It's good to hear that people are talking about helping LUSS get up and running again. I live locally and would be happy to help too. I was a member in the last few years before it's demise, so thought the full story might interest people....
I joined LUSS in autumn 1997 as a postgrad student. I was already a caver, having previously been a member of NUCC, so it was a bit of a done deal. At that time, the club consisted of a mix of undergrads (including newly recruited freshers), postgrads, staff and former students who lived locally and stayed on as part of the club. We had a pleasant year, hiring the uni minibus every weekend and heading off to the nearby Dales for the usual caving/drinking.
September 1998 I had transferred to St Martin's College (now part of Cumbria Uni) to do my teacher training but remained a member of the club. we were preparing for the freshers fair when the student union contacted us to say that we were not allowed to have a stall. Apparently we were registered as a sports club rather than a student society. That was a problem because sports clubs were defined as clubs who competed with other units in tournaments. Hence we were not allowed to be one of those any more. To become a student union society we had to produce a 20 page risk assessment, attend numerous meetings with the student union, have a constitution they approved of and form a committee. We jumped through all of these hoops but the process took so long that we missed the freshers fair and so had no new intake that year. We carried on as normal for a while, albeit with reduced numbers, but the university then brought in new regulations regarding minibus hire. People hiring the minibuses had to be staff/students of Lancaster Uni, be over 21 and have the D2 category on their licence. None of the club members fulfilled these criteria so we were no longer able to hire uni minibuses. But we still carried on...sometimes we hired minibuses from Marshalls in Lancaster, sometimes the older club members used their own cars.
September 1999 we had a freshers fair stall and did brilliantly recruiting new members and really thought the club was recovering. However, a week later the students union contacted us to say that we had not submitted a piece of paperwork correctly and therefore LUSS was no longer a university society. This meant that they were going to write to every student member we had, informing them that we were unauthorised and had recruited them under false pretences. I did a huge amount of diplomatic negotiating with the powers that be, through gritted teeth. The best deal I could get was that I was allowed to write a letter to the members, vetted and approved by the uni, explaining that our lack of registration was due to an oversight and we were actively working to remedy this and rejoin the student union. As a result, we lost about half our remaining members.
September 2000 we were ready for a big comeback. We had all our paperwork in place, had it in writing that we were members of the student union and had our freshers fair stall set up. By now our membership was third years and a few older former students, so we struggled to man the stall. I was on maternity leave, so I stuck my month old daughter in a bouncy chair on the table, wearing a miniature club t shirt and offered a free baby cuddle to everyone who signed up. It worked a treat and we recruited a fair number of freshers. We really thought we'd got the club back on track. A few weeks later, we were again contacted by the university. This time it was to tell us that it was unacceptable for student clubs to have non-student members. Despite numerous appeals, I and several other people who had invested a huge amount of time and effort into the club were unceremoniously ejected by the university.
I believe that that wasn't the end of the club and that it carried on for a while, no thanks to the university, but eventually met its end.
