Local History Day, and the AGM, due to be held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, on 6 June 2020, also had to be cancelled.  We do hope to be able to restore the planned programme at a later date, and details will be posted on the website as soon as possible.  For those members who are constitutionally minded, the AGM must be held within 15 months of the previous general meeting.  We await advice from the Charity Commission, but that does give us until September 2020 to regularise matters.  If necessary, it should be possible to conduct an AGM electronically, circulating in advance the necessary papers and arranging a quorate number of members at their screens. 

The vital role of the State has been demonstrated in the measures introduced to deal with a medical and economic challenge to our wellbeing.  The first thing is to wish readers a safe journey through the next few fraught months.  Certainly, this crisis offers challenges to us personally and collectively?  It would be silly to evoke any idea of a national spirit; that runs counter to the idea of individual responsibility, and human diversity and agency.  Rather, it may be a time when we learn to rely more on each other, a process that may help counter the deep political divisions opened by Brexit.  I have been heartened by how my own community has organised and responded to aid vulnerable and weak neighbours.

As an historian of the flu pandemic of 1918-19 (I am currently completing a chapter for an edited book on flu and memory), the present crisis provokes various thoughts.  How will this current crisis be remembered, and why might it be forgotten?  Will it be recalled for its human loss, or that a Conservative government denied its traditional ideology and asserted the power of the State?  What materials will be available for the future historian to use in writing the history of covid-19?  All of which suggests tasks for local historians in isolated confinement: keeping a personal diary, collecting local official and private cautionary materials, the circulars of all kinds dropped through the door, and, in the spirit of ‘Mass Observation’, recording those snatches of conversation and observed behaviour in the streets and shops, everything from words of kindly encouragement to scenes of retail anarchy.  Despite the global pervasiveness of the flu pandemic of 1918-19, that kind of material is relatively scarce from 100 hundred years’ ago.  Local historians now have an opportunity to contribute to the history of the future.

With my good wishes, 

David Killingray, Sevenoaks, Kent