About us

A small charity, fifty-eight years old, run out of an office in Stoke-Sub-Hamdon and a café on Level 2.

We are The League of Friends of the Yeovil Hospitals — a registered charity (number 220038) that has stood at the bedside of Yeovil District Hospital, quietly, since 18 September 1968. This page sets down our history, names our trustees, and explains plainly how we are governed and where last year’s money went.

A late-afternoon view of the Friends’ Café on Level 2 of Yeovil District Hospital — empty tables, the chairs neatly stacked, a Friends-branded apron folded on the counter.
The Friends’ Café, Level 2 · February 2026.
Founding

From two almoners and a tea-trolley in 1968.

The League of Friends of the Yeovil Hospitals was formally registered with the Charity Commission on 18 September 1968. Its founding committee was small — two hospital almoners (the social workers of their day), a retired district nurse, a Yeovil grocer and his wife, the vicar of Stoke-Sub-Hamdon, and a Montacute solicitor who agreed to do the paperwork for nothing. They met for the first time in a side-room of the old Yeovil Public Dispensary on Hendford and agreed two things: that the new charity would buy equipment the NHS could not afford that year, and that it would take a tea-trolley round the wards on a Sunday afternoon. Both decisions still hold.

The hospital they served, then, was the old Yeovil District Hospital on Higher Kingston — a Victorian building with a maternity wing added in the war years and a cardiac annexe added in 1962. In 1991 the trust moved to a new build on the present site, and the Friends moved with it, paying for the original shop fittings on the new concourse and contributing £14,000 toward the children’s play equipment in the new outpatients waiting area. We have been on this site ever since.

The model has hardly changed in fifty-eight years. We run a shop and a café inside the hospital. The surplus from those two enterprises, plus donations and legacies from across South Somerset, funds an annual list of medical equipment agreed each summer with the medical director and the ward sisters. Comforts — radios, slippers, toiletries, magazines — are funded from the trolley round’s small float. Larger pieces of capital equipment — monitors, scanners, beds — are funded by the Equipment Appeal, which has run continuously since 2010 under that name and informally for forty years before that.

Milestones

A timeline of nine quiet decisions.

  1. 1968

    Charity registered, 18 September.

    A committee of seven meets at the old Yeovil Dispensary and signs the founding deed. The first object is recorded in the language still used today: ‘To purchase medical equipment and provide benefits to patients in Yeovil Hospital.’

  2. 1971

    The Sunday trolley begins.

    A tea-trolley funded by a £40 grant from the Yeovil Rotary Club is wheeled around the Higher Kingston wards every Sunday afternoon by two volunteers in cream-and-gold aprons. The aprons are still in service.

  3. 1985

    The first concourse shop opens.

    A small newsagency-and-toiletries shop opens in the old hospital’s east corridor. It takes £6,400 in its first year, all of which is returned to the wards as a single cheque to the medical director.

  4. 1991

    The hospital moves; the Friends move with it.

    Yeovil District Hospital opens on the new Higher Kingston site. The Friends contribute £24,000 toward the new concourse fittings and pay for the original children’s outpatients waiting equipment.

  5. 2003

    The Friends’ Café opens on Level 2.

    After two years of fundraising and one quiet trustee meeting in the chair’s kitchen, the café opens with three paid staff and twelve volunteers. It has not closed for a single non-pandemic day since.

  6. 2010

    The Equipment Appeal is formally named.

    The annual fund — until then quietly listed in the accounts as ‘ward purchases’ — is given a name and a thermometer. Its first formal target, a portable bladder scanner, is met in eleven weeks.

  7. 2017

    The trading subsidiary is established.

    On the advice of our auditors, the shop and café are placed in a wholly-owned trading subsidiary that gifts its surplus to the charity. The trustees serve as the subsidiary’s directors without remuneration.

  8. 2020

    Doors closed; equipment doubled.

    The café and the trolley round close for ten months during the pandemic. The shop reopens after eight weeks under a strict rota. We pivot to direct equipment funding and buy more in the spring of 2020 than in any prior year — £241,000, against the trust’s urgent list.

  9. 2024

    Refurbished café and a second portable ultrasound.

    The Friends’ Café reopens with a new roof and a redrawn floor. We announce the appeal for a second portable ultrasound on the Surgical Assessment Unit — closed in March 2026 at £92,140 raised.

Trustees

Ten unpaid trustees, four officers, one auditor.

Our trustees are named on the Charity Commission register. None receives remuneration, expenses for trustee duties, or benefits in kind. They meet on the first Tuesday of each month in the Yeovil District Hospital boardroom.

Roger Walkington, in his seventies, photographed against the side wall of the Friends’ Café — open-collar shirt, hands clasped, late-afternoon light.

Roger Walkington

Chair of Trustees [email protected]

A retired general practitioner from the Yeovil Park Surgery, Roger has chaired the trustees since 2021. He sits on the Equipment Appeal sub-committee and writes the chair’s letter each spring.

Margaret Anne Davis-Brown, in her sixties, photographed at the trustees’ oak table in the hospital boardroom, half-glasses pushed up, a ledger open in front of her.

Margaret Anne Davis-Brown

Honorary Treasurer [email protected]

A chartered accountant who retired from Old Mill in Yeovil in 2018, Margaret has been the Friends’ treasurer since 2019. She produces the management accounts each quarter and writes the treasurer’s note for our annual report.

Jacqueline Henderson, in her late fifties, photographed in the concourse shop with a stack of folded volunteer aprons beside her, smiling slightly.

Jacqueline Henderson

Honorary Secretary [email protected]

Jacqueline keeps the trustees’ minutes, runs the AGM, and is the first person the volunteering rota goes to for sign-off. A former English teacher at Stanchester Academy in Stoke-Sub-Hamdon.

Annette Parker, in her sixties, in a cream Friends’ tabard photographed in the trolley store-room with a thermos under her arm.

Annette Parker

Volunteer Coordinator & Trustee [email protected]

Annette has been a Friends volunteer since 2008 and joined the trustees in 2017. She runs the volunteer induction every January and writes the rota for the trolley round and the till.

The other six trustees of the Friends, also on the public register, are listed below. We are grateful, every month, for their patience and their unpaid hours.

Governance

How we are run, in five paragraphs.

Constitution. The Friends are constituted as an unincorporated charitable association under a 1968 deed and re-stated rules adopted at the 1997 AGM. Members elect the trustees at the September meeting each year for terms of three years; up to one third stands for re-election in any year. Our governing document is on file with the Charity Commission and available on request from the Honorary Secretary.

Trustee meetings. The trustees meet at 18.30 on the first Tuesday of each month in the boardroom of Yeovil District Hospital. The chair, treasurer, secretary and volunteer coordinator form a small officers’ group that meets a week before the full board. Sub-committees of the Equipment Appeal and the Friends’ Café meet quarterly. Minutes are filed in the Honorary Secretary’s office and available to members.

Trading. Our shop and Friends’ Café are operated through a wholly-owned trading subsidiary established in 2017. The subsidiary is staffed by eight paid employees and a rota of volunteers; the trustees also serve as its directors without remuneration. The subsidiary’s entire surplus is gifted to the charity by deed at year end.

Audit. Our independent examiner is appointed at the AGM. The annual accounts are filed with the Charity Commission within the statutory window each year. The trustees publish a plain-English summary alongside the formal accounts on the Annual Reports page.

Policies. The Friends maintain the policies expected of a charity of our size and turnover: safeguarding, bullying and harassment, complaints, financial reserves, internal financial controls, internal risk management, investing charity funds, trustee conflicts of interest, trustee expenses, and serious incident reporting. Each is reviewed at least every two years by the trustees and the dates are recorded in the minutes.

Latest audited accounts · Year ending 30 September 2024

The headline numbers, set down plainly.

Income

£740,938

Of which £609,170 came from trading (the shop and the Friends’ Café), £79,360 from donations and legacies, £51,620 from investments, and £795 from other sources.

Charitable expenditure

£473,690

Spent on equipment, comforts and ward purchases at Yeovil District Hospital during the year.

Cost of raising funds

£438,590

The running cost of the shop and café — the staff, the stock, the heating, the audit and the trust’s service charge.

People

8 · 33 · 10

Eight paid employees in the shop and café, 33 volunteers across the trolley, the till and the kitchen, and 10 unpaid trustees.

Full audited accounts are published each spring at the Annual Reports page and filed in their entirety with the Charity Commission.

Get involved

We are a small charity. Your hour, your fiver, your annual standing order — they all matter.

Pick whichever fits you best. Every route leads to the same Surgical Assessment Unit on the third floor.

Donate Volunteer