Testimonial: Tony Manstead (1993-1996)

During my presidency, the main development was that the Association continued its remarkable growth. The size of the membership increased by 17 % in those three years, with some of the growth being in countries that had until then not been central to the Association’s membership: Portugal, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. So the Association was reaching beyond its traditional bases of strength in Northern and Western Europe, a trend that has continued since then. The fact that some of the key meetings of the Association were hosted in these countries (e.g., General Meeting in Lisbon in 1990, East-West Meeting in Prague in 1995) undoubtedly helped.

A new initiative was the production of something called the Associaton’s ProFile. This was the brainchild of Bernard Rimé, my predecessor as Secretary of the Association. He had long argued that there should be a single authoritative document that members could turn to in order to find out anything they wanted to know about the Association. Bernard had done a lot of the work to assemble the material for such a document and during my term as President we actually managed to produce the first edition of the ProFile, as it came to be known.