Local History News Number 100 Summer 2011

This is the one-hundredth issue of Local History News, clearly an occasion for rejoicing (why no extra Bank Holiday, I wonder?). My own collection of LHN begins with no.6 (November 1984), a while before I joined BALH (my early copies came from Sue, the mother of a friend: Sue had done an OU degree and a local history course, and was a member of BALH for some years). Then from 1989 there are my own copies, the early ones stained brown as a result of an accident a few years later, involving a cup of coffee and a small child who was supposedly being guarded by her absent-minded father. My contributions to LHN began in February 1993: so far there have been 148 ‘endpieces’ (as they are known in the trade). Looking back over them brings back many memories, as they record two decades of the quirky aspects of my life. 

The first few issues of LHN on my shelves are 12-page booklets, with a quaintly homespun quality compared with today’s glossy appearance. There’s much that remains familiar, but 27 years later other aspects seem historic in their own right. How Victorian the phrase ‘Public Record Office’ now sounds. In those days membership of BALH and a subscription to TLH were separate, causing much administrative confusion. To have both cost you £10, so that the present £25 represents a real bargain, especially as you now receive 496 pages of quality TLH and LHN per year, compared with only 352 in the mid-1980s.  

Reading through these early issues, I something was strange. Why did they appear to be so old-fashioned? Suddenly it came to me—not a website or email address to be seen. Of course that’s perfectly obvious, but we are now so accustomed to seeing those key bits of information that their absence is somehow puzzling, unsettling. And that means in turn that there’s no talk of resources, databases, scanning, digital this or digitised that or PowerPoint anything at all (do I hear a murmur of approval for the last?). It’s a world of paper and pencils. Photocopying is progressive, a forward-looking society was commended for its tape-slide sequence, and microfiche was the new medium.

In September 1985 LHN ran an article explaining what the new ‘heritage centres’ were about, and how and why they differed from museums. There were already 38 in the country at that time—I wonder how many there are now (and how many, having been opened in such a spirit of optimism, have been forced to close because of financial problems subsequently)? It’s very easy to forget how times have changed: heritage centres were a novelty and are now a commonplace. It was a time of expansion—there are many reports of new local history courses in adult education, universities and polytechnics (remember them?) were opening centres for local and regional history, and there was palpable sense of opportunity. There are plenty of familiar names and photographs of people (me included) looking scarily young and clad in outlandish garb with luxuriant hairstyles. I enjoyed the photograph (May 1989) showing a former county archivist of Leicestershire, and famously-vocal supporter of Leicester City, sitting in the stocks (she was chairman of BALH at the time, but that was not the reason for this cruel punishment).

 But on a purely practical some things do not change. Even in the mid-1980s, there was frequent talk of spending cuts (the result of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies), the future of some local authority archives services was in doubt; and—perhaps the most permanent aspect of local history in this country—a number of county and local societies were appealing for volunteers to take over administrative and secretarial posts because existing incumbents had been there for many years, wanted to retire, and no replacements were forthcoming. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as we say in Preston. 

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For the second time in the ten years of BALH recognition of personal achievement in local history there had to be a posthumous award made at Local History Day in June.

We were so sad to hear of Patricia Knowlden’s death earlier this year. Everyone at BALH remembers her enthusiasm and energy, as a member of Council and committees. Anyone who enjoyed one of the many guided visits she organised will recall the way she exploited (in the nicest possible way) those opportunities to the benefit of all participants. When she retired from attending our meetings we published some reminiscences of her in LHN 87 where it was said that she ‘succeeded in prising open the most resistant of doors’ and could ‘put on a cheerful face whatever the circumstances – a useful attribute for a local historian’. She was remembered for her knowledge and the respect she received. Since Patricia’s death a long-standing member has written about the visits ‘always to places of great interest and the small numbers of the party ensured we received good attention. She handled these occasions in a quiet way …always taking care we knew where to go, and adding information she had researched’. Patricia had attended meetings, with Kent representatives, of the Local History Standing Conference in London.  In 1982 these came to an end and the British Association for Local History was formed, she was one of our founding members.

Though born in Barnes, Patricia Gedye grew up in Bromley and was destined to reside in the Borough for virtually the rest of her life. About 1936 Geoffrey Knowlden – nine years her senior – became a family friend and they remained in contact up to and through the War, eventually marrying in 1947. Oddly, Geoff had also been bought up in Bromley after being born in south-west London ( Putney ) and it was back in that area ( Balham ) that they set up their first married home - lodging with her grandfather. A couple of years later they decided they could afford a mortgage and – moving back to be nearer their parents – found a property on the Coney Hall estate in West Wickham, then part of the Borough of Beckenham but subsequently subsumed into Bromley. Here they had two sons, Derek – who was tragically killed in a gliding accident in 1997 – and Neil.

Having settled in West Wickham, Patricia thought it time to learn something about the place and enrolled on a WEA local history course taken by Mr R C W Cox, who became her life-long mentor and local history ‘guru’. Another great influence within the WEA was Dr Fred Lansbury who ran a three-year research group in local history – a number of years later – and from whom she learned a great deal about sources and methods. Later still, in 1973, she found, by chance, that someone was setting up a local history society in Bromley.  So she joined and from then on local history took over more and more of her life – she became Chairman of the Society in 1984 and remained on the Committee for the rest of her days.

Patricia Knowlden had a long track record of research into Bromley and Kent local history. She was the author of histories of Bromley and (with her great friend, the late Joyce Walker ) West Wickham, also – from first-hand experience as Bromley’s Youngest Air Raid Warden – on the Second World War in the area. Between 1977 and 2008 she wrote frequently for Bromley Local History, The Local Historian and other periodicals, demonstrating a knowledge of and interest in topics ranging from the English Civil War to the London Chatham and Dover Railway. Her membership of the Kent Archaeological Society extended back over three decades, and she remained active in Kent historical research until very recently. Shortly before she died Patricia finished writing a book on the fields and farms of West Wickham which Bromley Borough Local History Society hopes will be published before the end of the year. Patricia’s ashes have been scattered on those very fields, a most appropriate place.

Patricia also cared passionately about archives, being acutely aware of the way in which good historical practice is reliant on the exploitation of archival resources.  She was a committee member of the London Archive Users Forum for over a decade, helped monitor issues of user concern in SE London, attended the LAUF annual conferences and was involved in other aspects of their wide ranging activities.

Always enthusiastic, energetic and helpful, Patricia Knowlden made a remarkable contribution to local history at national, regional and local level for many years. It is an honour to recognise this with a BALH Award. The subject will be the poorer without her.

With thanks to Neil Knowlden, Dorothy Lockwood, David Mander, John Whyman, Christine Hellicar, Ruth Paley.

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The 14th-15th March 2011 marked the 70th anniversary of the West Riding of Yorkshire’s heaviest bombing raid of the Second World War. We wanted to do something fun that would bring the records alive and show them in a dynamic and vivid way adding contextual information to the Air Raid Precaution Service’s incident log with photographs and Pathé film clips.

 The West Yorkshire Archive Service has been using Twitter since July 2009 as @wyorksarchives and it has very much been seen as a way to connect with new non-traditional audiences. We felt Twitter would work for the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) project for a number of reasons – entries could be kept short, easy to use and interpret, we could add photographic and audio-visual material to add context and interest

This included links to other websites such as Pathé, Getty images, Leodis (images from Leeds Libraries) and our own images, scanned and hosted on Flickr.  It also had potential for posting tweets 'as live' effectively representing the bombing raids, discoveries of unexploded bombs ad siren alerts  as if we were actually there, almost 70 years ago to the exact minute. 

The historical background and records show that the West Riding of Yorkshire was reasonably untouched by German bombing raids during WW2 with the only serious night of bombing on the 14-15th March 1941.  It is easy to underestimate the impact of this event: over 4,600 homes were damaged when 25 tons of bombs dropped.  65 people were killed – 8 of whom were children and landmarks such as Leeds Town Hall, the Post Office, Leeds Museum and markets were all bombed.  There were over 160 incidents reported in WRCC areas. 

In order to tell the story as accurately as possible we are using a variety of sources from across our holdings. The key sources were the West Riding ARP incident log 1941-1945; and a privately deposited scrapbook  which gives the times the sirens sounded in Wakefield and other fascinating details about life in the war.  These were added too from the records of Leeds City Fire Brigade and a fire-watcher’s log from Turner's Tanning Machinery in Leeds.  We have also used images from the WRCC collection and the Leeds, Bradford, Halifax and West Riding Police Forces.

So has it been successful? Well, we now have almost 250 followers which we are reasonably happy with - especially as most of them were not already following the archive service.  In the same timeframe we have also seen a significant increase in the number of followers of our @wyorksarchives account so it would appear the project has also raised the general profile of the Archive Service.  

The other major benefit we saw was a significant amount of local press and media coverage. We learnt a number of lessons from the press coverage, not least to remember to iron your shirt in the morning as you never know when you might end up on TV!

You can follow the account atwww.twitter.com/WR_ARP, and it is hoped that tweets will be appearing exactly 70 years to the day, until 2015.

Catherine Taylor & Gary Brannan

West Yorkshire Archive Service

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Archives discovery has come a long way in a short time. Just fifteen years ago, the internet was barely a factor and we would have struggled to imagine the wealth of resources now available for using archives in our own homes. It’s important to reflect on how far we have come in online access, at a time when onsite access is being reduced in many areas. Accessing archive information remotely is now a key priority – as Archives for the 21st Century has it, the archives sector is working towards “comprehensive online access for archive discovery through catalogues and to digitised archive content by citizens at a time and place that suits them”. 

As archive use online develops in ways we would not have guessed at even a decade ago, so “archive discovery” is now used as a deliberately loose term to describe this work. Discovery covers anything from those encountering original archive material for the first time to those requiring high-quality tools to deliver academic projects based on primary research, and a wealth of different needs between those poles.

Catalogue data: networks, aggregators and online catalogues

For experienced researchers, online access to information about archives is still the most critical need, as their research takes them beyond the most popular series into often barely-charted territory. There is a wealth of catalogue and location information now available online.

At the top level, a place-name search of the National Register of Archives (NRA) (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches/simpleSearch.asp?subjectType=PL) is the fastest way to locate multiple collections relating to a particular location. The indexes of the NRA offer many alternative search options for those looking for something more specific, and their overview of where archives are held is the broadest available. Increasingly, the NRA links through directly to more detailed catalogues held in archive networks or on archive services’ own catalogues. There has been a steady and continuous development of online catalogues through services such as the Archives Hub, AIM25, Archives Wales and Scottish Archives Network (SCAN) [Jane: links to all these available if you want them'>more..., and numerous archives now have their own searchable online catalogues. To give just a couple of examples: the huge online catalogue of London Metropolitan Archives (http://search.lma.gov.uk/opac_lma/index.htm) and the combined catalogues of four archive services which make up Black Country History (http://blackcountryhistory.org/), together with related museum resources.

Increasingly, there is a trend in online catalogues: to cut across museums, local studies, archives and related heritage collections such as archaeology or the built environment, creating one-stop-shops for discovering an area’s past. Examples include Norfolk Online Access to Heritage (http://www.noah.norfolk.gov.uk/) and Exploring Surrey’s Past (http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/). These allow researchers to cross divides and discover related material across domains.

Digitised documents

You may be lucky enough to have a free online archive resource which meets your needs. Examples include the local, like Northumberland communities (http://communities.northumberland.gov.uk/); and the national, like Images of England (http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/) for images of listed buildings. This type of approach tends to be more common for photographic and image collections than it does for written archives. Photographs are a great way in to archives for novices, and, as long as they are well labelled, quite easy to describe. If only the same were true of written sources.

Digitisation of archives brings huge access benefits, opening up collections to readers across the globe. It is not a simple process, involving intensive work on description and often conservation of items to ensure they are not damaged by digitisation. Description is what makes digitised archives discoverable – makes them not just an attractive image, but a research tool. The cost of discoverability is high, and it means that digitisation is not a simple bulk solution to accessing archives. Where large series of records have been digitised, it has usually been on a commercial basis – otherwise the cost of digitisation is far too high for the public sector to deliver. 

There is a payoff between the convenience of being able to access archives in your own home, with no need to travel to far-flung archives, and the upfront cost of paying for images to be accessed online. The National Archives and the Archives and Records Association are currently developing a pilot consortium of UK archive services holding school registers to 1914. The aim is to offer coherent digitisation of common record series, regardless of who holds them. This consortium approach will benefit archive services, in offering support in breaking into the digitisation market, and to researchers, in offering wholesale access to important record sets.

Specialist resources

These won’t be relevant for all researchers, but where such a resource exists, it is inestimably useful. Databases and other online resources continue to develop specialist access to types of records with wide research applications.

The York Cause Papers Database (an XML-based catalogue of the papers of ecclesiastical causes for the province of York) is now live. It contains descriptions and metadata for over 14,000 cause papers spanning the period 1300-1858. http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/causepapers/

See also: http://www.york.ac.uk/library/borthwick/projects-exhibitions/church-court-records/project-details/ The Borthwick has also won funding as part of JISC’s eContent programme to create and attach over 200,000 images of documents to the catalogue’s records. http://yorkcausepapers.wordpress.com/

The Manorial Documents Register (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/mdr/) county computerisation projects continue apace, and we will soon have information on the survival of manorial records of over half the counties of England online, as well as for the whole of Wales. Online interpretation guides can be extremely helpful in understanding these more specialist record types, and there are examples such as the Lancaster University manorial records site (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/manorialrecords/manors/index.htm) or the University of Nottingham resources on Deeds (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/deeds/introduction.aspx) and Deeds in Depth (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/deedsindepth/introduction.aspx). Here you can encounter expert guidance in record types, with the opportunity to view examples which will help you to come to grips with unfamiliar types of record.

The Future

Doubtless there is plenty more to come in discovering archives online. I wouldn’t want to guess at exactly what is to come – so much has already happened in such a short time. To a great extent, I think that ‘the future’ of archives discovery is already with us. Archives are coming online in a wonderful variety of ways, from tweeting the diaries of West Yorkshire folk (http://twitter.com/#!/wyorksarchives), to project blogs describing the discoveries while cataloguing a major Gloucestershire estate archive (http://staldwynarchive.blogspot.com/), to inviting users to share their expertise in photo identification through flickr (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/africa/). The work of Historypin with Google (profiled in Local History issue 98 /lhn/article.php?file=lhn-vol1iss98-9.xml) allows anyone with historical images to become part of a worldwide visual image resource. As linked data and open data progress, the opportunities for linking up disparate resources become easier and more beneficial.

Historypin is one of several examples of how engagement with locality and place is becoming a key means of discovering the potential of archives. The prospects of geo-tagging and geo-referencing to produce place-based content are really exciting. One website which is well advanced in developing the possibilities is People’s Collection Wales (http://www.peoplescollectionwales.co.uk/) which is a combination of online access to archive and museum collections, with the opportunity for users to interact, add content and use the existing content to create new resources. For example, you can create and share trails mapped onto the ‘real world’ . referencing historical content from the People’s Collection. You can stand looking down at a historic site, and access online photographs, documents and objects which describe how the site once functioned and what it looked like in the past. It is a really exciting example of how wider access to online resources brings history to life and how institutions can collaborate with their users to bring benefits which are shared online.

Melinda Haunton

Secretary – UK Archives Discovery Network

www.ukad.org

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BALH members who took advantage of the special offer to add access to the Bibliography of British and Irish History to their subscription this year have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about its benefits. One member writes:

‘The BBIH is a most useful resource for local historians for three reasons. Although it can simply be an online library catalogue providing bibliographic details of books, it also provides titles of individual articles in both books and periodical journals. One doesn’t need to plough through back copies of obscure journals to find articles of local interest. Keyword searches allows one to look for a specific village. As well as major journals many local periodicals are included. It is updated regularly; these updates contain ‘new’ books and articles as well as some older ones that had previously been missed.

Second, although it is advertised as covering Britain and Ireland, localities are very well represented in the database of titles.

Finally, for those ever increasing numbers of books and journals that can be viewed online, links are provided to those sites where you can purchase individual articles should you wish, paying just for the article, not the whole journal. You can download articles in convenient formats and print them.

I would recommend this resource for anyone carrying out local research. It is surprising how many articles about your village will turn up in unexpected journals’.

Look out for further details with your subscription renewal for 2012!

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This event was a huge success, with over 80 individuals in attendance from 44 local societies and organisations.

Robert Bearman acted as Chairman and gave a short introduction to the day.

I spoke for my allotted 10 minutes on BALH and what we have to offer to local societies – insurance was obviously the top priority, and BBIH was also introduced as a help to Independent Scholars  – who were regretting the lack of access to up-to-date literature sources.  I emphasised the amount of information that they receive from their membership – eight items per year, and also the website.

Beat Kumin from Warwick University then spoke for 10 minutes on the work of the Warwick Network for Parish Research, the importance of their work and their proposed Symposium to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the foundation of the group in 2012.

The attendees then broke up for 30 minutes into 10 ‘Breakaway Groups’ each of eight individuals, looked at what they really needed and suggested ways in which the County Local History Society could help them. The meeting re-convened after half an hour and priorities were identified and listed on a flip chart – the analysis of which will be discussed further at a future meeting. The main themes that emerged included the following:

Need for a register of groups with contacts
Lists of speakers, and their charges – it difficult to find speakers at the moment
Rolling list of events to avoid duplication, and note upcoming talks
Need for further events of a like nature – people getting together every 2 years
Need for a county co-ordinator
The need for a networking facility to avoid re-inventing the wheel…. and thus a register of research interests
A website for groups of all sizes, including those with small membership
Contact with schools to ensure the emergence of the next generation
Role of BALH as experts and co-ordinators
Information on how to tap financial resources

There were huge amounts conversation and networking, but the breakaway sessions were very productive and well organised; overall fruitful day.

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Much has been made of the concept of the big society expounded by the coalition government. Opinions, range from the official view that it willempower communities, redistribute power and foster a culture of volunteerism, to the sceptics’ belief that it is about saving money by providing government on the cheap: If people are doing things for free then you don't have to pay to be able to run post offices, libraries, transport services and shape housing projects. The cry has gone out for volunteers to come forward to play a part in the provision of local services.

Archive Services have a long made use of volunteers, particularly in indexing and listing work, and offer one of the rare opportunities for members of the public to make a meaningful and valuable contribution for the benefit of present and future users. This range of work includes projects that would never be undertaken by the staff, such as transcribing parish registers, to listing modern archives thus enabling archivists to concentrate on those collections for which their interpretative and palaeographical skills are a necessary prerequisite. Properly supervised such work is of immense value in reducing the amount of un-catalogued, and thus inaccessible, collections of archives. In 2010 volunteers clocked up over 9,000 hours Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre (WSHC)

Because of pre-eminence of the railway town of Swindon WSHC holds extensive archives of the Great Western Railway Company, and these have attracted several volunteers willing to work on staffing, pension fund and engineering records. Several years ago another volunteer listed our listed the collection of 20,000 plans of plant and water supply (rolling stock all at York) of GWR, that were produced in the offices (now housing NMR at Swindon) where he ended his career as chief draftsman. Currently a retired railway engineer is listing account books and agreements to which he brings professional expertise and keen interest as a railway historian. Another retired engineer is listing the archives of his former employer, Westinghouse, a world leader in railway break and lighting systems, and has come across material about projects on which he worked in his career.

A third volunteer, whose father worked on the railway, has produced indexes of staffing and pension fund records of considerable value to genealogists. Local members of NADFAS are working on modern estate records of the Stourhead estate and the letters of Edith Olivier.

The papers of Jean Morrison, the local historian of Bratton, have been catalogued by her successor, whose local knowledge, awareness and sensitivity will make the collection accessible to others, notably members of the village’s local history society which has recently re-formed.

The transcription team of Wiltshire Family History Society, about 20 in number, are working on parish registers, corners’ bills. in an increasingly digital age such a yardstick may seem outmoded, it is nevertheless revealing: the shelf-run of genealogical indexes to census, parish registers, marriage licence bonds etc produced by the team and others over many years is exactly double that of catalogues produced by the archivists since 1947.

Such work has been regarded as valuable part of an older strategy of Lifelong Learning; but is equally applicable to this new concept. In this way Archives Services have been somewhat ahead of the game. We have adopted a more proactive role to advise and assist local history and heritage groups in researching and recording their communities’ histories.  WSHC acts as a bridge between HLF South West and local community groups in Wiltshire and Swindon, helping them create projects, prepare bid documents. Two members of staff have received training from the Heritage Lottery Fund in writing applications, explaining the processes and the grants available.  

The big society is thriving in WSHC, in an eminently productive and successful way, if not quite as imagined by its promoters.

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TNA DOCUMENTS FREE ONLINE AT AALT AND WAALT

The Anglo-American Legal Tradition Project (AALT:http://aalt.law.uh.edu/ ) provides free access to 30 legal and financial document series of the UK National Archives between the years 1200 and 1700.  It currently makes available approximately 6.5 million frames of material and contains both Latin and English material including common law plea rolls, pipe rolls, memoranda rolls, and various sets of equity petitions, orders and decrees.

The AALT is designed for researchers.  Just as at TNA itself, this material is not indexed; the site merely reproduces the originals.  Nevertheless, ready online access to these series makes possible the exploitation of resources for local history that had been impractical on any major scale.  There is some inconvenience from the terms of the TNA license, since the documents cannot be unbound for digitizing.  Thus the materials appear in two folders:  one for the fronts, the other for the dorses or versos.  The insertion of navigational guides reduces that inconvenience (and blue markers for every 10th and red markers for every 50th membrane/page), as will opening the two folders for a given document in different browser windows and alternating between the two.  The site has proven extremely useful.  In terms of time of use, the AALT is equivalent now to a completely utilized reading room at TNA seating 572 researchers.

The wiki for the AALT, named WAALT (http://www.uh.edu/waalt/index.php/Main_Page), has just launched.  WAALT is a highly organized wiki site for posting references for online documents.  It contains grids for more than 1,300 English and Welsh towns (basically cities, boroughs, and market towns).  Like any new wiki site, it will be most useful at the beginning for those who want to post documents they have found, but then increasingly useful for those looking for information. One of the major reasons for the WAALT is the development of a massive data base for local history and the enabling of the formation of small cooperative research groups to provide mutual support and to avoid duplication of effort.  In posting new material, please first observe the style of the entries already made.  Material posted, including names and places, rapidly gets picked up by net ‘bots that index the content  so that services like Google will find the references.

               Posting information on the WAALT requires acquisition of an account from the administrator.  That barrier is necessary to filter out vandals, not to limit legitimate access.  Researchers are encouraged to apply for an account.  The AALT and WAALT are both products of the University of Houston and operate with a minimum of personnel.  We cannot assist with basic palaeography more than the AALT site provides online but can provide limited assistance to users who have already acquired skills as time is available.  If there are skilled volunteers who are willing to offer palaeographical assistance to beginners, we would be more than willing to post their names on the site.

Both sites can be easily located by running a Google search for either AALT or WAALT.  Comments are always welcome at rpalmer@uh.edu.

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The story of King John and his surfeit of lampreys grips the imagination for the image it conjures up of greedy feasting among a privileged few. Packing fourteen separate talks into a one-day conference carried the danger of a feast turning into a surfeit with the obvious end result. No one need have worried. It was a richly studded menu, but so well organised and varied that all must have left the table without threat of indigestion let alone danger to life. The aim was to promote an exchange of experience between people who had been involved in The National Archives Project cataloguing MH12 papers for 22 Poor Law Unions. The correspondence between Boards of Guardians and the Poor Law Commission for the first twenty years or so of their existence has long been known as a hugely informative source for local, social and economic history (more recently for family historians as well). A catalogue was urgently needed to allow easy access, and the end result is now online. In practice, the Conference proved attractive to numerous others interested in the subject matter and there must have been 70-80 people who stayed all day.

The project organiser, Dr Paul Carter, had selected Unions for study to provide a country-wide sample of institutions operating the new Poor Law post-1834. The conference could not hear from all the 20 groups participating in the cataloguing task, but again a sufficiently wide sample was taken to give a full understanding of just what was done. For the audience, an outstanding feature was the quality of all the speakers and the reports they gave of selected subjects arising out of laboriously ploughing though thousands of pages of correspondence. Selecting a few contributions which struck home more forcefully than others to one observer must not be taken as a denial of the value of the remainder. Ultimately, it is to be hoped that BALH will find a way of publishing all the papers for they all deserve a wider audience.

Alan Mills was most unfortunately absent through illness, but Paul Carter gave his paper about the death of Thomas Simpson in the remote Union of Reeth in the Yorkshire Dales properly crediting Alan with historical sensitivities of a high order. His subject was ‘fear’ – that fear so often said to be common among working people that they would end up in the workhouse, destitute, disgraced and alone. Trying to pin down just how this psychological state came about was the problem, for the reported facts of any case can be easily established. In this instance, it was a local concerned neighbour who pestered the Board of Guardians and the Commissioners about the cause of death of one man, well into his sixties, ‘of dirty habits’, who resisted invitations to take ‘the house’ until the day before his death. He lived to the last, eking out existence on salted portions of a diseased pig, in an acknowledged hovel in filthy conditions. Could the Board of Guardians or their officials be held responsible? Why was Thomas so adamant that death through starvation was preferable to life in the workhouse? Inquiries and inquests were satisfied that all the rules had been followed, so no personal negligence was attributable. True, the inquest thought the amount of relief was unsatisfactory and recommended an increase. In the end, however, the Poor Law objective had been achieved. A poor man had been deterred from becoming a cost to the ratepayers. 

Thomas Simpson’s fear might have been based upon several possible premises which Alan Mills set out to test. One cause could have been the sheer frightening nature of workhouses, classically illustrated as large quadrangles separating out males and females. These prison-like structures and the Spartan regimes of eating and sleeping were totally at variance with the home-like, small-scale, albeit uncomfortable, cottages in which the poor led their lives. Not in Reeth’s case. Alan Mills lives in the workhouse master’s accommodation, integral to a building largely replicating the homes surrounding it! The photograph of this most domestic of structures proves that it could hardly have been this that put the fear into Thomas Simpson. What was much more likely to have deterred him was common knowledge among local folk of the fate of another seventy-odd year old man some years earlier. ‘Of dirty habits’ and rough manners, he had been dragged by the hair down a flight of stairs outside into a yard by the master to have buckets of cold water thrown over him. The next week he was dead. As Alan Mills surmised, the likelihood is that here were two cases of former labourers, widowed and penniless, succumbing to the inevitable ravages of age, suffering the final indignity of incontinence, trying to stick to their estimable principles of manly independence. All the effort of patiently summarising hundred of documents not previously investigated added but a small item to the history of Reeth, but throws a glaring light on a Victorian Britain too easily seen through nostalgic reminiscences of a former golden imperial age.

John Hainsworth approached the past in similar vein on the basis of letters to and from the Llanfyllin Poor Law Union. Bastardy was taken to be a special problem for the Guardians. They adopted an unusual tactic of distributing numerous printed notices among the farms and village homes seeking to educate local employers about the evils of allowing male living-in servants to visit the rooms of female servants at night. ‘Courting in bed’ was the popular term: too many infants in the workhouse was the result. The new Poor Law contained a policy supposed to deal with the issue of covering the cost of maintaining bastards, but it clearly did not work. The researchers among the Llanfyllan correspondence could not find a single copy of the official notice in their local offices, and so were delighted to find the one sent to the Poor Law Commissioners. As at Reeth, a small incident in a rural Welsh community added a paragraph or two to local history, but set in the context of an age-old problem stretching from Elizabeth legislation through the 1834 Act to the Child Support Agency of more recent memory this one document speaks volumes about the Victorian age and its system of values so often held up for approbation.

Vaccination, international rivalries over medical qualifications, caning boys and the mass export of labourers to Canada in the 1830s (and much more) were all similarly succinctly dealt with by speakers who kept to time and held their audience. Paul Carter presided but Helen Good’s behind the scenes organisation ensured a trouble free day. The stylish digital projection of documents and texts was a notable success provided one accepts that one has no hope of reading the words of original letters put up as full pages unless in the front three rows. BALH  had a winner in this conference, nevertheless, and the whole TNA project deserves further support.

Given the total absence of any London paper, however, and the raison d’etre of the organisation being localhistory, most of which concerns the provinces, how about taking a risk on a Midlands, Northern, West Country or Wales based meeting or two? Berwick on Tweed and Truro, Reeth and Liverpool make sacrifices which it should not be beyond Londoners and those in the surrounding counties to make if called to Leeds, Birmingham, Bath or Cardiff to share experiences.

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Log on, join in, make links...

The recently overhauled VCH website is gaining much interest and rapidly establishing itself as the ‘go to’ website for many in the local-history community. Over the next year we hope to encourage its roots to expand further by initiating a links campaign. The VCH has long enjoyed happy and fruitful relationships with many partner organisations in both formal and informal capacities. By mounting a targeted links campaign we plan to raise the profile of our own work and help support the work of other similar projects. A links campaign needs much planning and preparation time but if successful can really help to improve search engine optimisation and spread the word about our activities too.

Common types of links are:

Reciprocal
Resource
Forum
Blog
Directory

Over the next few months the VCH is concentrating on the first type. Usually found between two websites (for example between VCH and BALH) a reciprocal link help to improve both websites’ rankings in search engines such as Google. It also helps to target visitors and try to control traffic to our site. The time-consuming part of a links campaign can be researching specific types of links which would be relevant to us as an organisation, as Google clearly state, “quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating” (Google Webmaster Central). In fact linking to non-relevant sites can actually affect your Google rating negatively. Once links have been established they should be monitored to ensure they are still current and some research needs to continue to foster more links from newer websites and organisations.

And what does our website offer for potential link partners? We feel that the revamped VCH website offers our users a wealth of well-researched and attractively-presented information with features such as:

information about us as an organisation
news of research projects both current and completed
draft text
quick access to digitised volumes
parish index search function
resources for teachers, researchers and students
guides to writing for the VCH and our paperback project EPE
news of events both centrally-based and around the counties
VCH twitter feed updates

Since our soft launch in the spring these features have helped us to increase the number of visitors to our site, meaning that organisations which link to us can hope to also reap the benefit of these developments. Underpinning these technological advances is the VCH’s guarantee of high-quality scholarly research and writing which is a common thread found in all our varied activities. As we are unique in what we do, our published output (both print and online) is in demand internationally as well as nationally. Therefore any organisation who choose to link to us may feel the benefit of not just higher visitor numbers but a growth in visits from around the globe and from those engaged in serious historical research who may add your site to their favourites.  

The VCH Publications Manager will begin to contact organisations over the summer to establish reciprocal links with them. If you would like your organisation’s website to share links with us then please do get in touch with a member of staff at central office or email the Publications Manager via info@victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk

Jessica Davies is VCH Publications Manager

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School admission registers: proposed pilot national digitisation project

Early (pre-1914) school admission registers are the subject of a new partnership proposal between local record offices and commercial companies, co-ordinated by The National Archives and the Archives and Record Association. Over ninety archive offices have formed regional groups in England to offer the opportunity to specialist commercial firms to digitise over nine hundred volumes of school registers, comprising about 500,000 individual images of original pages. This is called  ‘The National Consortium Schools Registers’.

In each of nine regions a centre has been identified where registers could be scanned in accordance with a programme template following The National Archives’s guidelines. Two ‘open days’ for suppliers have been arranged for June 2011.

This project is in its very early stages  but, if successful, its benefits to researchers, whether into local, social or family history, would be considerable. From the point of view of record offices, school admission registers present preservation problems. Heavily used within schools, the original registers are often in poor condition when received and this is further aggravated by the risk of over-handling because of frequency of requests for access. Availability of digitised images would address these problems. It is likely there would be a charge – and this is one of the aspects of the proposal to be clarified as it progresses. 

Information about the nine regional groups can be found on the ARA website: http://www.archives.org.uk/si-acalg/news-and-events.html

 Margaret O’Sullivan

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John Gent [1932-2011]

The local historian with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Croydon that emerged after public transports systems, in the form of the Surrey Iron Railway, the Croydon Canal and the wider railway network, reached the town has died. John Bannister Gent wrote a series of publications, long and short, which appeared between 1966 and 2010. The bibliographical record of the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society notes sixty-six items in his name, from his highly acclaimed illustrated local history books produced for the Society to his set-pieceCroydon: A Pictorial History, published by Phillimore in 1991.

His great enthusiasm for local history had been stimulated by a teacher at Selhurst Grammar School, Kenneth Malcolm King, and John recorded that Croydon Reference Librarian, Kenneth Ryde, had also been instrumental in developing his interest. He had no specific training in historical methods or techniques, but he had an irrepressible devotion to the local history of Croydon and its area. He became a distinguished President of the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society which had originally been founded in 1870 as the Croydon Microscopical Society and which stood in that all-embracing local tradition of scholastic enquiry which John so typified.

My personal tribute to John is that, although he recognised that we came from different local history perspectives, in that my interests were to set Croydon in a much wider context and also in a much longer historical perspective, he was very supportive of my work. He introduced me to a retired local government official named Alfred Hawkes who had a collection of over 20,000 index cards recording historical property details for the centre of Croydon, which enabled me to develop my understanding of the relative location of Croydon’s inns from Tudor times onwards.

John Gent was a good friend and good company. He was one of those people that you can meet on a train or bus – was he really responsible in his day for siting London bus stops as tradition would have it ? – and a previous conversation will be re-ignited as if it had never been interrupted. His role in the local history of Croydon will not be repeated. We have much for which to thank him.

Trevor James

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Simon Fowler's article, Seventeen Come Sunday (Local History News 99, p 14), about the value of folk song in relation to local history, was a very apt reminder to this writer. As well as having had a life-long love of traditional folk music, I have come across a prize example in the course of my own research.

Barnsley can boast the oldest, still surviving, local Friendly Society in England. The Cordwainers Society was founded 5 March 1747/8 by a group of sixteen men meeting in a local hostelry - 'the house of Elizabeth Lawton'. Over subsequent centuries, several of my own ancestral family were members. Despite the name, the members were not, by any means, all cordwainers. From the very start, their membership spanned the ranks of local society from minor gentlemen (acting as trustees of the funds), through various skilled tradesmen to colliers and labourers. It maintains this social breadth to this very day. The Society's role as sickness and funeral club has diminished, but a reputation for respectable conviviality has grown. Apart from the annual (men only!) Feast, each year sees a couple of social events to which members' families are also welcome.

I discovered the Society and its records by a happy accident, while researching for a dissertation on pre-industrial social networks in the Barnsley area. On contacting the Society's secretary for permission to quote and use material from their archives, I found myself welcomed aboard. At their annual Feast in 2003, I became their 'official historian' and an honorary life member, resuming the family connection after a gap of more than a hundred years.

The Feast introduced me to their song. At an appropriate point, when everyone is full of good food and a fair deal of good cheer, several of the members lead the assembled company in the Cordwainers Song. The words and tune are both of folk origin. The phraseology of the chorus suggests that the original may have been a drinking-cum-hunting song of eighteenth century provenance or earlier. In the foothills of the Pennines there was a 'tradition' of poaching that targeted the wealthy estates and deer parks, especially in the seventeenth century.

A search of the collection of printed ballads held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford reveals numerous broadside versions of a song called The Social Fellow. These are extremely similar to each other and date from around 1790-1810. It is a matter of argument as to whether the song was in common circulation before it was printed and spread as a broadside. My own prejudice is in favour of the oral tradition. I prefer the idea that balladeers took an existing song and (almost certainly) a popular tune and printed it up to make a modest living touting it around the markets, fairs and hostelries. It was a practice that had been common since Elizabethan times.

The chorus of the song is absolutely the same in both versions and reveals the hunting origins:

And he that will not merry be,

Shall never taste our joys

See, see, the game’s in view,

Hark forward my brave boys.

Both versions end with a verse comprising a loyal toast to the reigning monarch, while the intervening verses toast female partners and absent friends. The printed versions include a few other worthy subjects of toast - the nation's soldiers and sailors, and everyone's good health over miserly wealth. The first verse of both versions is also virtually identical:

Push, push the bowl along,

And never mind the score,

For when this liquor’s done,

We’ll call again for more

Quite how long the song has been sung at the Society's annual feast, no records tell us, but the dates of the broadside ballads suggest that it may have coincided with the Society's official registration in 1792 or (if my assumptions about the oral tradition are correct) from the very beginning of the annual feasts in the 1750s - at least informally, among other songs from the common muse. I'll drink to that!

Martin Bashforth is a freelance writer and researcher, working on radical approaches to the use of family history, including a history of Barnsley's Cordwainers Society. He recently published 'The 11th Durham Light Infantry: In Their Own Names' (Amberley, 2011).

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Conference report on Asa Briggs: A Celebration.

This day-colloquium marking the 90th birthday of Asa Briggs was held on Thursday 19th May and co-hosted by the Institute of Historical Research and the British Association for Victorian Studies. Eleven contributions from speakers shared their appreciation of Asa’s work on Victorian studies and the age of improvement, on media studies including work on a history of the BBC and his significant contribution to what was described as ‘redrawing the map of learning by turning it upside down’.  We learnt of the respect he had received from Australian historians who had valued his emphasis on studying the local and provincial, his interest in Birmingham on its micro history and a focus on ‘the workshop , not the factory’, his emphasis at Leeds on the use of Christian names and how he had ‘disturbed the hierarchy of snobbishness ion a very short time’, how his Vice Chancellorship at Sussex from 1961 to 1976 had ‘created a culture of rebels’ and the emphasis he had placed on interdisciplinary learning.  And there was Asa, fired up and energetic throughout the long six hours, starting his reflections on what he had heard by saying that he ‘had learnt a lot from the day’,  reflecting on the importance of sociability in learning together and acknowledging ‘I have never really wasted any time’. (There is a story that he wrote a book review on the morning of his wedding.)

My own limited involvement with Asa in local history research projects in East Lothian had been helped with his view of the importance of the whole picture and that there was no single perception.  He explained that was why he had written A History of the BBC and not theHistory, adding that he had never wanted to produce a definitive picture of anything. Quotations were shared in abundance such as ‘I am an explorer, not a settler’. While Asa managed the challenge of the acoustics and presentation skills, the delegates were told there would be podcasts available for fuller study, something to be expected with his pioneering work on media!  His personal papers are being archived at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Centre at Boston USA where Asa explained there is a commitment to cataloguing. He is still writing and exploring. I came away from the day reflecting on the impact of Asa’s explorations and that he was still raising the challenge of bottom up micro history studies. 

David Affleck, East Linton.

21 May 2011

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Our Annual Regional Conference was held at Aberystwyth in April, in association with the National Library of Wales and the Ceredigion Local History Forum, on the theme of Houses and Communities.

 On Friday evening two presentations were given on the archives of Ceredigion, chaired by Michael Freeman of the Ceredigion Local History Forum.  Helen Palmer, the County Archivist, described the range of private and public records held in the local archive office established in 1974.  Archive collections include those of the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments of Wales, and the history of educational institutions including the Trinity College of St David, Lampeter, and the records of Aberystwyth University, from 1872.

 William Troughton, the Visual Images Librarian in the National Library of Wales, showed a selection of the 800,000 photographs in his care, including those of Aberystwyth, illustrating archaeological sites and buildings in the town.

 Saturday was spent in Y Drwm, the high-tech lecture theatre in the National Library of Wales.  Sixty-seven local historians attended the event, and we heard six superb papers on Welsh local history.  Beryl Evans, responsible for the Library Archives, gave an excellent guide to the Library collections.

 Professor Geraint H. Jenkins gave a superb lecture on the writing of Welsh history in the Welsh language, with inimitable panache and humour.  He described his academic career at Swansea and his growing awareness of the ‘linguistic apartheid’ between English and Welsh languages in the 1970s. 

Dr Richard Suggett, of the Royal Commission, examined the problems of locating the oldest houses in Wales, the fast-diminishing resource of isolated upland medieval houses.  Dendro-dates from 40 houses show a cutoff date of around 1400AD, which has transformed the understanding of these buildings.  From 1450, 2-bay halls appear, and even halls in peasant houses.  Thatch was generally used for roofing, and driplines have been found. 

Professor David Austin reported his research findings on the impact of the Cistercian Abbey of Strata Florida on the landscape, economy and culture of Ceredigion.  The Project examined inter-disciplinary themes over three periods between the Iron Age and the present day.  The landscape work is underpinned by GIS, accompanied by academic input from Welsh national historical groups. 

Dr Eurwyn Wiliam examined the building traditions of the rural poor, from 1750.  Very few cottages of this period survive, built of dry stone-walling with thatched roofing and plaited chimneys, often described as hovels. Regional variations include slate roofing in North Wales and ropes used to hold thatch in place elsewhere.  Mud buildings were known on Anglesey and recorded in fifteenth century poetry.

Gerald Morgan looked at Nanteos and the making of a great house and its families.  The Powells were a wealthy family at the upper end of the social scale who left large archives, cataloguing the slow decline of the house due to ever-mounting debts and lack of heirs. 

A very pleasant day ended with a guided tour of the old town and dinner at a seafront restaurant.

On Sunday morning, we heard Michael Freeman, (Curator of Ceredigion Museum) discuss the work of the Ceredigion Local History Forum.  After coffee, we drove to the Hafod Estate Office, where the house built by Thomas Johnes in the 1780s, was demolished in 1958, but the 7000-acre estate survives as the finest eighteenth century ‘Picturesque estate’ in England and Wales.

Our grateful thanks are due to Dr Margaret Escott for her meticulous planning, Michael Freeman for his presentation on Sunday and organisation of the local tickets, Helen Palmer, the County Archivist for Ceredigion, The National Library of Wales for providing such excellent lecture facilities (and lunch), our speakers on Saturday, the staff of Pantycelyn Hall who made us all very welcome and the Forestry Commission for setting up an exhibition of Hafod for us.

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Sponsored by the British Association for Local History and held at Wolfson College, Cambridge

This series of local history lectures has just completed its 13th cycle, and for the last three years has been sponsored by BALH. Always well attended, the lectures attract an audience of local history students, college members and local historians from across East Anglia and beyond. Many of the lectures are eventually published in The Local Historian, and so available for a much larger readership.

The 2010-2011 year started in November with an exciting lecture on the developing economy of nineteenth century Hertfordshire ‘Small but flourishing Hertfordshire towns, by courtesy of 19th century communications’ by Dr Peter Bysouth. The small but flourishing towns are Ashwell, Baldock, Buntingford and Royston. Dr Bysouth shifted the debate on the definition of the small town through its population to a definition based on its function. Using functional analysis he has formulated a model which allows the reconciliation of small towns within the landscape of a central place landscape, this creates an extra-urban matrix which identifies a population dependent not on large central places, but small towns, which have an extensive range of goods and services extending over a large catchment area. This in turn can be related to Professor Charles Phythian-Adams ‘borderlands’ marked by lines of small market towns, which are mediators between adjacent economies. Members of the audience involved in research quickly realised that this could be applied to other places and periods, and that this is an important contribution to urban history.

The second lecture of the series was by Professor David Bates of the Universities of East Anglia and Caen. This was a delightful and entertaining excursion into a period and subject too few local historians explore ‘The Empire of the Normans: A local perspective.’ The lecture, partly sparked off by a book Professor Bates reviewed for The Local Historian, used a mixture of biographies and extracts from the chronicles combined to explore the Norman empire in local terms, and to introduce a number of individuals that helped to humanise what is sometimes seen as a militaristic occupiers of a conquered kingdom.

The final lecture was by Dr Kate Tiller of the University of Oxford. Dr Tiller gave one of the first lectures in the series,Local History: The State of the Art, which was published as an occasional paper by the University of Cambridge, Institute of Continuing Education. In her lecture Dr Tiller revisited the state of the art, and reviewed the decade which has expired since her first lecture. She showed how trends in local history have changed. Quantification, for example is no longer such an important tool as it was in the 1990s, and post modernist approaches to local history have been replaced by more accessible approaches. The future for local history, Dr Tiller feels, lies in micro-history, a conjunction of people, places, social, economic and cultural history creating an in-depth and intimate portrait of parishes and communities.

These vastly different topics and approaches illustrate the diverse nature of local history, and raises once more in my mind the question as to what is local history, and what, why and how should local historians study and interpret it.

The lecture series will continue in the next academic year. The first lecture will be given by Professor John Beckett on November 4th 2010 The English Village Revisited.

Evelyn Lord

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for personal achievement

Arthur Bantoft, Barwick-in-Elmet, Leeds: for a quarter century of work developing the local history of his community and district
Malcolm Dolby, West Butterwick, North Lincolnshire : for supporting local history societies and encouraging other historians in north Nottinghamshire and the surrounding area.
Kenneth Gay, Hornsey, London: for long-standing commitment to local history in the London Borough of Haringey, and for sharing his enthusiasm
Patricia Knowlden, Kent 1927-2011: for her work as a local historian in Kent, and for promoting the importance of archival sources for local history.

for a society newsletter 

Eastbourne Historical Society 

for research and publication

[equal overall winner] Chris Hall, ‘”Class distinction, democracy and proper drains” – how Witney was civilised, 1894-1904’ Oxfordshire Local History vol.8 no.4, autumn 2009

[equal overall winner'] David Holmes, ‘Development of the boot and shoe industry in Leicester during the nineteenth century’Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society vol.83, 2009

John Wright, ‘The Military Survey of 1522’ The Glaven Historian: Journal of the Blakeney Area Historical Society no.12, 2010

Tony Broster, ‘An investigation of gas production in the nineteenth century, with particular reference to East Suffolk’ Fram: The Journal of the Framlingham and District Local History and Preservation Society 5th series no.15, April 2010

David Butler, ‘”The Chief Ornament of his Native City”: William Henderson and the building of Durham’s Town Hall, 1848-1851’ Durham County Local History Society Journal no.75, February 2010

[short article award']Edna Blake and Erica Statham, ‘”Do it with Pride”: working lives at Joseph Johnson’s Department Store’ Leicestershire Historian no.45, 2009

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We returned to Friends House in London for our major annual event this year. More bookstalls and displays provided a useful background for the important part of the day which is catching up with friends and acquaintances and making new contacts - otherwise known as networking.

In the morning session we were delighted to welcome Sue Clayton who has been closely involved with local history in Nottinghamshire since she was last part of the BALH team. Sue explained the results she had obtained from a detailed survey of local history societies in her area and disucssed what the analysis could tell for future developments. Win Stokes contibuted some comparisons from Durham, and contributions from the floor were, as always, most valuable. 
BALH President Professor David Hey chaired the AGM. Further details of changes in personnel can be found on p 35 and a list of current members of Council on p 36.  After lunch Professor Hey presented certificates to this year’s award winners (see opposite).
The annual lecture was given by Dr Rowena Archer, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Under the title of ‘Evisceration, Embalming and Boiling’ we heard about some extraordinary - and indeed gruesome -  funeral practices amongst the upper classes of medieval times. 
Next year we are looking forward to an excellent turnout for Local History Day on 16 June in Manchester. 

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The path followed the flowering May trees through knee-high white cow-parsley, we were walking along one of the gaits to the open fields.  The village of Laxton holds the last remnants of a medieval 3 field system with its crop rotation and manor court.  Farms are clustered at the centre of the village; 14 of the original 22 remain working. Each has a mixture of strips and enclosed land. Mr Stuart Rose, Steward to the Gaits and Commons, who was our guide for the day, farms 164 acres, a third of which is in the open fields.  Members wondered why the village was never enclosed: various ideas were put forward: there was not one lord of the manor, Lord Manvers could not afford to enclose and although time could be lost in travelling, the villagers preferred that way. Unusually all the farms within the village have a similar look: red local brick, each with its crew yard of differing sizes. Lilac Farm was dated within the brickwork 1748 while on the barn as 1760. At that time there appears to have been much rebuilding yet there is no evidence of cruck or timber framed houses except some reused timber within buildings.   

The visit for 26 members began at Lilac Farm, with a film to explain the workings of the manorial system and its court (leet).  This meets in the one remaining village pub, The Dovecot, in the last week in November to swear in the jury and foreman for the field to be inspected.  Each field is done every 3 years, this is neighbours meting out justice on each other.  These men check the drains and the width of each strip; either too short or too long would call for a fine. They restake the strips (now larger than before) with wooden stakes. A week later the court meets under the Bailiff and fines are imposed for wrong doing, even for non-attendance at the leet. Once business has been completed, there would be time for discussion; all must agree on the planting of a field although different types of wheat could be sown, leaving a field fallow each third year.  It is modern machinery and methods superimposed on a medieval landscape.  On the longest day of the year, they meet for the auction of the hay from the sykes.  This is land which might be too wet for arable and is left for grazing and meadow land, and now holds abundant wild flowers. Only those farmers who put up smoke from their chimneys in the village can bid. 

After discussion, Mr Rose guided us round the village. From the top of the motte and bailey castle there is a good view of the land with the wooded area and the enclosed farmsteads to the edge of the parish. In 1653 there were 1894 acres in 2280 strips, but now there is undulating 483 acres. The strip cultivation was quite distinct linked by the sunken gaits so made to alleviate the gradient for the heavy carts. 

After a most welcome and delicious lunch, we visited the church in the afternoon, a very large building with impressive clerestory windows filling the nave with light. The nave of the church has been made smaller, pointing to a larger population at one time. On the wall was a copy of the 1635 map showing all the strips of cultivation. The manor house had a staircase of fish ponds, now only one remains. We again returned for afternoon tea and a black and white film of the village made in 1935. The lasting memory is an evocative picture of a binder harvesting in the field being pulled by 2 horses with black lowering clouds behind. We had spent an extremely interesting and informative day with Mr Rose’s excellent commentary.  Our pending visit had even been published in the Parish magazine, The Open Field.

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The Association’s trip to Southampton was much enjoyed by the participants.  It is one of the strange features of Southampton that the city does not market its historic features, only its shops.

 In the morning, Dr Andrew Russel the head of the city’s archaeology unit showed us round some of the medieval remains.  The city has a surprising length of medieval city walls still standing and a goodly number of vaults or undercrofts, two of which were unlocked for us to visit.

In the earlier part of the middle ages, the city was defended by a ditch and then by walls on the landward side of town.  The sea came up to the quays of the great merchants who traded there and who could unload cargos straight into their warehouses.

However in 1338 the French raided the town, on a foggy day and while the population was in church, and wreaked havoc extensively.  After that, the town was ordered by the king to provide defences along its coast line.  This entailed walling in the merchants’ houses so they lost the use of their private quays.  It also entailed building various drum towers so that all parts of the wall could be defended by guns.

After lunch we were made welcome by Professor Chris Woolgar of Southampton University and his staff.  A selection of documents from the newly purchased Broadlands Archive were laid out for us to inspect and Chris thanked the BALH for being one of the bodies that had supported the University in their bid for funds to buy this collection.  The records include papers from Victorian luminaries such as Lord Palmerston, one time owner of Broadlands, Wellington, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury and others.  From the 20th century the collection has records of Earl Mountbatten including notes from Gandhi. However for local historians the exciting part of the collection is the massive number of papers to do with the administration of the Broadlands estate and it was a few of these that we were able to inspect.

We were then taken behind the scenes to see the storage area and workrooms including the conservation laboratory.  After that, staff opened up their Special Collections Gallery specially and we were able to look at the current display which features relations between Britain and South Asia 1760 and 1960.

Finally it transpired that few of the party had seen the reference books that are available in the History Sources area of a university library, so we went and looked at what is on offer for visitors to read or consult.  One special feature of Southampton University library is the Cope Collection which is a very fine collection of publications about Hampshire.  Members of one local history society were fascinated to see their society’s publications in hard-back.

Phoebe Merrick

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A small group of members visited the British Library Newspaper Collection at Colindale north London in early June and were given a fascinating insight into this unique collection which is quite invaluable for historical research.

 Following the introductory talk outlining the important changes which are now occuring  to the Newspaper Library the members were taken on an extensive tour of the shelving storage areas which held the bound volumes and were remarkable for the extent of publications held and their diversity.

Originally, from the 1820’s, newspapers, as a record of events, were collected by the British Museum at Bloomsbury.  In 1869 it became a legal requirement for newspapers to supply a copy of each edition of a newspaper to the Library.  In 1900 space ran out and a repository was built in north London at Colindale. Eventually all responsibility  for newspaper collections was taken over by the British Library.  However, the two buildings at Colindale are no longer suitable for their purpose, and the British Library has all ready created a high quality storage facility for both books and documents and soon to be completed  a purpose designed Newspaper storage building at Boston Spa near to Wetherby, Yorkshire.

Previously many London and regional newspapers were copied to microfilm and these are currently available in the Reading Room at Colindale where they will remain until 2012, after which they will transfer to St. Pancras where there is also an extensive range of overseas and non-English newspapers.

Members were also briefed on the future digitisation (in conjuction with a commercial organisation) of a wide range of local, regional and national press across some three centuries. This will primarily focus on specific geographic areas and key periods i.e. census dates, national events and wars.  Digitisation will also be able to make those fragile copies available to be seen without having to be handled.

 Following the tour of only a small fraction of the floor to ceiling shelving on three floors, and examination of some quite remarkable bound volumes of memorable publications, some of the members availed themselves of the microfilm facilities for personal research, before this remarkable building at Colindale closes and re-locates.

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Out of the Hay and into the Hops: Hop cultivation in Wealden Kent and hop marketing in Southwark, 1744-2000, Celia Cordle, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011, 181p, ISBN 9781907396045, £18-99.

Having been born on the borders of Kent over sixty years ago, I was very much introduced to the existence of the Southwark hop trade and the world of itinerant hop-pickers by both of my grandfathers. Both were white-collar workers before the First World War but, through where they lived and worked almost in the corridor of hop-picker migrations to Kent and hop movements to the markets at The Borough in Southwark, they were acutely conscious of this trade and the socio-cultural life of the workers involved.

This means that I opened Celia Cordle’s Out of the Hay and into the Hops with great enthusiasm. I have not been disappointed. This thorough piece of research covers two hundred and fifty years of Wealden hop cultivation and its ensuing trade. It is constructed on the basis of case studies and it is enhanced by oral evidence from those who were involved, both as farmers and as hop-workers. Hop gardens and oast houses are especially part of the historic landscape of Kent and Celia Cordle explains the technical and personal side of this landscape very helpfully.

From my point of view, the section on ‘fringe’ farms was extremely interesting as it revealed that hop farming spread in some instances as far away from the Weald as Ivychurch in the Romney Marsh and that its presence there may have been linked to predominant local sheep economy, possibly arising from movement between winter and summer pasture and certainly from the trade routes associated with the sheep economy.

This strongly recommended book has enabled me to develop my understanding of this agricultural, commercial and social phenomenon, in effect providing me with a framework or structure to surround and explain the oral tradition to which I had been introduced more than half a century ago.

Trevor James

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Secured for the town

The story of Huddersfield’s Greenhead Park

David Griffiths
Friends of Greenhead Park 2011  £5
C/o Refreshment Rooms, Greenhead Park, Huddersfield HD1 4HS
fogphuddersfield@googlemail.com

Huddersfield came relatively late to municipal developments in the nineteenth century, well behind its neighbours Bradford, Oldham and Halifax in both incorporation and the provision of public amenities such as parks. This was largely due to the dominance of the local landowning family of Ramsden. The story of Greenhead Park illustrates the complex relationships between the Ramsdens, the council, individual civic leaders, as well as businesses and organisations. Issues of power and influence, finance and ethics abound. The park became a place for music, theatre, a children’s playground, sports and informal leisure facilities for the people. A sombre and impressive memorial was built to citizens who lost their lives in the Boer War. 

Its significance goes beyond the local, as Huddersfield was recognised as giving ‘ a magnificent national lead’ to the Holidays at Home programme in 1941.  The local paper enthused ‘ Every Tom, Dick and Harry, every Mary, Lucy and Jane, young and old alike – all are invited to put aside their war worries and join in the fun and frolic’.  (p 50)

In recent times activities have taken on a new lease of life reflecting the multi-cultural nature of Huddersfield’s population. A successful bid for funding from HLF ‘to restore the Park to its Victorian splendour’, and a project in association with the University of Huddersfield Centre for Oral History Research, look to its future in a very positive light.

This is a concise but comprehensive history of the park, well-written, with endnotes and comments on sources, and generously illustrated, though sadly no index. Apart from that  caveat, it is excellent value for money.

Rosedale Railway Heritage Trail

Kirkby, Great Boughton & Ingleby Greenhow Local History Group, and Rosedale History Society

Produced to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the first running of this North Yorkshire railway on 27 March 1861, this colourful A2 folded sheet serves both as a concise history of the line and the industries and communities it served, and also as a guide to exploring the old trackbed which is now a permissive path for walkers and cyclists.  The pocket-sized result tackles the inevitable problem of how to arrange the different sections of information to be able to read them in any logical order by providing distinct one-third-of –A4 sections on topics such as locomotives and rolling stock, geology, Ingleby Incline, snow, and so on. Although it is not clear which order they should be read, on the whole that is not important to understanding the historical story. Only ‘Social Life of the Railway and Mine Workers’ runs from one ‘page’ to another.  The reverse has a map of the route, with generously captioned images at key points along the line. Indication of the equivalent OS sheets to go alongside would give valuable reassurance if undertaking the walk. 

Rochester Through Time

Robert Turcan
Amberley Publishing Plc £14.99  ISBN 978 1 84868 270 2 2011

Part of Amberley Publishing’s extensive Through Timeseries, this is book joins the vast number of  publications that contrast old and new photographs of the same views to demonstrate how somewhere has changed in the past 150 years or so. Kent seems particularly well served with these; Faversham, Sittingbourne and Maidstone have already benefited from this treatment, Chatham and Gravesend are forthcoming.  Rochester’s history dates from the Romans, and includes a splendid castle and magnificent cathedral, both notably photogenic.  Associations with the River Medway, and consequent marine industries, abound. More recent developments include exploitation of Charles Dickens who lived and worked nearby at Gadshill. His father was employed as a pay clerk in the naval dockyard, Chatham where the exhibition ‘Dickens World’ is now to be found.

Hotels, schools, substantial houses, philanthropy and commerce all feature. Coverage extends beyond the town boundaries to include Upnoor, Cliffe, Cooling, Halling and Strood.  A tradition of pageants in Rochester seems to have attracted photographers over the years; the historical pageant of 1931 involved over 5,000 people. Annual events in modern times include May Day Sweeps’ Festival, and two linked to Dickens. In June and December there is much dressing-up as Victorian characters from his novels.

This is an evocative and diverse collection; the captions have been exploited to good effect to provide an outline history of the town. The organisation of the material is not crystal clear (outwards from the centre? chronological?) and I must reiterate my oft repeated request for an index and a map to locate all the places mentioned.

Jane Howells

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SUPPORTING ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS

When budgets for archive services are being cut on all sides, how can we best support new acquisitions, especially of material which comes up for sale?

Joining a support group for your local record office is one way, and many such groups have made very great contributions to fundraising to save collections at risk. But what if your local archive service does not have such a group or if the archives are primarily of local rather than national interest? 

One very practical way is by becoming a member of the Friends of the National Libraries (FNL). Despite its name, this charity, established in 1931, helps local as well as national bodies acquire manuscripts and archives, especially those which might otherwise be exported. Over two hundred institutions, including county record offices and university archives, have been helped by grants of money from the Friends of the National Libraries towards purchases. One great advantage is their impressively fast response time to requests – crucially important if material is for sale at auction.  If the case is urgent and worthwhile, an offer of support may be agreed by return of email. Many archivists have reason to be grateful for such speedy action by the FNL, as well as for the generosity of their grants.

The range and diversity of the grants  given is enormous.

The FNL publishes an annual report and a searchable list of all grants made since 1931 can be seen on the charity’s website www.friendsofnationallibraries.org.uk.. During 2011 the FNL’s budget for grants from its operating fund will be limited to £125,000 unless significant legacies or exceptional donations are received and, in order to maintain its resources, the charity is actively seeking new members. The annual subscription is £25 and for eligible tax payers Gift Aid is available.  Further information can be obtained from the website (address above) or from the Membership Secretary, Friends of the National Libraries, c/o Department of Manuscripts, The British Library, 96 Euston  Road, London, NW1 2DB.,

The value of the work of Friends of the National Libraries to local historians is very much greater, but is perhaps not always well known. Do consider supporting them by becoming a member. For a small subscription, you will be helping archive services throughout the country to build up their collections and to safeguard unique historical documents from dispersal, especially overseas. 

Margaret O’Sullivan

May 2011

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In early April, for the first time in my life, I went down a coalmine. The Big Pit in Blaenafon, a branch of the National Museum of Wales, is a fascinating place, in a hugely evocative setting. As a working pit it once employed 1300 people and produced over a quarter of a million tons of coal a year. When it closed in 1980 it was the oldest operating colliery in Wales. The museum—the former colliery—stands high on the hillside above Blaenafon, the town which (as its name indicates) is at ‘the head of the river’, in this case the Afon Llwyd which flows down to Pontypool and Caerleon and once ran black as silty ink.

Down from the colliery, where once stood a vast ironworks, there are now new woodlands, a remarkable industrial estate (I’ve rarely seen more interestingly designed buildings in such a place anywhere) and the town of Blaenafon. Many groups of pit and ironworks cottages have been demolished, others survive in a setting changed dramatically in the past half century. Where once skeins of railway lines were crowded with trucks and officiously-shunting small engines, there are now green ways, and the smoky pall of industry has given way to clear wide skies. 

The entire upper valley is a World Heritage site because of its exceptional range of industrial archaeological sites and ‘social landscapes’ (a term I think I’ve just minute made up) from the 1770s through to the mid-twentieth century. The imposing ruins of the late-eighteenth century Blaenafon Ironworks, the best preserved such site in the world, stand next to the three rows of ironworks cottages dating from the 1790s, two of them carefully furnished in the style of that period, when the workers enjoyed relative prosperity, and the 1840s, when their conditions had become grindingly poor.

From the pit there is a sweeping view across the valley to the moorland ridge beyond, an entire hillside, covering more than two square miles, pitted and pocked by mining, quarrying, tipping and the scouring of the surface by deliberately-created flash floods which stripped the overburden to expose the minerals beneath. It’s a ravaged and riveting landscape, with a powerful character of its own – no longer as bare and stark, as vegetation has grown and softened its lines, but an enduring monument to the determination with which ironmasters and coalowners remodelled their corner of the world.

I went underground in the company of twelve astonishingly well-behaved teenage French schoolchildren, their two teachers, who spoke beautiful English with a lovely accent, and our guide, a witty and gifted interpreter of coalpit life (many of his forebears had worked that very pit). But the French schoolteachers, translating for the benefit of their pupils, could not follow all he said because they weren’t used to a thick Eastern Valleys accent. So I hesitantly tried to explain, in inadequate French, what was meant by the word that sounded like ‘stimkle’. Steam-coal, I said, for railway engines and warships … they understood, and thus I acquired the unofficial post of linguistic intermediary, reworking powerful Anglo-Welsh through the medium of rather basic O-level French which, with its pure (and thus useless) grammar and detailed investigations of how to ask for a sandwich, had not focused noticeably on the technical procedures whereby a small child would open a trapdoor with a string so a laden coal-tram could be pushed along the level. Very remiss of the authors of Le français d’aujourd’hui back in the late 1960s! 

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Local History News has reached issue number 100. As you can see from the picture on the back cover it has changed considerably from the simple news sheet of early days, when it was started as a way of communicating with members to run alongside our well-established academic journal The Local Historian. Its contents have expanded and varied, but maintain the principle of sharing news about the extensive, diverse and exciting world of local history around the country. Readers’ comments indicate that LHN continues to be valued, despite developments in technology, and as a source of information about activities of societies, individuals and institutions, especially at the grass-roots, it still plays a significant role. This would not be possible without the many contributors who send information, ideas and suggestions. Thank you all.

People

At the 2011 AGM in June Professor Claire Cross completed her term of office in the Chair of BALH and Helen Good was elected as her successor.  Helen Good is a committee member of the East Yorkshire Local History society and also teaches at Hull University on the Local and Regional History part-time degree course.  She is primarily a Tudor-Stuart local historian with a special interest in the east coast port towns, and she is writing a book on the port towns and the Spanish Armada of 1588.  Her work for BALH so far has been mainly practical, running BALH conferences on Yorkshire history and for the Poor Law records project. 

Jo Mattingly from Cornwall, and Nigel Tringham from Staffordshire also came to the end of their time on Council, and Michael Farrar decided not to stand again. We wish Jo and Michael well, and we are very pleased that Nigel will continue to represent VCH to BALH.

Newly elected to Council is Jacquelené Fillmore. Many readers will have appreciated Jacquie’s articles in TLH on internet sites, and will have a copy of the Directory of local history internet sites she complied – our recent best-seller.  We are delighted she has become a Trustee and welcome her to BALH.   She writes that her interest in history stems from a serendipitous meeting with two Chelsea Pensioners when she was a young girl; they fuelled in her a love of history which she has pursued throughout her life.  Having been offered voluntary redundancy she took the opportunity to pursue this by embarking on a degree course in British History in 1997. After graduation, and a year out, she joined the Master of Studies in Local & Regional History at Cambridge University. Jacquie's particular interests lie in Food Production in Bedfordshire during the First World War, and in the Bedford Workhouse during the late 1800s.

We often mention the importance of volunteers in the world of local history, and BALH itself is no exception. Without people such as these, and the other members of Council and Committees who give their time, energy and knowledge to the Association we would not be able to achieve what we do. Thank you all too.

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‘We’ll Meet Again’: Stockport War Memorial and Art Gallery is the venue for an event on 30 October commemorating the Guernsey  evacuees who fled their island in June 1940 and found safety in Northern England. Gilliam Mawson has been heading a research project (see LHN XXX). There will be a variety of activities including film, documents and photographs, sharing memories, special experiences for children, plus free tea and biscuits.http://guernseyevacuees.wordpress.com/community-group/ gillianmawson@btinternet.com

Tring Local History Museum has been officially opened in the 1893 office of the town’s former cattle market.  The volunteer-run museum which is open free of charge is a joint project between the town council and the museum society. Exhibits include features on the local straw plait trade and the surrounding Rothschild estate.www.tringlocalhistorymuseum.org.uk

The current exhibition at Chertsey Museum is ‘Hue and Cry, the history of the Surrey Constabulary’ which runs until 17 September. Items on dsiplay come from the museum’s own collection and from the Surrey Police Museum. For further information contactenquiries@runnymede.gov.uk

Amberley Museum in Sussex has restored the De Witt Kilns which form a centrepiece of their site. Built to an early 20th century Belgian design to burn chalk with coal to create lime, they were not successful and by 1910 all but two had been converted to traditional English bottle kilns. The renovation includes a new exhibition Life and Lime at Amberley.  AIM www.aim-museums.co.uk

The British Postal Museum and Archive will not now be developing a new base in Swindon, due to ‘significant changes in funding expectations’. However ‘the BPMA retains its commitment to securing an accessible future home, and its staff will continue working to achieve the best possible outcome for BPMA and its unique collections’.  There will be a major exhibition at the Post Modern Gallery in Swindon 6 Oct – 6 November The Post Office in Pictures showcasing some iconic photographic images from the Royal Mail Archive. Further details and much more on their new websitewww.posalheritage.org.uk

Gosport Hampshire is the home of the global diving industry and now has the Museum of Diving recently opened by the Historic Diving Society. The co-inventor of the diving helmet John Deane lived in Gosport from 1835 to 1845 and during that time he discovered the wreck of the Mary Rose. www.divingmuseum.co.uk

Another water based industry has also achieved ‘museum-status’. The Museum of British Surfing is to be found at Braunton in North Devon, though the collection has been holding touring exhibitions there and in other coastal areas for some time, and will continue to do so. There will be collaborative projects with the local youth service. Surfboards of course dominate the collection, but there is an array of memorabilia associated with the sport and its special locations.www.museumofbritishsurfing.org.uk

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This issue of LHN contains several articles about archives, so this section is somewhat briefer than usual. However, several pieces of good news need to be shared amongst the gloom of cuts and reduced services around the country.

The new Carlisle Archives Centre is open, containing over a million documents, not only those formerly held at Carlisle Castle but many more that had previously been in separate storage units, only available by prior request. Alongside the modern building is historic Lady Gilford’s House that will be used for exhibitions and other events.www.cumbria.gov.uk

Sheffield Archives will reopen in September are months of building work which has installed state-of-the-art strongroom facilities. Developments to the online archive catalogue have also been made to make more of Sheffield’s archives available online with quick and easy access. www.Sheffield.gov.uk/archives

Talks from experts are regularly part of the programme of activities at The National Archives. If you want to hear any and missed them at Kew, they are being made available as podcasts from the TNA website.www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/podcasts Recent additions include Mark Pearsall on ‘Sources for tracing agricultural labourers’, David Clarke on the UFO file release, March 2011, and ‘Broadmoor revealed: the Victorian asylum’ by Mark Stevens.

Preserving digital records for posterity is both important and potential problematic. Cheshire Archives and Local Studies already have advice on caring for paper, parchment and photographs on their website, and have recently added guidelines for digital depositors, seewww.archives.Cheshire.gov.uk under Record Care. They provide support for groups, organisations and individuals in preserving their own records, whatever the format.

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The Library of the Society of Friends contains a very varied and wide-ranging collection of material relating to the work of the Quakers. Recent accessions include the papers of Leonard Ernest Wilman, born 1897, which document his experience as a conscientious objector during the First World War (MSS Acc 11285), and the archives of the Friends Armenian Mission. This was established in 1881 to relieve the suffering of persecuted Armenian people in Asia Minor under the Ottoman Empire (MSS Acc 11287). As well as books and periodicals, the Library’s online catalogue includes details of over 8,000 articles that can be searched by subject, author or title.www.quaker.org.uk/library