Buckingham MP gets in the spirit as Padbury charity founder's Wear A Hat Day lunch raises more than £1k for charity

More than £1,000 was raised at a popular Wear a Hat Day fundraiser in Padbury in aid of the charity Brain Tumour Research.

The event was organised by Sue Farrington Smith who set up a charity 14 years ago which helps fund four Centres of Excellence striving to find a cure for brain tumours.

The fundraiser lunch was hosted at Sue’s Padbury Hill Farm on Friday with Buckingham MP Greg Smith posing for a photograph wearing an iconic pink top hat donated by Lock & Co Hatters – the oldest hat shop in the world.

Sue said: “This was the sixth Wear A Hat Day lunch with many of the guests coming every year. Altogether we raised £1,152 on the day bringing the total for this event to £4,641 to date. We had a lot of fun, especially with the addition of games like heads and tails and playing card bingo, which, along with ticket sales, the raffle and auction all contributed to a successful fundraiser.”

Now in its 14th year, Wear A Hat Day has raised more than £2 million for Brain Tumour Research to help fund the fight against the disease. The popular fundraising event takes place on the last Friday of March as the culmination of Brain Tumour Awareness Month.

This year, the charity’s Wear A Hat Day pin badges had a regal theme in recognition of the coronation and the theme for 2023 was looking super for science in order to help make research breakthroughs happen.

Last month the charity announced a £2.5m funding agreement to help find a cure for high-grade gliomas, the deadliest of all childhood cancers, including diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) and brain stem glioma, the type of tumour with which Ali was diagnosed.

Sue, who is chief executive of Brain Tumour Research, and her husband Justin, lost their niece Alison Phelan to a brain tumour three weeks before her eighth birthday. It was after Ali was diagnosed that her family realised the dearth of treatments available to brain tumour patients due to very little research into the disease in the UK.

To make a donation to Wear A Hat Day for Brain Tumour Research visit the charity website here