Woods Ware China at the Serving Hatch

Extract from an article in the Summer 1951 issue of “The Countryman” on an Essex village: “Miss A runs the village boy’s club. It is about 50 strong at the moment, though that figure is perhaps misleading. Its real membership runs into many hundreds, and it is on this shadow strength that the lady’s reputation rests. The club is held on two or three nights a week in the village hall, the usual pitch-pine-and-varnish building which elsewhere seems to produce an atmosphere of genteel apathy. We went to see it. During the day it was deserted, but hardly empty; for round the walls, with scarcely a break, hung the framed photographs which recorded the club’s annual beanfeasts. Instead of showing the year’s crop of thirteen and fourteen year olds, each picture was crammed full with young men and women, and older ones as well, ranged at the supper tables, row on row, until beyond the reach of the flashlight glare the faces faded into the background. The photographs went back year by yea...

There has been a growth in recent times of travelling cinemas – at least I have become more aware of them. It’s tempting to think of this as a new idea, because until the 1960s, there were cinemas all over the place and not much need for the mobile variety. Every decent sized town or even village had one. However, we turned them into bingo halls and Presto or Gateway supermarkets as people turned away from big screens in favour of the small ones in the corner of their living rooms. These days, we seem to be falling back in love with going to a public place to be part of a bigger audience than the one that we can fit round our tellies. A happy consequence of this is that village halls are now being used as temporary picture palaces. I can confirm that this concept is not new though, after reading the Winter 1951 edition of “The Countryman” journal.   I was very pleased to read the opening line of the first article within the green paper covers: “Our cinema is the village h...

Extract from “The Village” by Marghanita Laski (1952) She had never seen the hall decorated for a dance, and indeed, for none of the wartime dances had the shabby wooden hall been bedizened as it was tonight. Everyone had contributed what they could find from their old stocks of party and Christmas decorations and everything in splendid confusion was tacked to the walls, to the platform, to the beams in the ceiling. Ted Pickering, who, having been invalided out of the Army after Dunkirk, worked at his Dad’s electrical shop when he wasn’t conducting his Ragamuffins, had managed to fix up the coloured electric lights that Mr Waters had dug out for Victory night so that they dazzled and twinkled (except for two blue ones that wouldn’t work) right above the heads of the band. Then there were Japanese lanterns and odds-and-ends of paper concertinas and little glittering glass Christmas tree toys and lengths of tinsel and tacked-up laurel branches – everything, in fact, that Priory...