We spring cleaned for the Queen – and won £25,000!
The inspiring stories of the local heroes who joined the Mail’s Jubilee litter crusade – and won fabulous cash prizes that will transform their communities
TINA Sweester is bobbing up and down in her seat like a tiny, 5ft 5in pixie and talking ten to the dozen. ‘ It’s just incredible . . .’ begins the 49-year-old gardener and driving force behind the Hardingstone Residents Group. ‘I mean . . . it’s brilliant!
‘I never…Goodness, well, gosh . . . I just don’t know what to do with myself! I’m not usually like this, I promise.’
‘Oh listen to her — she’s all excited,’ chimes in Jane Larkins, Tina’s neighbour and fellow group member.
No wonder. After all, Tina and the rest of Hardingstone Residents Group have just found out that they are the winners of the Daily Mail’s Spring Clean For The Queen competition. So you can forgive them a bit of excitement. Launched in May, the competition was the Mail’s campaign to get Britain looking beautiful ahead of the Diamond Jubilee and Olympic Games. We asked you to go out into your communities, clear as much rubbish as you could find, and tell us all about it.
Some of Britain’s biggest companies — including Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Debenhams — also got involved, organising mass clean- ups with thousands of employees taking part.
Entries for the £10,000 first prize in the campaign poured in from schools, community groups and parish councils.
‘I can’t believe that we are the ones who won,’ says Tina. ‘We all knew how hard we worked — but to have someone else recognise it. It’s just . . . wow!’
Hastily assembled in the immaculate sitting room of Colin and Margaret Newman, who have lived in the village for more than three decades, the rest of the 25-strong group — from Colin and Margaret’s ten-month-old granddaughter Amy to 72-year- old Toni Barker — look just as shell-shocked.
Over a celebratory feast of fruit loaf, tea, squash and Margaret’s homemade carrot cake, they describe how they went to war on the litter blighting their pretty Northamptonshire village, population 2015, home to two pubs, one school, and one of the country’s last three remaining Eleanor crosses, erected by Edward I in the 13th century to honour his wife, Eleanor of Castile.
‘As soon as I read about the competition in the Daily Mail, I knew we had to do something to get involved,’ says Tina. ‘I’ve always hated litter. Litter and middle-lane drivers. I’m half-Italian, you see, very feisty.
‘We’d formed the residents group last year and a spring clean sounded like the perfect project.’
SO TINA tore out the article, and took it along to the group’s fortnightly meeting at the Hardy Drive Community Centre ‘Everyone loved it. We went home and called up everyone we knew to ask for help,’ she says.
The local council armed them with plastic bags and litter pickers (‘we even had mini ones for the children!’). Colin and Margaret dug out a stash of high-vis vests from their entertainment and marquee-hire business.
‘Honestly, you should have seen us — we looked like a swarm of yellow litter bees, or sherbet dips, or goodness know what in those things,’ says Tina.
And on Sunday, May 20, they tidied the village as it had never been tidied before. They spent eight hours sweeping, weeding and litter-picking. They sang songs (‘Happy Days Are Here Again,’ ‘Heigh-Ho’ and — with a touch of foresight — ‘ We Are the Champions’), made new friends (‘The number of people who were coming up to us to say well done — it was wonderful’ ) and unearthed a few surprises along the way.
‘We went down to the bike track where the teenagers hang out, and there were plastic bags full of rubbish hanging from trees,’ says Colin’s son Ross, the group’s treasurer.
‘So they tidy it all up, bag it . . . but don’t take it home with them. It’s the strangest thing.’
‘And there was whole crate of unopened beer cans buried in a bush!’ laughs Tina.
By the end of the day, they had collected more than 100 bags of rubbish. ‘We had so much we had to use the children’s prams as transport,’ says Ross. ‘The kids were arguing over who had the most litter — we even had to introduce a “first dibs” rule by the end. If you saw a piece of rubbish first, you could pick it up.’ Tina adds: ‘ We could tell we had done well. We’ve had so many messages of thanks. But to win the whole competition — it’s incredible!’
All that’s left now is to put their prize money to good use.
‘ We have it all planned out,’ says Jo Hughes, the group’s chairman. ‘ We want to do something that will touch everyone in the village — the young and the old. Some of the money is to go to Hardingstone Primary School to help build a new zebra crossing. Lots of us have children or grandchildren there.
‘The rest is going towards repainting the railings on our war memorial. It is such an important part of the village, everyone comes out on Remembrance Day each year — the Boy Scouts, the WI, everyone. The railings haven’t been painted for about 40 years. We’ve told some of the veterans in the village and they are absolutely thrilled.’
And Hardingstone isn’t the only community in Britain to be celebrating this week. For as well as the top prize of £10,000, the Mail has awarded two prizes of £5,000 to our runners-up, Girvan Primary School in South Ayrshire and Rolleston- on- Dove Parish Council in Staffordshire.
At Girvan, pupils in the Primary 4 class read about the Spring Clean For The Queen when they were asked to bring in newspaper cuttings for a school project. They made their own ‘Spring Clean’ posters, cleared the playground of rubbish, put up bunting, and threw a Jubilee party.
‘It was really fun,’ says eight-year-old pupil Jorgi Kelly. ‘ And it all paid off because now our playground is nice and tidy.’
The class’s teacher, Myra Shennan, adds: ‘They are such an enthusiastic bunch. As soon as they heard about Spring Clean For The Queen they were so excited. I’ve asked them what they want to do with the money and they all agreed that we need new picnic benches in the playground.’
And in Rolleston, two clean-ups saw volunteers from the parish council, pupils (and parents) of John Rolleston Primary School, and the local MP
Andrew Griffiths clear the village of litter, tend to flower beds, repaint the school’s rusty front railings, and clear litter-choked weirs in Alder Brook, which runs through the village.
‘I get the Daily Mail every day and when I saw the Spring Clean For The Queen campaign I thought, “what a brilliant idea”, says parish councillor Heidi Light, who organised the clean-up by putting up notices in the village, sending out Facebook messages and ‘badgering everyone I spoke to’.
‘The brook didn’t look nice at all,’ she adds. ‘The water wasn’t flowing, and all sorts of rubbish had been caught up by the weirs. Now it looks beautiful — you can hear running water as you walk past. We even had a mini “river pageant” with model boats on it over the Jubilee weekend.’
The Parish Council plans to use its Spring Clean prize money to plant a Jubilee Orchard on a patch of wasteland on the edge of the village.
Heidi says: ‘ We are going to plant plums, apples and pears for residents to pick. Thanks to the Mail, we can begin planting in two weeks.’
Five other spring cleaning groups are also celebrating after receiving prizes of £1,000.
At Dorchester Primary School, pupils who volunteered to clear up the school playing field were rewarded with a certificate in assembly after educational assistant Patti Bowers cut out an article about the competition and brought it into school.
Ten-year- old Tyler Clark signed up for the litter pick straight away. ‘Rubbish is a really big problem, and it was really fun to clear it up,’ he says. ‘It was great to know that we had worked hard and done something good. We are going to do it every term.’
The prize will go towards ‘Bash the Trash’ music lessons for the older children, using instruments made out of recycled rubbish, and a teddy bears’ picnic for younger classes.
In Sudbury, where Sudbury Canoe Club members took to the River Stour in their vessels on a rainy Sunday to clear the water of cans, bottles and plastic bags, the £1,000 will go towards training more instructors to supervise the children’s lessons. ‘We’re thrilled,’ says Oliver Williams, says the club’s chairman. ‘And we’ve got a nice clean river, too — we went out on it and it was great
JAN MOIR IS AWAY
not to have all the bottles.’ Meanwhile, Clough fields housing estate in Barnsley will get more rubbish bins and fresh paving after retired occupational health worker Kilmeny Payling, who has lived there for more than 33 years, organised a community clean-up with the help of the local council, residents and pupils of Springwood School.
The historic village of Tweedsmuir, in the Scottish Borders, will receive a boost to the residents’ campaign to turn disused Crook Inn, one of the oldest inns in Scotland, into a ‘community hub’ hosting music sessions, meetings and special events.
And in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, the Little Lambs PreSchool Centre can buy more classroom equipment after their jubilee-themed litter pick saw 57 children and 63 adults fill more than 40 bags with rubbish — while sporting Union Flag bowler hats and yellow vests.
‘ It means so much,’ says the school’s manager, Sandra Bloomer. ‘We don’t have much of a budget, so there is always an endless list of things we are short of.’
BACK in Hardingstone, Tina, Ross, Jo, Colin and Margaret are basking in the glow of congratulations. John Read, director the The Clean Up Britain campaign, has offered his praise, describing the residents group as ‘truly worthy winners’.
‘It shows what can be done when people get together and decide to confront the depressing and debilitating blight of litter. Well done to them!’ he says.
Not that the praise is making them rest on their laurels. As Tina says: ‘ We’ve still got plenty to do. From now on, we will be litter picking regularly. It has been brilliant. We had fun and made the village look great.
‘But best of all we can use the prize money to give everyone a boost. So from all of us, it’s a massive, massive thank you to the Daily Mail.’