The Formation of Nomads Archives
 

During the course of the 56th National Management Meeting held at the Beach Hotel in Durban in August 1983 under the Chairmanship of Mick Sugden, the subject of starting a Nomads Archives arose once again.
The issue was becoming somewhat of a perennial topic and to that date no-one had yet managed to resolve it. Great idea - agreed by all - but questions such as where to house it, who would accept the challenge of collecting and collating the various items available, were raised; after all there had been several previous attempts all of which had ended in failure.

Seated in the body of the hall was one very young, very inexperienced Vice-Captain, Les Floyd, who just happened to mention to his Captain that he would "like to give it a go". And so it was, one tea break later that he had been appointed as Nomads Archivist - unopposed, of course.

Settling in to the work he decided that the best way he could think of to amass the vast quantities of material he envisaged would come his way to swamp him would be to approach all those persons who had held significant positions throughout the almost quarter of a century that Nomads had been in existence and ask for their assistance. So he wrote to the then current hierarchy, all the Past Captains, Past National Chairmen, National Coordinators, original Founder Members of Transvaal and any others that occurred to him, to get material and hopefully ideas for the furtherance of the project.
The resultant reaction was somewhat less than encouraging, being a mixture of "have not got/kept anything of interest" through to "have lots of material but I am not prepared to part with it".
Nevertheless, notwithstanding some highly discouraging responses which confirmed the reasons why the project had not been anything like successful previously, it was decided to persevere with the material which was on hand.
This resulted in the first exhibition of the Nomads Archives at the Transvaal 25th Anniversary held at Rand Park. This was presented along with the enormously interesting audio visual presentation of the first 25 years of Nomads existence produced by the then National PRO, Bob Thornley.

The exhibition was presented for a second time at the 1986 National Tournament held at Wanderers.
Both exhibitions being at a local venue presented no great logistical problems but how does one get to  show it to the many Nomads at our Clubs situated throughout S Africa?
Suggestions were made to have it placed in a trailer which could be moved from Tournament to Tournament and Club to Club but this was turned down on the basis of cost and logistics involved.

Eventually, following negotiations undertaken by the then national Junior Vice-Chairman, Alec Saunders, it was decided that the exhibition would be permanently housed in the Nomads Walk at the newly built Germiston Country Club and provision was made with the Club that anyone wishing to visit the Walk would be accorded temporary Membership of the Club for that day.
This situation is not entirely satisfactory as it is a) stays in one place, b) is not exactly central to the travel paths of most Nomads and c) is not flexible enough to display the huge amount of material made available over the years.
The material comprises thousands of photographs and documents; several video tapes of various functions; trophies; badges and sundry items which could be of substantial interest to "older" Nomads who were around at the time.

The contents remain there at Germiston to this day.