Gloucestershire Local History Association
About Gloucestershire Local History Association
Gloucestershire Local History Association (GLHA) is a voluntary organisation of around 50 local history groups across Gloucestershire. We aim to promote local history throughout the county and to encourage as many people as possible to become involved with the history of where they live. You can discover more about us at gloshistory.org.uk Our activities include an annual Summer meeting, hosted by one of our member organisations. This year's event will be in Tewkesbury on the afternoon of 24 June 2017 and Tewkesbury Historical Society will be our host. It will begin in Tewkesbury’s historic Old Baptist Chapel, which recently benefited from Heritage Lottery funding, and there will be an opportunity to see a newly-built ‘interactive’ scale model, showing how the Chapel changed form between the 1500s and the 1970s. Please come along if you're interested - you can download our event programme and a booking form here - we'd be pleased to welcome you. Meantime, you can have a sneaky peek at some images of the scale model if you click on the 'Tewkesbury Old Baptist Chapel' link in the 'In this section' box at the far right of this page.
Featuring Tewkesbury Local History Society, one of GLHA's member organisations
Tewkesbury Historical Society was formed in 1991, to fill a vacuum in a historical town which had no historical society. Besides the usual monthly meetings of such societies, members are involved in researching the town’s history and are keen to make this important information accessible in both written and digital media.
With this in mind, the Society publishes an annual Bulletin of Research which, over the period, has merited two winners and nineteen members short-listed for the Jerrard Award.
It has also marked significant milestones, such as the 50th Anniversary of the loss of the town's railway in 1961, and published biographies of the citizens killed in both World Wars.
Tewkesbury Local History Society sees its website, ths.freeuk.com, as an increasingly important method of communication. Recently, it also made its Woodard Digital Database of Local History, the outcome of a 25 year project, available to members online via Google Drive.
The Society is looking forward to welcoming the county’s historical enthusiasts to this year's Gloucestershire Local History Association Summer meeting, which it is hosting for the second time. David Elder, author of THS Publication 10, Literary Tewkesbury will be leading one of the guided tours.
Old Baptist Chapel, Tewkesbury
Back in 2015 Gloucestershire Archives was pleased to support the Tewkesbury-based John Moore Museum's bid to Heritage Lottery Fund for a project to make the town's historic Old Baptist Chapel more accessible. The 1:12 scale model of the Chapel shown below was commissioned as part of the same project. It was designed and built by Mark Cunningham and Nigel Cox, working to a brief supplied by Simon Lawton and Jemma Fowkes and can be configured to demonstrate the four main periods in the life of the building: a 1500s Merchant’s House; early 1700s Baptist Chapel; 1800s reduced Chapel and cottages; and the Chapel as restored by Freddie Charles in the 1970s. As you can see, it is an attractive and accessible way to help people understand the history of this important local landmark.
You can discover more about the Chapel by going along to Gloucestershire Local History Association's 2017 summer event, which is being hosted by Tewkesbury Local History Society. Click on the 'Gloucestershire Local History Association' link in the 'In this section' box at the far right of this page for more information.
Victoria County History
The Victoria County History (VCH) is a national project to write an authoritative history of all the parishes in England. Although the project began in 1899, it had a slow start in Gloucestershire: a general volume was published in 1907 but work on the detailed parish histories did not start until 1960. By 2010, when funding from the county council and University of Gloucestershire came to an end, nine volumes covering almost half the county had been published. These are available to consult at Gloucestershire Archives and most of them are also available online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/search/series/vch--glos.
The Gloucestershire County History Trust was set up in October 2010 to enable the project to continue locally. It supports the VCH Gloucestershire Academy, a group of editors, commissioned by the Trust, that is working with volunteers to undertake the necessary research and writing. The County Archivist, Heather Forbes serves as a trustee and we have received generous practical and moral support from both her and her staff, with the Archives' Alvin Street premises providing an important hub for our activities. In September 2016 we published The Vale of Gloucester and Leadon Valley (Volume 13), which completed coverage of the county west of the River Severn. We are currently working on 3 areas:
14: Yate and the Sodburys,
15: Cheltenham hundred,
16: Cirencester and district.
We welcome new members to the Academy, whatever their interests and experience. We are also seeking people to act as local ‘ambassadors’ and as trustees, particularly from Cirencester and South Gloucestershire. If you are interested, do contact me.
As we write sections of editorial, we post the drafts (https://www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/counties/gloucestershire/work-in-progress), on which we welcome comments.
You can find out more from the VCH Gloucestershire Academy website where you can also download our regular newsletter.
Jan Broadway
admin@vchglosacademy.org
Victoria County History – South Gloucestershire
VCH Volume Gloucestershire XIV - Yate and district. Work on the three adjacent parishes of Chipping Sodbury, Lttle Sodbury and Old Sodbury began in 2016 and is expected to take about two years. Beth Hartland is researching the medieval period for all three parishes, while Phil Baker works on the early modern and later material.
We have been very fortunate to receive significant grant support for this stage from the Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society and further assistance from South Gloucestershire Council and Hanson plc.
If you are interested in joining the volunteers who are helping with the research for this volume, please see our Academy website for more details.
Comments on the drafts are very welcome, and should be addressed to vchglos@btinternet.com. The first two are about schools, and are posted at https://www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/counties/gloucestershire/work-in-progress/sodburys.
History project seeks local coordinator
You may have seen the new history of Yate by Rose Wallis, which came out in 2015. The research for it was carried out by a charity, the Gloucestershire County History Trust – supported by a South Glos Council grant. It was the first step in a new project to investigate and write up all the nearby parishes, to the national standards set by the Victoria County History (VCH). The Trust has now begun work on Chipping Sodbury, and draft sections written by our main researcher, Phil Baker, are starting to appear online, at
https://www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/counties/gloucestershire/work-in-progress/sodburys . Another researcher, Beth Hartland, is working on the medieval sources for all three Sodbury parishes.
Although most of the specialised investigation is done by paid professionals, there’s a lot that volunteers can do, especially with more recent sources. This was true at Yate, and we’d like to create a similar set-up at Chipping Sodbury, where we already know there are willing hands. However, what the Trust lacks is someone on the spot, to provide a personal bridge between local volunteers (and their local knowledge) and the rest of the ‘VCH Glos’ effort, whose centre of gravity tends be Gloucester itself, where many of the relevant archives are.
Ideally, we’d like someone with an active heritage/history interest, who is local to the Sodburys and perhaps also knows the scene in the neighbouring parishes we’ll be tackling in due course. In the first instance, the task is to organise, guide and encourage volunteers, and generally promote the project locally – adding up to a few hours per week. Depending on inclination and aptitude, there are also openings for new trustees.
If this sounds like you, or someone you know, then James Hodsdon, chair of the Trust, would be delighted to hear from you: jj49@btinternet.com or 01242-233045.
The Yate book is available from the Yate Heritage Centre and Chipping Sodbury Tourist Information, as well as public libraries.
The Dowty Project
Still in its very early days, the Dowty Heritage Project is looking to gather memories from former employees and other people with a connection to Dowty. We already have some willing interviewees lined up and are in the process of arranging suitable times for chats. We would like to hear from others too, as this will help us to create a more comprehensive record of the firm's social history. So please email archives@gloucestershire.gov.uk if you'd like to take part. Meantime, we're pleased that two new volunteers have come on board to help with interviewing and are arranging for them to receive training soon.
We'll be adding these spoken histories to the extensive Dowty archive, which is held at Gloucestershire Archives. And once the new onsite Heritage Hub is up and running we'll be working with a project archivist to catalogue this important collection, which was rescued from destruction over 20 years ago after a takeover of Dowty in the early nineties. We'll also be on the lookout for other documented memorabilia about Dowty eg things that retired employees might be looking after personally. We'd like to make sure this is well looked after and to share the hidden histories that emerge, and we'll be working with Archives staff to help make this a reality.
