2025 New Year Honours for New Forest and Christchurch residents Alice Tai, Michael Bailey, Carolyn Wheatley, Trevor Harrop, Mark Fane and Heather Freeman

THE great and the good of the New Forest and Christchurch have earned royal recognition in the King’s New Year Honours list.

Double gold medal winning Paralympic swimmer Alice Tai from Barton was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to the sport.

The 25-year-old athlete was recently named the overall women’s champion in the 2024 Citi Para Swimming World Series competition in Brazil, following her double gold success at the 2024 Paris Games.

Fellow New Milton resident Michael Bailey was honoured for his 60 years’ service to the print industry and allied trades.

Mr Bailey, managing director of Col-Tec Solutions in Queensway, was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) – initially thinking the letter informing him about it was a scam.

“It came as a complete surprise,” he told the A&T. “I had a letter to tell me about it, but when I received it I thought ‘the scammers are getting really clever now’ so I put it in the bin.

“The following day I spoke to my son Paul and he said he had nominated me for the award about two years ago.

“I have worked in the print industry for 60 years non-stop, I’ve employed a lot of people and our company has exported three quarters of the machines we’ve built to all four corners of the world, but I would have thought there must be so many people out there doing much more than me to deserve this.”

Mr Bailey began as an apprentice in the print industry in Manchester and worked for 16 years at the city’s former Daily Express site before relocating to the Forest.

As a young man, Mr Bailey said he saw a gap in the print industry so he developed and later patented a collator printing machine for business forms called the Kollector.

“For me the Second World War never ended,” he explained. “The print industry in this country has always been in competition with Germany, so when we developed the collator machine we called it Kollector to sound more continental.”

The Kollector, which prints banking forms with multiple layers, was later replaced with the Kollectorset machine, and later, the Col-tec machine.

“I’m 86 and I still work full time,” Mr Bailey added. “I keep saying I should chuck it all in next year but I haven’t yet. The industry has changed so much in the 60 years I’ve worked in it.”

Despite suffering from a life-limiting condition, Carolyn Wheatley of Christchurch has been made an MBE for her services to patients with intestinal failure.

Carolyn chairs, and helped found, national charity Patients on Intravenous and Naso-gastric Nutrition Treatment (PINNT).

The group supports people who need artificial feeding after they leave hospital and return home.

“This award came 100% out of the blue, and it was completely overwhelming,” Carolyn told the A&T.

She suffers from intestinal failure which means she has to receive nutrition intravenously. She was one of four patients being treated for similar conditions at St Mark’s Hospital in London before they set up the national charity some 37 years ago.

“I was patient number 11 on the program, but now it’s up to about 2,700 users nationally,” she said. “It’s about receiving this complex treatment and still being able to live in the real world.

“I wish I was not getting this award because that would mean no one needs this treatment, but I’m extremely grateful that it’s now available because without it I could be dead.”

She added: “I’m still hooked up to machines for 12 to 14 hours per day but I’ll never forget what a nurse said to me years ago, ‘it’s only limiting if you want it to be’.

“She advised me to plan to be the master of my own treatment, so that’s what I did, although it’s still not easy.”

Conservation volunteer Trevor Harrop was awarded the Medal of the Order of the British Empire (BEM) for his services to angling as the co-founder of the Avon Roach Project, based in Ringwood.

Now aged 66, Mr Harrop set up the fish stock restoration project for the River Avon in 2005 with his “best friend and colleague” Adam ‘Budgie’ Price, who died in 2022.

Mr Harrop told the A&T: “Budgie and I came up with the Avon Roach Project after the Environment Agency produced a report in 2005 saying the fish population was in severe decline.

“We were as naive as we could be, elbows on knees thinking, ‘What can we do about this? Can we grow roach spawn in a bathtub and reintroduce them to the river?’”

The pair began cultivating roach spawn and eventually put their first full grown roach back into the waterway in 2007.

“It’s been one of the most amazing experiences,” Mr Harrop said. “The river is now in the best condition it’s been for a generation, and we’ve established information that’s new to science.

“Our work established that all the roach spawn there on the same date – 25th April – for 13 years out of of the last 15 years that we’ve been monitoring.”

In setting up the restoration project, Mr Harrop said he and Mr Price had to establish the reasons for declining roach stocks, which included a loss of spawning environments and flooding.

“We’ve managed to put a stop to agricultural mechanical weed cutting on the Avon riverside, so we can leave the fry spawn sites alone at three specific points between Salisbury and Christchurch. Some of those sites were down to as few as a dozen roach before the project started.”

On receiving the royal honour, Mr Harrop said: “I was blown away to receive the award, absolutely beside myself.

“I just wish the honour could have also gone to my best friend and colleague Budgie, who sadly passed away in August 2022 aged 61.”

Mr Price had been left tetraplegic after a car accident when he was aged 27, although it did not stop him getting involved in the roach project.

“He was the most amazing character to ever grace this Earth,” Mr Harrop told the A&T. “A true force of nature and he was there for every second of our work.”

Mark Fane, former chair of the Garden Museum in Fordingbridge, was also made an MBE for his services to horticulture.

He previously served as vice chair of the Royal Horticultural Society in 2020 and was on the Garden Museum’s board of trustees for 12 years.

Heather Freeman, the former head of Aspire adoption agency based in Christchurch, was made an OBE for her services to vulnerable children and families.

During National Adoption Week in 2019, Heather said finding families for some of the most vulnerable children in the area was at the “heart” of her work.