Northumberland Archives is a heritage partner to a National Lottery Funded project, the ‘Northumberland Village Halls Heritage Project’. The project aims to celebrate the history of some of Northumberland’s Village Halls and ensure that records and memories are preserved for future generations. The project was developed by and is managed by Community Action Northumberland (CAN) whose mission is to benefit and help sustain rural communities in Northumberland. This blog was written by Lynn Hall.
This whole process started when towards the end of 2021 a former committee member contacted our chairman David Pentney and informed him she had six boxes of old information concerning the Village hall. When David looked through the boxes he found loads of history from the Village hall including the minute’s book used by the original trustees dating back to 1928.
However the book was looking a little fragile so he contacted Community Action Northumberland (CAN) for advice on restoration and how best to display the information. From that David arranged a meeting with CAN representative Tracey Morgan in early April which Nick & I attended, – being quite new to the village we were interested in its history, although we did not realise until we attended the meeting that our hall was enrolled on the CAN Village Hall history projectJ. Lucky for us we had all the info for our project contained within those boxes including two minutes books covering 1928 to 1999.
As part of the project Nick, David & I visited Northumberland Archives on 26th April meeting representatives from other Village halls who were doing the project. We were given a crash course on what materials can be used to preserve documents, as well as ideas on how to do any research we may need to do for our individual projects. We were also treated to a tour behind the scenes to see how they store documents so they are preserved for future generations, as well as how they are trying to get a lot of documents scanned for online viewing. It was a well presented and interesting tour.
Initially we were hoping to do a synopsis of both minute books which would form the central theme of our project, however as Nick worked his way through the minutes and we realised how time consuming this was we decided to focus on the 50 years up to 1978, which was still quite an undertaking. One of the biggest problems was deciphering the different handwriting styles over the years – we would think we had it cracked & then the minute taker would change and, therefore, the handwriting too! Another issue we had was getting information from the locals as we are new to the village so this was why we concentrated on the minute books.
As Nick continued with the synopsis he decided to include subsections on points of interest e.g. the caretaker – as there was a lot of discussion in early minutes on the caretaker’s duties & wages. We considered printing the synopsis into booklet form & distributing to villagers but as I typed Nick’s notes up it became apparent this would be too costly, so another idea is to put it on our website for people to read or download.
With the CAN/ National Lottery grant of £300 we have purchased some display boards. These will allow us to showcase all the information and photos we have at the coffee morning we are organising for the 26th November, hopefully we will have a good turnout as we are offering free coffee & biscuits. Anyone who wants a copy of the synopsis can have it emailed – also allowing us a platform to email them about future events.
Nick and I have certainly learned about the village through doing the project, with interesting anecdotes like the lamb which was offered as a raffle prize at an Easter dance – it did not mention if this was alive or butchered. Or the caretaker saga in the 1930s when the caretaker at the time was asked to take a pay cut from 7 to 5/- a week, when he refused new tenders were requested for his job – however his was the only tender they received at, you’ve guessed it, 7/- a week so he carried on in his role. Then there was all the Google searching we did when we were looking up e.g. a needle & thread race or old penny pitching which was part of a sports day held in 1930.
So although initially we wondered what we had let ourselves in for we feel it was worth doing.