Dear Members,
Firstly our condolences to Sheila for the passing of her Aunt, who was very close to her.
We would also like to welcome Brian Hansford from Filgrave as our newest member. Brian spent a lot of his childhood in Sherington.
We are now embarking on the Winter season, but the Summer has been quite successful for us, several very important events are now behind us,
Norman went on to show the members a copy of the certificates that were given to all of the children and some adults that took part in the scarecrow competition. Each certificate was presented in an A5 frame and was well received. ( these were purchased from Willen Hospice warehouse, via Philip).
- Our ‘Stagger’ round the village was so enjoyable and blessed with fine weather.
- The Village Fete, was also most successful, a great number of visitors, accompanied by the annual ‘Scarecrow Competition’ with about 45 entries.
- Our ‘Open Day’ and ‘Bike Ride’ ‘Film Show’.
- We have had a busy year.
Starting with our ‘Open Day’ this was probably our most successful, not necessarily in numbers, but in interest it was the best. Firstly thank you to all of the members who took part and helped with the running of this day, it did go off well.
We had a visit from a family from Castlethorpe, members of the Line family who spent quite a couple of hours investigating, in fact they were the first to arrive and sat in the car park for ten minutes before we had opened at 12 noon.
Secondly a couple from Salisbury, Wiltshire, who came especially, descendants of the Ivester-Lloyds, of writer and artist fame. I had been in E-mail contact with Carol Hewson (Grand-daughter) for some time and we had exchanged lots of information, but it was nice for them to see our files and for Carol to have a long conversation with Philip about the family. Thank you Mark also, for walking the Hewsons round the village, in the rain. They spent at least three hours in Sherington and we are richer now with some literature and photos relating to the Ivester-Lloyds. They were staying the weekend in the vicinity and going on to the Stockwell Park museum on the following day to see the dioramas of Ivester-Lloyd that had been donated by Carol’s Grandma.
Also a visit from David Clarke, who came from Biggin Hill, in Kent. Just to thank us for re-uniting him to his family of Pixleys, he had been adopted at birth and had no knowledge of his birth, until some months ago he found our web-site, e-mailed me and found through us his lost family. The grand finalé was a re-union lunch in the White Hart which re-united the whole family. Also from this we were able to add another POW to our files, as David’s father was Milovic Ilad, a Yugoslavian POW, who could not return to his native country after the war, he stayed on and settled down in Olney, married and raised his family there. David was able to E-mail us copies of photos of his father in his army uniform.
The members who helped on the day were kept busy the whole afternoon, talking to people, lots of notelets were sold, the raffle went very well, and the takings on the day produced, about £130, including the donations for the tea and biscuits.
Philip, Kay, Caroline and myself had a picnic lunch in a corner of the village hall on that busy Saturday, we must give a great vote of thanks to Kay as the provider of the feast.
This E-mail service has proved of great benefit for us and if used for good will go on being useful, but as with all things, there are people out there who will always abuse things.
The invitation that was sent to North Crawley HS, resulted in a long conversation with one of their members, who I hope was quite impressed with our efforts.
Our film show, ‘The 1982 Bike Ride’ was a brilliant film, showing such a spirit of camaraderie in this village at that time, and showing so many old faces (much younger then), most of who have moved away, grown up and have families now of their own or in the worst situation have passed on. Mind you a lot of them are still here. It really was a night of unashamed nostalgia. It really was great pity that the rest of the village couldn’t have come and swelled the ranks of the 14 people who did come (12 of whom were members). But that was their loss. We have this now recorded on DVD, thanks to Olly, so the film is really permanently in our archives, and permanent for posterity.
Thank you very much for all your efforts Peter and Philip.
Over the past year I have been kept more than busy, consequently our filing system, which has never been even adequate, is now total chaos. Files have been taken out, used for displays etc. for our events and put back by our very willing helpers where they could find room, for which I have been extremely grateful, the end of a day like the fete or open day leaves me extremely fragile. BUT, Kay and I are now in the process of getting a very rudimentary filing system up and running. If we can get this done before Christmas we will be very lucky. If any of you out there can spare a morning or afternoon to help with this chore, we would be so grateful.. Nothing at all strenuous, other than climbing the stairs to the office in the village hall. We also need to get our files and filing system on a computer some how, in some sort of order, instead of scattered around as they are now, also as a safeguard to them being lost as happened 9 months ago.
We have some projects that might prove interesting for some of you to take on, the Farms project, each old building in the village needs some research. If any one has a pet subject, relevant to Sherington it could be an interesting project. And so on.
Christmas is fast approaching and we will be producing Christmas cards again, this year. As I have mentioned we have done well with notelets and last year we did well with cards. These do not make a great deal of profit but as a PR exercise it works well. (We will not be doing another calendars). We have a nice picture of the Knoll with snow, taken a couple of years ago, we will do the Embroidery again and also Caroline’s Winter scene of Sherington, in large and small format. Sheila Line has volunteered to man a stall at the Christmas Bazaar again this year, so that’s when our cards will again go on sale for the first time, along with notelets and books. We also have the tickets from the Community Trust for the VW Car. Would all members consider taking some books to sell to their friends, I would mention that the sales of these tickets goes towards helping the disadvantaged groups and the setting up of new deserving groups throughout Milton Keynes, it was this Trust that set up Sherington Bowls Club. We shall be distributing these tickets at the next meeting.
The September stats as received from Ian Collinge are as follows. We are still second in the league tables
Cooper and Newton (Olney) 17.365 Hits Sherington HS 12,382 hits Hanslope DHS 10,765 hits Wolverton DAHS 6,889 hits
So you cans see we are still in the same position as usual, second in the top BIG THREE. We are second all down the line for July, August & September. Interestingly we get more of our hits from the USA than from the UK and also more from the rest of the world than from the UK.
Our Christmas Dinner (usually held in January) looms on the horizon, we would welcome any suggestions for a venue for this. Only ‘The Chester Arms’ has been suggested so far. Provisionally Tuesday 24th January 2006.
The next SHS meeting will be on 8th November in the village hall at 8pm. This will be general meeting. But it will be important to discuss our Christmas party for the following month of December, if you can invent some amusing games for the party evening, we shall be grateful.
There will also be other important matters to discuss.
N.A.
Don’t forget this is your newsletter and we will welcome anything you have to say.