The History Club, founded in 1997, has a membership of around 70, and in normal times we have monthly speaker meetings in the parish church. The photo below shows the church in the 1880s and is one of the many interesting photos you can see on the newly updated website.

This photo is part of the Club’s large archive of catalogued material, which as well as photos, includes books, journals, documents, maps and audiovisual recordings. In addition, the Club is fortunate in having an extensive collection of transcriptions into understandable English of the wills of various Radley people who lived between the mid 16th century and the second half of the 19th century. Radley History Club has an extensive library of oral history recordings. The huge task of backing up all of these to MP3 files has recently been completed. Our challenge now is to establish a permanent arrangement for safe, accessible storage and back-up of the whole archive. 

In order to find common themes from the oral history recordings, a small group is summarising information from interviews in the ‘Radley Remembered’ series, about memories of Radley in the 1930s and 1940s. All the information gathered will be merged onto a master spreadsheet which can then be used to create presentations for Club meetings.

To mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day on 8/9 May 2020, we have a new feature on the RHC website on World War Two memories. The first accounts were published on the Club website in April 2020 https://www.radleyhistoryclub.org.uk/ww2-memories-first-accounts-available/

Each month there are new posts about Radley experiences in the Second World War - both of individual Radley residents and of life on the home front in the village. For example,  Bill Small who was a private in the 4th Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (a Territorial unit). He was captured by the Germans in northern France in May 1940 and spent the rest of the war as a POW.

If you're a local history organisation and would like to share news, please email webmanager@balh.org.uk.