Suited & Booted Charity
Suited & Booted is one of the Bowyers' favourite small charities. It gets City workers to donate business attire - suits, shirts, ties, shoes - and uses them to kit out job-seekers to look the part for job interviews. It adds some interview coaching too, and each year sends 1,500 of them out on new career paths with heads held high, and a high rate of success.
To cover its premises and operating costs it depends on charitable donations from City businesses and livery companies (including ours), and also raises money from a series of innovative fund-raising evenings organised by their charismatic principal, Dr Maria Lenn.
The most recent, on 28 November, was a wine-tasting evening at the London Bridge offices of Norton Rose Fulbright, conducted by no less an expert than Dr Gerald Sacks, the Chancellor for London and Southern GB of La Jurade de St Emilion, at which a Bowyers' table of 6 was delighted to be present to support this excellent cause.
Dr Sacks talked us through the tasting of seven St Emilion wines, from two very good 2012 St Emilion Grand Cru, via St Emilion Grand Cru Classé, to a couple of absolutely superb 2007 St Emilion Premier Grand Cru Classé. Despite some initial confusion about whether we were experiencing plumminess or blackcurrantiness, we all felt most privileged to have had such an expert and most enjoyable wine tutorial.
The Bowyers' party comprised (l to r) our Charity Chairman John Ellery, Upper Warden David Laxton, Immediate Past Master Tony Kench and his wife Enid (who took the picture) and Charity Committee member Lt Col Richard Martin and his wife Sue.
Tony Kench
Archived event reports
- A full list of archived event reports is available in the Members' area