Agenda:

1.    Apologies for absence
2.    Minutes of the Annual General Meeting held on 11 June 2022, and matters arising
3.    Report from the Chair of Trustees
4.    To consider the Annual Report and Accounts for 2022 (Dr Iain Taylor)
5.    Charitable Incorporation (Dr Iain Taylor)
6.    To elect Members of the Board of Trustees: Dr John Chandler, Dr Paul Dryburgh, Jane Golding, Dr Daniella Gonzalez, Professor David Killingray, Dr Tim Lomas, Mr Joe Saunders, Dr Jack Southern, Dr Iain Taylor, Dr Adrian Webb, Laura Yeoman
7.    To elect Officers of the Board of Trustees
8.    Membership Report and Subscriptions (Dr Jonathan Mackman & Dr Iain Taylor)
9.    Teacher Fellowship Programme Update (Dr Tim Lomas)
10.    Independent Examiners of the Association’s Accounts
11.    Any Other Business notified by 1 May 2023
 

Members will be supplied with details of online voting, to take place prior to the AGM. 

Risk and choice: a new approach to local history, Sevenoaks 1790-1914

by David Killingray and Iain Taylor.

Historians do have day jobs. Mine was in financial public relations. That meant attending company presentations to City stockbroking analysts. If they went well, one sure-fire question was ‘that all sounds fine, but what are the main risks facing to the business over the next year or so?

I filed that away until I considered writing, with David Killingray, a history of Sevenoaks in the long nineteenth century. We were thoroughly disenchanted with many other such efforts, which so often suffer from an over-narrow focus on a parish or town, while ignoring the important national and regional factors that hugely influenced those localities. We determined to put that right; we also thought that identifying and analysing risk might be a helpful approach.

Our basic argument is that, particularly for the poor, their lives mainly revolved around overcoming the everyday risks impacting their very survival, especially obtaining the four bare necessities of food, clothing, housing and fuel. Those efforts are placed within their contemporary contexts, examining what types of risk mitigation strategy were available to the disadvantaged, including employment opportunities, family support, charity and poor relief, and petty crime such as poaching.

Risk diminished as economic improvements from c.1850 put more money in people’s pockets, including some of the poorest. Choice was not merely expressed in terms of greater incomes and a wider range of consumer goods. For choice or, perhaps better, pluralism made accessible more opportunities and rights: the vote; alternate places in which to worship (or not); knowledge and education; and a wider choice of sporting and leisure activities. How and why people (especially the poor) clamoured for more choice, and how and why they expressed those choices when they had the opportunity to do so, we believe drove the historical process in, broadly, the second half of the nineteenth century in much the same way as risk did the first.

Our contention is that focusing on the risks people had to bear and the choices they could (or could not) make, how they coped with them, what impact that might have had on other social groups (which carried the potential for various political conflicts), and how those risks were eventually removed or reduced, provides a fruitful new way of looking at the history of the Sevenoaks area in this period. And we believe there is no reason why this methodology might not be extended to other places, too.

Sevenoaks 1790-1914: Risk and Choice in West Kent, by Iain Taylor and David Killingray, is published by the University of Hertfordshire Press, priced £14.99 https://www.herts.ac.uk/uhpress/books-content/sevenoaks-1790-1914