This evening we had the pleasure of hearing our President Mark Butcher’s most interesting life talk.
He took us through the journey of his life from birth to his present day role as this year’s President of Winchester Rotary.
From a modest childhood; his Dad was a bell boy at Grosvenor House Hotel, certainly not a modest place!, then becoming a very talented plumber. His mother’s family came from Italy between the wars. Unfortunately many were killed during the blitz on London. As a boy, Mark and his brother were surrounded by many family members. He remembers family holidays and many home parties.
Mark tells us he was a quiet, retiring boy who did well at school, finally obtaining a BSc in Computer Science. He did an intern year at IBM Winchester and on completion of his degree, he was accepted by IBM where he worked for almost 38 years.
He met a young lady called Kelsie at IBM because he was asked to take her to lunch on her first day there. That lunch resulted, after some years of persuasion on Mark’s part, on Kelsie becoming his wife and the addition of their two amazing sons, Alex and Geran.
During Mark’s distinguished career at IBM, he fulfilled almost every role: developer, tester, builder, people manager, quality champion, transformation and operations lead, COO, to name a few. His work took him, among other places, to Seattle, Copenhagen, California, Florida.
Mark recalls some of his proudest professional moments which include: the first software product to win the Royal Academy’s MacRobert Award for engineering innovation, becoming a published author, receivIng the IBM Project of the Year Award, becoming the IBM Representative on the OU’s Advisory Board.
Mark recalls that his proudest personal professional experience was the support he gave to a member of his team during his transition period – when Sam became Megan. What true empathy and humanity. It is sad to reflect that in today’s supposedly sexual enlightenment, transgender people still suffer unkindness, violence and ridicule.
We are so fortunate in our relatively small Rotary club to have so many talented, altruistic, humanistic members, many of whom have lead our club as president or who will lead us in the future.
Thank you, Mark, for giving us an insight into your distinguished life.
Diana Brooks
To enjoy Mark’s life story in more detail follow this link:
https://drive.google.com/file/1o1FKU8jXzivxRxCoQmpCamiD-uCnWuJq/view?usp=sharing
