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The Local Historian
Volume 38, Number 2 - May 2008

Contents

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Current issue

Editorial
By: Alan Crosby

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EDITORIAL

There is little resemblance between Chairman Mao and John Beckett, director of the Victoria History of the Counties of England (known to most of us as the VCH), but both have produced a Little Red Book. The Chinese version has a significantly larger print run, and may have had a greater influence on global history, but both enshrine thoughts, beliefs and attitudes which are very much of their time. The VCH volume is entitled The Little Big Red Book and it has been published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the VCH project by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. There is a compendium of information, ranging from a list of all contributors to VCH volumes 1990 .. 2007, via a summary contents list of all Big Red Books and new popular volumes published in that period, to a series of short essays on the history of this extraordinary and idiosyncratic English institution since 1933. It is attractively illustrated with portraits of luminaries, maps, and photographs reflecting themes covered by recent VCH work. There are also testimonials from figures associated with culture and history, including Boris Johnson, a trustee of the Oxfordshire VCH who, by the time this appears in print, may have other matters on his plate.

Its appearance is timely in other ways, for the VCH has been undergoing far-reaching changes and will surely continue to experience further reshaping and reappraisal during coming decades. The most significant, and one with a long ancestry, is the perpetual challenge of finding sufficient funding to carry on the work. This is hardly news, but the evergrowing costs of such a project, and the evergreater complexity of the administrative and organisational frameworks which lie behind any such enterprise, have for many years presented the VCH and its editors with permanent insecurities. That, sadly, shows little sign of changing, and we might cynically feel that to the Rt. Hon. Hazel Blears, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who suggests that By working with local volunteers, the Victorian County History is helping local people to discover, record and take pride in the history of their communities, the volunteer element has obvious financial attractions. And yet the volunteers working on current projects represent a fundamental and very welcome reorientation of the focus of the VCH, which began in the 1960s and 1970s with the inclusion in the Red Books of extended general essays on social, cultural, political and religious topics, essays which in some instances could be published separately as accessible introductions to key themes in local history.

This refocusing, with the adoption of less daunting and more popular works which parallel the traditional (and essential) specialist topographical compilations, has now continued into the production (under the auspices of the Englands Past For Everyone project) of attractive and readable paperback books on particular places, regional themes, and key topics within communities, thus, the volume on Bristol looks in depth at migration and ethnicity over the past millennium, while that on Codford is a popular history of a smaller Wiltshire community. The VCH will never escape either the legacy of its own late Victorian origins (and that is no bad thing) or the burden of fundraising, but it has shown in recent years a welcome ability to adapt and be flexible. That, far more than any sentimental attachment to a great institution, is what has allowed it to survive and flourish in the early 21st century. Floreat VCH!

Searching for the small people of medieval London
By: Caroline Barron

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The abstracts and brief chronicles of the time: memoranda and annotations in parish registers 1538 - 1812
By: Steve Hobbs

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The vanishing unemployed, hidden disabled, and embezzling master: researching Coventry Workhouse registers
By: Rosemary Hall

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A Kent market town and the Great Rebellion: Bromley 1642 - 1660
By: Patricia Knowlden

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Reviews Editor: round-up for 2007
By: Evelyn Lord

Recent publications in local history

Reviews

Leominster Minster, Priory and Borough c 660 -1539 reviewed by Elizabeth Gemmill

A Woman in Wartime London: The Diary of Kathleen Tipper 1941 - 1945 reviewed by Elizabeth Roberts

Killerton, Camborne and Westminster reviewed by Elizabeth Roberts

Church & people in a Victorian Country Town Barton Parish 1830 - 1900; Lincolnshire Parish Correpondence of John Kaye Bishop of Lincoln 1827-53; The Barony of Glasgow a window on to church and people in the nineteenth century; A Northern Catholic Community in 1823 A Report to Rome. reviewed by Evelyn Lord

The Jacobite Invasion of 1745 in North West England reviewed by John Sutton

Medieval Devon and Cornwall, Shaping an ancient countryside reviewed by Graham Winton

My Dear Brother: the letters of Thomas and Henry Hookham 1830-1899 from schooldays in Princes Risborough Bucks, to later life in London and in Christchurch New Zealand reviewed by Pamela Horn

The Poor Law in Ireland 1838-1948 reviewed by Dick Hunter

Rothley and The Abolition of the Slave Trade: the mutual endeavours of Babington, Gisborne, Wilberforce and Macaulay reviewed by Kate Thompson

Codford: wool and war in Wiltshire reviewed by Pam Slocombe

Jewish London an illustrated history reviewed by Christopher French

Women in Thirteenth Century Lincolnshire reviewed by John S Lee

Wiltshire Water Meadows: understanding and conserving the remains of a farming and engineering revolution reviewed by Tom Williamson