Category Archives: General News

It is with great pleasure that I write to let you know of the result of the nominations made for Honorary Membership of the BCA in 2010. We have three new Honorary Life Members:

Bill Clegg, University of Newcastle
David Taylor, Consultant
Venki Ramakrishnan, MRC-LMB, Cambridge.

Congratulations to all three of them!

If you are a member of the BCA you should be
receiving the IUCr Newsletter every quarter. If you are not, you can
update your details at http://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/request. The
IUCr does not use the list for any other purpose, nor do they sell the
information. The Editors of the IUCr Newsletter want to reduce the number of copies
that are not reaching subscribers because of outdated or otherwise
incorrect postal addresses.

Also, please consider updating your existing entry or creating a new one
in the World Directory of Crystallographers at http://www.iucr.org/people/wdc

First of all, apologies if you have seen this request by another route, but it is important that we contact anyone who might have information.

Lachlan Cranswick, who is well known to many members of the BCA, has been missing since he left work at Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, at 4:30pm on Monday 18 January 2010. If you have had any contact with Lachlan since then, or have any information about his whereabouts, please let the police know. The contact regarding the search is

E-mail:  cskea@police.deepriver.ca
Phone:  +1 613 584 3500 ext 0
Fax:  +1 613 584 1736.

Alternatively, you could contact Ian Swainson (email: Ian.Swainson@nrc.gc.ca).

Dear Member

As I hope you are aware, over the last year or so the BCA has been  in
the process of changing banks to the Charities Aid Foundation Bank  (CAF
Bank). This process is now complete, and the BCA no longer has any bank
accounts with HSBC plc.

The BCA has taken the opportunity to revise the methods by which
Membership fees can be paid; with immediate effect, standing order
payments will no longer be accepted, but direct debits can be set up
instead and payments can also be made by cheque or credit card.

Any existing standing orders to the BCA should not be debited from
the Member’s account. While it is the individual Member’s responsibility
to confirm this with their own bank, your bank should advise you that your
standing order has been cancelled because the BCA’s bank account has been
closed. As has been pointed out by a  number of Members with whom I have
discussed this, control of payments made  by standing order lies  wholly with
the payer; BCA has no way of  amending payments received by this method -
we cannot even cancel them.

There are three principal consequences from the removal of the  standing
order facility;

(1)  Members who have inadvertently set up multiple payments will no
longer pay more than once a year for their Membership.

(2) The BCA will be able to identify more easily which Members have
paid their dues – several standing orders are only identified by a
somewhat cryptic message, so we have no idea who is making the payment!
It is possible that a good proportion of these unidentified transactions
are being made from people who are not Members any more.

(3) A substantial proportion (~45% last time I checked) of Members
paying by standing order in previous years paid the wrong amount;  most
of these were underpayments because Members had not updated their
standing orders in line with changes in BCA Membership fees.

I hope that the changes that have been implemented will address these
points.

Finally, I’d like to wish all our Members a Happy Christmas and
Prosperous New Year.

Harry
–
Dr Harry Powell, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC Centre,  Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH