Page 177 - WHO'S WHO OF DUDLEY ROTARY

584 Andrew (‘Andy’) Lawrence MONK (1959- ) (inducted 3.12.2018; still a member at 2022) Media
& Entertainment. He is Owner and Managing Director of Nightair
Productions Limited which operates as Nightair Discos, a nationally
recognised DJ event organisation providing music and entertainment for
weddings, parties, proms and student balls, conferences and hotel events,
and offering a hire service for mood lighting, dance floors, and public
address systems. In addition the company provides look-alike celebrities.
Andy himself is Britain’s leading impersonator of TV personality Simon
Cowell and won best lookalike at the National Tribute Music Awards in
2018 and 2019. Andy was also one of the Chippendoubles, semi-finalists
in the 2010 TV show 'Britain's Got Talent'. As a performer he is a member of ‘Equity’.
He was brought up in Nottingham where he attended the High School, and then Mansfield
Art College where he obtained a Diploma in Art Studies. His father was a member of Sutton-in-
Ashfield Rotary Club and as a teenager Andy went on overseas exchange visits to Germany and
Italy organised by the club. In 1982, by then living near Mansfield, he started Nightair
Productions and the Nightair Disco Show, working with a three-girl dance troupe ‘Bodywork’.
He soon branched out into video recording services, company promotions, product launches,
fashion shows, and the sale and hire of sound and lighting equipment. The business significantly
expanded over the following 30 years. On marrying Rose Cook, club member #585, in 2013, he
moved to Dudley. With his wife, Andy is co-founder of The Duncan Edwards Sporting
Foundation, which helps talented young people in sport with their kit, training and travel, and is
involved in other community-based charitable activities.

585 Rosemary (‘Rose’) MONK/ MONK-COOK, BEM (1969- ) (inducted
3.12.2018; left June 2020.) Historian & Journalist. She is a busy cruise
ship lecturer and after-dinner speaker, and a member of the
Professional Speakers Association. She won the 2019 award for Best
Guest Speaker by the Writers and Speakers Guild, and has over 90 well
researched lectures covering a wide range of subjects including Vera
Lynn, nurse Edith Cavell, George Cadbury, Wallis Simpson, elephant man
John Merrick, Freddie Mercury, her personal 120 mile walk along the
Great Wall of China, and local heroes Wimbledon champion Dorothy
Round, peace campaigner Bert Bissell, and footballer Billy Wright.
Rose is proud to be Dudley born and bred. She was founder, in 2017, of the Duncan Edwards
Foundation in memory of Dudley’s famous son Duncan Edwards, a Manchester United ‘Busby
Babe’ and one of the greatest footballers ever to play for England, who was fatally injured in the
Munich air crash of 1958. The Foundation aims to provide grants and bursaries to young people
in the Black Country who have a great sporting ability but due to financial hardship and
circumstance cannot afford their training, kit or travelling expenses. She had previously been
the award-winning producer of a 55 minute documentary - ‘...and then came Munich’ - telling
the tragic life of the 21 year old footballing giant, and wrote a stage play ‘Keeping the Dream
Alive’ on a similar theme. As a look-alike of pop singer Debbie Harry she was the lead member
of a Blondie tribute act from the 1980s. She and her future husband Andy Monk (member #584)
worked together as extras for BBC series Doctors. Rose was awarded the British Empire Medal
in the 2022 New Year’s Honours list for Services to the Community in Dudley.