Woods Ware China at the Serving Hatch

In the 1870s, William Wilkinson left the village of Islip in Oxfordshire and came to Sheffield for a better job. Without this minor contribution to the industrial revolution I may not exist – William Wilkinson was my Great Great Grandad and it was in Sheffield that he met my Great Great Grandmother, who had joined the throng from a village in Northamptonshire. They settled in the considerably less bucolic surroundings of Attercliffe among the steelworks. When I traced my family tree it brought me into contact with a wide range of tiny villages that I had never previously heard of – the Wilkinson story was repeated in every branch of my tree and was a fascinating history lesson on how our cities were built. I have since taken an interest in all of my ancestral villages from the viewpoint of a now post-industrial Sheffield, but Islip has become my favourite. So let’s have a look at their village hall. Islip was also the birthplace of Edward the Confessor (ooh, I wonder if my an...

My photograph of the Book Exchange Shelf at a Derbyshire Community Hall is somewhat obscured by a folded trestle table, which I was not about to move to get the perfect shot. I know trestle tables, they bite. Those fold out legs are the cause of many a finger blister. But you get the idea. Anyone is free to take a book from the shelf and do what they want with it. And you can leave your unwanted ones too. Ideal if you’ve just finished a novel that you weren’t that fussed about while you waited for the interminable length of time that it takes Brownies to finish. What a great scheme – everywhere should have one. A free book encourages you to broaden your horizons. Where you might not pay £1 or £2 for a book from a charity shop in case you don’t like it, a free shelf encourages you to give it a try and possibly open a whole new world. Maybe you never thought you’d like Catherine Cookson – but then you pick up a free copy of one of her books and love it – and bingo you’ve go...

I have recently been trawling the Australian newspaper archive (trove.nla.gov.au) in order to write my latest publication – “The Gossiper’s Association”. This is a fictional account of actors Cicely Courtneidge and Thorley Walters’ year in the Antipodes. Of course while I was having a rummage in there, I had to see if there were any references to British village halls. Perhaps there had been some fracas that our own newspapers had been shy to report. What I did find in the Canberra Times in 1963 was brief reference to Duffus Village Hall in Scotland, the village near where Gordonstoun School is situated. Famous for a certain Royal alumni, the school apparently used the hall for an annual handicrafts exhibition. In 1963, young Prince Charles was notable in his absence from this worthy exhibition in what was then a glorified Nissan hut. Where was the lad? The Canberra Times had the answer. He was in trouble. Apparently he had been on a visit to Stornoway on the school boat and (bra...