Le tour de Boswells hits Yate

Boswells Cafe fundraiser offers free drinks in exchange for cycle miles in spinathon

Free drinks are on offer to all customers who cycle for 15 minutes in an all-day charity 'spinathon' at Boswells café in in Yate shopping centre on Saturday 16 August.

The Yate event is part of a mammoth fundraiser by the Boswells café chain, whose staff and management are fundraising for research into pancreatic cancer, which claimed the life of the family company’s founder and Chairman, Jeremy Burn, in 2012 - just a few weeks after he was diagnosed with the disease.

In addition to the spinathon competition between the branches, Boswells directors (and Jeremy’s sons) Nick, Matthew and Tim Burn - together with half-brother Charlie, brother-in-law Nick and three close friends - will set off on a cycle challenge. The group will cover 400 miles in just four days from 20-23 August, visiting all 15 cafés along the way starting in Newport on 20 August and ending in Gloucester on 23 August - via the South coast - in tribute to their father.

‘Le Tour de Boswells’ will be arriving in the Yate branch on Wednesday 20 August, the first day and the second Boswells branch of their four-day challenge. Keen cyclists are also welcome to join the group on the different legs of the cycle ride.

Each cafe along the route will be holding a spinathon competition and the top five customers who add the most miles overall to the challenge will also receive free coffee for a month. Staff and customers at Boswells in Yate will be hoping to raise as much money as possible on Saturday 16 August but they need your help, so come along and join in. Everyone cycling for 15 minutes will receive a free drink.

Bike experts, the Specialised Concept Store, is sponsoring the overall event. All money raised will be donated to the national charity, the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund, which supports the very best UK research into the disease (www.pcrf.org.uk).

Each year approximately 8,800 people in the UK are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It is an extremely difficult cancer to diagnose and treat because it is unusually aggressive, symptoms are often vague and generally appear at an advanced stage of the disease. Around three per cent of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will survive for five years or more, a figure that has barely improved in forty years.

Boswells director, Matthew Burn, says: “Dad was proud of us; he’d drilled us to take over on his retirement and he was gearing up to stepping down. He was a great mentor with lots of experience and wisdom to share. He was also great fun to be around and we all miss him enormously. Family was really important to him and he should have had much more time to enjoy retirement, to enjoy the grandchildren – he deserved to take things easy after so many years of working so hard for us.”

To donate, please visit Team JB’s Just Giving page www.justgiving.com/LeTourdeBoswellsor simply text the code LTDB99 with your amount to 70070