Watford Rotary Club is getting ready to celebrate its 90th anniversary at a grand dinner with local dignitaries.

The Watford Rotary Club marked its 90th anniversary with a small celebration at their meeting on Wednesday, February 19 and a grand celebration dinner with invited guests is being planned for April 30.

The club was sponsored by the Rotary Club of Reading and was chartered on February 19, 1924. It is the oldest club in the local area.

Peter Clark, who has been working with the Watford Rotary Club for more than three years, said: "We’re really looking forward to the dinner in April. We’re inviting the mayor and the MP and the president of Rotary Clubs nationwide. So it’s going to be a fairly prestigious event. We’ll hopefully have a hundred or so people from the club and other clubs in the local area."

The Watford Rotary Club is one of more than 34,000 clubs worldwide that form the international Rotary movement. The club meets weekly over a meal at the Watford Town & Country Club.

It is open to men and women who wish to put something back into the community or support national and international causes. It is also a chance to enjoy meeting socially, have some fun, and make new friends and contacts.

The club has been involved in a number of projects in the community. They raise funds for local charities such as the Peace Hospice and the New Hope Trust, and have volunteers providing transport to take blind people to the Watford Blind Centre twice a month.

Mr Clark said: "We’re the oldest rotary club in the area and we were sponsored by the reading club. It’s great that it’s been going for 90 years and that it’s still going strong and doing lots of things for people in the community. I’ve spent about 15 years in rotary as a whole but I’ve been at the Watford Rotary Club for about three years now. I’ve found it to be a lovely, friendly club and there’s a real community feel."

"It was founded as a men-only club but it has attracted many women in recent years. We’re also becoming more ethnically diverse in the club. It’s very welcoming. We do the centre floats at Christmas which all the local kids love, and we take kids out in the summer to Whipsnade zoo and things like that."

He added: "Everyone is feeling very excited. We’re quite proud of the fact that we’ve been going for so long and we’re still going strong."