LUDLOW Cancer Support Group (LCSG) has been awarded the King’s Award for Voluntary Service.

This is the highest award a local voluntary group can receive in the UK and is equivalent to an MBE. 

Recipients are announced annually on 14 November, The King’s birthday, and LCSG is one of only 262 local charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups to receive the prestigious award this year.

LCSG was founded in 2014 to support a friend who had been diagnosed with the disease and to address the lack of such support groups in the area.

Nearly a decade later the group is thriving and continuing to work to provide a sociable and welcoming environment where, through friendship and shared experience, people diagnosed with terminal cancer can find strength to cope with their situation.

Membership also includes people who have come to the group alongside a partner suffering from cancer, who then remain as part of the group after bereavement.

Rosemary Wood, chairman of LCSG, said: “Although several founder-members and former members who gave so much to the group are no longer with us, they are not forgotten.

“Our conversations often run along the lines of ‘Do you remember when Joan or Jack, or Dave, or Dori, or Pauline or Bryan did or said such and such?’  And, yes, we do remember, and we laugh. 

“We know how proud they would have been, if they were still here, to know that Ludlow Cancer Support Group has received the King’s Award for Voluntary Service, the highest award a voluntary group can receive in the United Kingdom and equivalent to an MBE.”