The first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the UK was held in room 202 of the Dorchester Hotel at 8pm on Monday 31st March, 1947 and five people attended. Early progress was slow, it was a year before a group outside London started in Manchester in 1948.
AA arrived in Scotland in 1948 and in Wales in 1951. It took two years for UK membership to reach 100, but subsequent growth has been exponential. Today, there are almost 4,000 groups listed in the UK directory and membership totals around 35,000.
Wherever you may be, you'll find an AA meeting - from Penzance to Paisley, Norwich to Newport, Aberystwyth to Aberdeen. At these meetings ex-sufferers from alcoholism come together to share their experience, strength and hope, passing on to others the same joyful message of recovery that was first heard years earlier in the USA.
Every meeting testifies to an everyday miracle. The people who attend share frankly, describing lives once wrecked by alcohol. Yet these same people are now able to take their places as functioning, useful members of society thanks to membership of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Wherever you are in the UK help is only a phone call away. There is a national AA telephone helpline which can be called by anybody wanting help with their drinking dependence.
The great fact is that AA works. AA works through one alcoholic talking honestly to another, those who've recovered pass on the message to those who are still suffering.
AA members have one thing in common: Alcohol was costing them more than money. Their lives and relationships had been taken over by a dependence on alcohol.
AA is a Fellowship for people who don't normally join anything. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking - there are no rules, no religion, no fees, no initiation rites, no hierarchy, no compulsion, no dogma, no distinctions of class or status. It's not who you are but what you are; not what sets you apart from, but what joins you together with others. New members are welcomed because of their problems, not despite them.
That small group meeting at the Dorchester Hotel sixty years ago set in motion a national movement that was, and remains, entirely self-supporting.
Not taking the first drink is the key to continued sobriety and a useful happy life.
"AA is here to help"
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Good Resources