apparent, even then, that the Regional Coach Training Programme was not keeping up with the demands of the club’s expansion so the club started running its own accredited programme having employed its own head coach. There were now some 20 plus volunteer coaches involved in the Club but most needed to get basic British Gymnastic (BG) certification. One-to-one coaching was also given to any child with a special need.

BG membership rapidly rose during the year from 147 to 280 plus 45 tots with parents. After the great flood of the building in 1993 enormous efforts were made to put things straight and the Swallows became the only venue in Cornwall with fixed competition standard equipment. It was now the best gymnastics venue west of Exeter (some 100 miles distant).

An application was made for charitable registered status as an unincorporated association with the aim of applying to the widest possible range of public funding sources because the Club’s activities and expenditure were now ahead of its income by some £6,000 pa. Not daunted by this potential deficit, the Club started a programme of providing national curriculum training for 6 local primary schools, with Barbara Wearne taking the lead. The links with Curnow Special School were re-established in January 1994 and they came regularly to train and take part in open days. By July 1994 the Swallows was officially registered as a charity.

There were loads of star gymnasts but one deserves a special mention from this time. Craig Pellowe had joined the Club and in February 1995 he competed in the London Open (his first National Open Age Group competition).

On the 5th April, 1995 I, as chairman and Alan Needham, who was the Treasurer went to a Ministerial reception at Lancaster House to receive a Sportsmatch Award of £6,250. We were sponsored by Gymnova to the tune of £6,000. This money bought a complete pre-school and primary school set of equipment. The following month the Club hosted its first Men’s SW Inter-county floor and vault competition.

By July there were 12 visiting primary schools and Barbara became a staff member assisted by Donna Thomas – a former competitive gymnast, and Rachel Pearce. The Committee also decided to encourage the older gymnasts to act as assistant coaches so that, as soon as they were 16, they could begin to take their BG Qualifications. Many of them did so (and still do) and have put hours and hours back into helping those following behind them.

An activity review was undertaken in September 1995 which showed that about 55,000 hours of gymnast training was being undertaken each year by 470 registered gymnasts, the visiting schools and the pre-school groups. In the November the 500th gymnast was enrolled. This was the year St. Erme Autistic Community also started to make its 50 mile round trip for regular weekly sessions.

The girls began competing regionally, e.g. for the Brenda Smith Cup. Three of them excelled in the SW Age Group Championships. Craig Pellowe had won the Regional National Development Programme sets and went forward to the National final, subsequently moving to the Lilleshall National Training Centre to join the British Squad.

During this time various plans for a new, £600,000 regional centre of excellence, based on the Swallows, were being prepared. Planning permission was granted, with the support of the local Councillors, but the site was sold, from under the Club, to a local business for supposed expansion which, ten years later, has not materialised.

Kevin Weller, now a Class 3 Coach and well on the way to gaining his Class 2 National ticket became Coaching Director and the Club appointed an Administrator.

By September 1996 monthly income was exceeding expenditure without any desperate need for additional fundraising but then the landlord Chris Price asked the Club if it could start thinking about moving on. There were now 609 gymnasts on the roll including some 30 ‘adults’. It must be said here that without the support, interest and patience of Chris Price the club’s history would have probably ended before it really started.

During the summer holidays the Club maintained its tradition of gym swaps with a club in Lannion in Northern Brittany. The Club also started to host some of the elite Regional Development Squad weekends putting it very firmly on the SW map.

1997 saw a growing number of displays by the Club’s competitive gymnasts at local fetes and events including providing the interval entertainment for two years in front of all the celebrities attending the Field Gun Trials at RNAS Culdrose. It takes a great deal of discipline, nerve and confidence in one’s own and others’ mental and physical abilities to hurl oneself into space at full tilt over a high vault in a synchronised display requiring split second timing in front of 4 or 500 people.

Perhaps the biggest event of all in 1997, however, was the display put on for invited guests, dignitaries and parents for the Swallow’s 21st Anniversary. Among the Guests of Honour were Muriel and Roland Holton. Two of the coaches who were still involved that day, Barbara Wearne and Clive Thomas, had started helping at the beginning and were given a thunderous round of applause – twice – because the day had to be run as two sessions now the membership was too large to accommodate it all at once.

In 1998, with the agreement of the Helston School Governors and the LEA, an application was made to the Sports Lottery for a new regional centre on the upper school site. The annual membership involved about 20% of the under 17’s in Helston with 12 rural primary schools, bereft of their own exercise facilities, bringing in about 800 children as well, on specially tailored programmes from as far away as Madron, on the other side of Penzance.

The breakdown excluding schools was as follows:

The number of gymnast visits and the training hours put in are shown in the following table, also for February 1998: