Homepage for this website (which, as explained there, is unofficial).

The original Conveyance and Trust

When Charlie Wood and the other trustees bought the first part of the campsite, they signed a deed of conveyance with the previous owner. (There's more about this on the history page.) The deed itself isn't very interesting, but, for completeness, here are scans of it.

Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and the covers.

Shortly afterwards, the trustees executed a trust deed. Some people find trust deeds a little dry, but I think that they make interesting reading. By looking at how they have been drafted, we can learn more about how our predecessors in Scouting made sure that the right people would have control of key assets. I'll type out a few of the articles for easier reading, but first here are the scans.

Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and the covers.

Article 3

"If and when the said Local Association shall be amalgamated with or incorporated with a larger body of Boy scouts then for the purposes of these presents the unit (if any) of such larger body which shall in the opinion of the Trustees represent the said Local Association or if there should be no such unit then the whole of such larger body shall be deemed to be the said Local Association"

Trust deed, article 3 (on page 2)

This article shows an awareness of the way in which local bodies of national organizations tend to merge and subdivide. It gives the trustees a way to work out who their beneficiary is - a way that doesn't require them to deal with the minutiae of how the merging and subdividing took place. Instead, they just have to decide which unit at the end of the re-organization represents the original Local Association (by which, as is explained in the preamble on page 1, is meant Cambridge and District Local Association); only if there's no unit left that represents the original Local Association do they need to do anything else.

More Original Documents

There are several conveyance documents and the like in this document and this one.

The appointment of the Scout Association Trust Corporation

In 1997 the trustees transferred their trusteeship to the Scout Association Trust Corporation, whose job is to own the title to land as a holding trustee on behalf of individual units within the Scout Association. Here are the scans.

Pages 1, 2, 3, and 4.

It's interesting that this deed of appointment refers to the New Trustees as being appointed trustees of the conveyances, and not to any new trust having been created at the winding up of Fred Feary's estate. This indicates that the original trust deed (above) was still held to be in force at that time, and that it's under its terms that the trusteeship was transferred to the Trust Corporation. In other words, the same document was still holding good 65 years after it was written, surviving the deaths of all of the Original Trustees and various changes in the day-to-day management of the campsite.