A VILLAGE DISCOVERS ITS HISTORY

Author: Burk, Kathleen
Volume: 35 Issue: 2 | February 1985 | Page 44 - 47<
Copyright History Today Ltd

Kathleen Burk looks at the recent history weekend organised at Long Wittenham, a village of less than a thousand residents on the River Thames in south Oxfordshire.

One evening in early April 1983, the Committee of the Wittenham Women's Institute, pressed to come up with a project to promote the image of the WI in the community, decided to sponsor a local history project. The idea was not particularly unusual, since WIs have often collected field names or reminiscences, and have frequently produced scrapbooks or short village histories. Further, the parish of Long Wittenham itself is rich in historical evidence, both archaeological and documentary; nevertheless, very little had been written on the parish, and that which had was largely to do with the archaeology or the church. But finally, a not unimportant element in persuading the WI to embark on the project was the fact that I am a professional historian as well as being the WI president, and I was willing to direct the research.

“Like most English villages, Long Wittenham is a combination of the old and new, and although there are few unbridgeable barriers between the older and new inhabitants,”

In fact, I profess a different field entirely, and in truth the project lacked the benefit of a trained local history tutor. The real importance of my role was to give encouragement and direction - which can be provided by anyone with sufficient enthusiasm. With an enthusiasm born of ignorance, then, the initial project grew ever more ambitious over the year; this was a tendency which a more knowledgable leader might well have felt obliged to dampen early on. Although sponsored by the WI, the project rapidly grew beyond its bounds, and non-members - men as well as women -took an active part. The outcome was an overwhelmingly successful pageant, exhibition and booklet, a strong sense of accomplishment, and a newly constituted Long Wittenham Local History Group independent of the WI.

What projects did we organise, and what was their goal? First of all, in my mind at least, was the ultimate goal of a substantial parish history. But even in the short-term, a booklet on a limited period was necessary, partially to ensure that all those doing research would realise why they had to be accurate, but also because research which is not written up is dead. It was determined that there would be a Wittenham history booklet produced to a professional standard. This clearly required high standards both of research and of information storage by all those taking part: notes without references were unacceptable, and all notes were typed up on A4 paper and copies deposited with the group secretary/archivist and in my own files (since it was clear from the outset that, at least in the first instance, I would be doing the writing-up).

The research effort was broken up into a number of smaller projects, some of them concerned with making categories of information generally available and some with finding out about specific topics. In the first category, we bought xerox copies of the census returns 1841-1881 from the Public Record Office, transcribed the nineteenth and twentieth-century parish registers, the school registers and logbooks, and made inroads into the material in St John's College, Oxford (lord of the manor), Exeter College (owner of the advowson), the Berkshire and Oxfordshire County Record Offices and local newspapers.

There was a wide range of specific projects. A number of members traced the histories of their houses and the former occupants; to make the material more generally available, two members of the group began to construct a Houses Index. Each house has a 5" x 8" card on which are entered references to and summaries of material relating to the house. There was a photography project, a farms project in which ownership and land use were traced, and an oral history project. The histories of significant families were reconstructed, and attempts were made to find out about religion, schooling and health care in the parish since 1800. The Group looked at the enclosure, at the Friendly Society and at the care of the poor.

One other special project was the graveyard survey. We particularly wished to involve some of the older children, and we therefore asked the Junior Church Group if they would undertake this task. One evening was spent discussing with them what was involved and the techniques they would be using. A requirement of this sort of project, of course, is an accurate map of the churchyard showing each of the gravestones in its proper place, and again we were fortunate in having in the village a man whose profession requires skills in mapmaking. He worked with the group mapping the churchyard a quarter at a time, and over the year the group transcribed all of the gravestones. Thus, not only was a very useful project carried out, but a group of nine to fourteen-year-olds gained experience in historical research as well as the knowledge that their results will be deposited in all of the relevant libraries and archives for others to consult.

A substantial proportion of the research was clearly directed towards the booklet, but booklets, however well-written, would only be read by a minority, and the main point of the WI project was history publicly presented. Thus it was assumed from the beginning that not only would there be an exhibition, but a pageant as well. There were several reasons for this. First of all, it would enable a panoramic view of the parish history to be presented; since the exhibition itself would concentrate largely, although not exclusively, on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as would the booklet, this would be the only real opportunity to place the recent past in its context for everyone to see. Secondly, this was a way to involve the children of the village, since (through the school) all of them would take part in the pageant. But finally, a dramatic production has an excitement that no static exhibition, no matter how well presented, can match. But we found that there were real difficulties in writing the pageant. How, for example, should the origins and consequences of the enclosure of the parish be presented in just a few minutes, when it has to be written in a way that makes it understandable to the audience, many of whom would not have heard of the word 'enclosure' in that context before, while ensuring that it is actable by schoolchildren? In the end, the pageant was written as a series of discrete scenes linked together with a narrative. In fact, it worked very well, largely due to the imaginative production. Having videoed it, we now have a permanent record of the pageant.

Like most English villages, Long Wittenham is a combination of the old and new, and although there are few unbridgeable barriers between the older and new inhabitants, nevertheless there was some small apprehension on our part that those who had lived in the village for many years might resent the presumption of newcomers attempting to find out about history which did not, as it were, belong to them. Fortunately, this was not a problem.

Goodwill is certainly required if treasured old photographs are to emerge from their owners' cupboards. We had three main ideas in mind with regard to photos. First, to acquire all we could; the usual procedure was to borrow them from their owners and have them copied for our files. Secondly, to replicate former scenes today for comparative purposes, so whenever a revealing photograph of pre-1914 vintage was unearthed the exact scene was rephotographed. And thirdly, we wished to record the buildings in the parish as they are today so that future generations of Wittenham historians will not have the same difficulties we had in gaining a clear idea of what the village looked like in earlier periods. Accordingly, every individual house and barn in the parish was photographed; (representative examples only of the council and private estates were photographed). This was by far the most expensive part of the research.

There was, therefore, a lot of parish-based work which went on over the year. At the same time, another group of six were initiated into the delights and frustrations of archival research. Apart from mine, there was little documentary research experience in the group. We began by consulting a number of books on various aspects of local history, the information from which was consolidated into a number of short guides to facilitate research. Then, two or three at a time, we visited the archives of St John's College, where we all worked together doing actual research. This was very successful: the members got involved immediately, proper references were noted down, and any questions raised by the material could be sorted out between or amongst ourselves then and there. Establishing the original guidelines ensured that reliable research could be carried out over the period and much more was accomplished than could have been done by a single trained researcher.

By March 1984, eleven months after starting, it was decided to call a halt to research, except to answer specific questions, and to begin shaping our material. It was also time to begin serious planning for the exhibition, and we decided to try and reconstruct the village as it had been in the 1870s and then show the results by means of a model. This was the brainchild of the archivist of the group, and it grew out of her own responsibilities in the project. One task with which she had been persevering over the year was the transference of data from the 1851 and later censuses onto People Index forms, an idea taken from an article by Kate Tiller in the Summer 1979 (Vol. 1, No. 8) issue of the Oxfordshire Family Historian. The archivist had thereby become very familiar with nineteenth-century Wittenham families and their occupations. We had access as well to all the parish records, including school registers dating from 1833. Finally, we had traced a copy of a detailed estate map of Wittenham belonging to St John's College, which by 1880 had owned roughly two-thirds of the parish, providing a good idea of the shape of the village; detailed knowledge of the shapes of individual houses was provided by those members studying the history of those houses. We felt that we had enough information, therefore, to construct a reasonably accurate model of the village, the houses of which would be labelled with the names and occupations of the inhabitants. The archivist marshalled a number of schoolchildren and a few adults and over three months they made models of all of the houses, barns, trees, the church and village cross, and painted flats showing the roads, the Thames, and some fields and hedges. (Even four-year-olds are capable of making trees out of twigs and green sponge.) The result was a 25-foot-long model of the village which was one of the high points of the exhibition.

The guiding principle in making the model was to enable people to visualise the village as it had been, but it was felt that it was equally important for them to be able to see how individuals had actually lived. Fortunately, one member of the group was in the process of renovating an old medieval building, called Church Cottage, which had been used since 1945 as a tractor shed. Built around 1440, its primary use had been as housing for agricultural labourers, and it was decided to try and furnish one of the three cottages into which the building had been divided as it would have looked about 1880. A member of the group who had some years' experience in buying and renovating antiques undertook this task. The upshot was that no house in the parish was safe from her considering eye, and possessions from a number of local houses found their way into the cottage for the exhibition. With one cottage thus furnished, the other two, now returned to their original form as a two-bay open hall, were left empty, with the owner available to conduct tours. The single most popular exhibit, it excited in particular the interest of schoolteachers, several of whom asked the local history group to draw up a guide to selected houses in Long Wittenham for use in their school courses, a project scheduled for next year.

Along with the model village and the furnished labourer's cottage, many other exhibits were planned. Besides the usual exhibits of photographs, nineteenth-century clothes and old farm implements, we wanted ones which would reflect the group's research. In the old barn which housed the farm implements, for example, there was also a map setting out the field names of the parish, biographies of some of the larger individual farms, and maps showing the changes in general land ownership in the parish. These were all based on research into old leases, wills and maps as well as on oral evidence. The school housed an exhibit on nineteenth-century education, based on the school log books and registers, and on the school deeds and building plans. We also had an exhibit on health care in the parish, the project of two of the women with a special interest in nursing. They found that local hospital museums and archives were generous with their loans of material and implements; of special interest to everyone was a gruesome instrument used to decapitate stillborn foetuses in the womb to facilitate their removal. There were exhibits on the WI, on the work in the parish of the Council for the Protection of Rural England and on the lords of the manor before St John's College. The archaeological exhibit included a map showing the sites of excavations in the parish; over the past century, digs have turned up remains from the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, an entire Romano-British village and two important Saxon cemetaries.

There is one further consideration, and that is publicity: there is little point in putting on an history weekend if no one comes to see it. Publicity was the responsibility of two members of the group, and they began several months in advance of the date of the exhibition, drawing up a press release and designing a poster, and then writing to all the local newspapers, museums and schools. Nearer the date, the posters were pinned to every available local noticeboard. One of the most useful contacts made was with the local radio station, Radio Oxford, who gave the project good publicity. A number of visitors mentioned this as their source of information about the weekend.

By the second weekend in June 1984, we were able to put on an impressive exhibition. The weather was beautiful, and over the two days large numbers of villagers visited the exhibits repeatedly, since one 50p ticket entitled the bearer to see the pageant and to make repeated visits to the exhibits. Former villagers flocked back for the weekend, and new leads for research were proffered and noted down. The general feeling in the parish, even of those who had not taken part in the project, seemed to be one of great pride. 'The Pageant of Long Wittenham', with scenes from the coming of the Romans to the parish to the First World War, was an overwhelming success, and was the single most important event of the weekend in bringing all sections of the village together and strengthening the bonds of community. The booklet, entitled The Parish of Long Wittenham 1800-1920: A Brief History , ran to 7,500 words and was professionally printed with a stiff card cover. It included eight photographs and a map showing a reconstruction of the parish in 1800. This was on sale over the weekend, together with a set of six postcards printed from old photographs; the postcards in particular were designed to help recoup the fairly heavy costs incurred over the year.

Where do we go from here - and were any useful lessons learned? The project will certainly continue. The sponsorship of the WI, which was specifically directed towards the history weekend, has now ended, and the group has constituted itself as the Long Wittenham Local History Group. The goal remains a substantial book, but that will only be completed some years in the future. The importance of having a continuous project made us decide to put on a smaller exhibition on the history of the church and the Methodist chapel next year. Besides this, one of the local museums has mooted the possibility of putting on a smaller version of the 1984 exhibition in their building. There is in addition the guide to the history of houses to begin. These are specific projects but they weill be undertaken along with the continuing work on the general history of the parish.

Another lesson was the importance of the WI's sponsorship to the success of the project. First, it gave the project the imprimatur of an established village group, as well as facilitating access to many who had much to contribute, whether of photographs, reminiscences or more specific help on the project. But beyond that, and on a strictly practical level, the sponsorship was very useful when it came to fund raising. Local history projects, done properly, are expensive: the cost of xeroxing, the cost of photographing, and in particular, the cost of printing the booklet and postcards - even the cost of renting the lights for the pageant - all added up to a sum considerably in excess of ��1,000. We have managed to cover our costs, but this would have been difficult without the help of the WI, who not only organised the compilation and sale of a cookbook, and a jumble sale, to raise funds, but supplied teas and coffees on the weekend itself. Other local history groups should take note and build their bridges accordingly.

All the members of the group found the whole project extraordinarily stimulating. For many of the members the project re-awakened an interest in history which had been buried under the urgency of daily tasks. I found it illuminating, although for different reasons; in particular, I discovered just how difficult local history research can be. So many different skills are needed: in reading the landscape as well as documents, in architecture and paleography, and in general in marrying widely diverse types of evidence. I certainly feel myself to be a much better historian after this year, and I recommend a dip into these waters to other historians, particularly to those who, like me, concentrate on political and diplomatic history. But probably the most satisfying part of the entire exercise - and I am sure that I speak for my colleagues in the project as much as for myself - was the fact that were able to present to the parish a picture of its past, and thereby to give the villagers a sense of their origins. And we had a lot of fun.

Further Reading:

1. The two books by W.G. Hoskins, Local History In England (London, 2nd ed., 1972) and Fieldwork in Local History (London, 2nd ed., 1982), are both inspiring and useful, a pleasure to read.
2. As absolute beginners, we found two short books by David Iredale, Discovering Local History (Aylesbury, 2nd ed. 1977 and Discovering Your Old House (Aylesbury, 2nd ed. 1977), particularly helpful.
3. For guidance on organising specific projects, the book of essays edited by Alan Rogers, Group Projects in Local History (Folkestone, 1977), proved to be a mine of information and sensible advice.

About the Author:
Kathleen Burk is a lecturer in history and politics at Imperial College, London, and co-editor with Colin M. Lewis of Latin America, Economic Imperialism and the State (Athlone, 1984).