Gloucester History Festival

2nd - 17th September 2017

This year’s Gloucester History Festival (2nd – 17th September) has an intriguing and wide-ranging programme celebrating the theme of ‘revolution and innovation’ with over 100 events across the City.

In our Blackfriars Talks series, we welcome Dan Snow and his History Hit show, hear Tony Robinson talking about his historical passions and The One Show’s Anita Rani exploring the moving story of her own family’s past during the 1947 Partition of India shown on BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are?

 

       

 

Ian Mortimer takes us back to Charles II and the Restoration with his new Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain, Roy Hattersley delves into the history of the Catholics since the time of Henry VIII, Shrabani Basu talks about the new film based on her book Victoria & Abdul - starring Judi Dench as Queen Victoria -  and we go behind the scenes of The Archers to see how they portray changing rural life today.

  

Other highlights include: Gloucester Day on Saturday 2nd September; and Heritage Open Days (7 – 10 September) when many of the City’s finest buildings will open their doors for free and you can also enjoy walks, talks, tours and concerts that reveal Gloucester's rich heritage. 

You can also enjoy City Voices which reaches out across the City with its biggest programme yet. Come and hear World War Two veterans from the Polish community share their wartime memories, take part in our ‘Brexit and Me’ debate and hear our top-notch ‘tag team’ of historians covering the history of Gloucestershire in just one a day.  And finally, don’t forget our brand-new Family Day on Saturday 9th September, packed full of free fun events for children of all ages!

For a free brochure and more information visit gloucesterhistoryfestival.co.uk  Tel: 01452 396572  Please note booking opens 24 July.

The Festival is delighted to offer a special 25% discount on all Blackfriars Talks tickets to Heritage Hub Newsletter readers meaning that £8 tickets will cost just £6. To take up this offer simply choose your events by visiting gloucesterhistoryfestival.co.uk to book your tickets or call the Box Office on 01452 396572 after 24 July and quote HHN Offer to receive your discount. This can’t be combined with any other offer, discount or concession and is subject to availability.

 

Scriptorium Tag

Good ideas schemed up during a bout of insomnia don’t usually seem so clever next morning. But when I tried out on colleagues my nocturnal fancy for a local history contribution to this year’s Gloucester History Festival, they were enthusiastic, so now it will be in the programme and I am committed to making it work. In case you missed it, last year’s festival was an outstanding success, a vibrant, stimulating and joyous celebration of city, county, and history generally. This year’s, from 2-17 September, promises to be even better.

My idea, dubbed Scriptorium Tag, is to assemble a group of fellow local historians from among the ranks of the Victoria County History, local universities, and other friends and colleagues, to participate in a kind of relay of short, pithy and lively lectures, which will run non-stop through an afternoon and evening in the Scriptorium range of Gloucester’s admirably historical Blackfriars. Each presentation will touch on some aspect of Gloucestershire’s history, about which the speaker is an authority, and they will run in roughly chronological order. The ‘tag’ line will be that the last sentence of one lecture becomes the first sentence of the next, rather like the baton in a relay race. Intended to be informal and entertaining, as well as high-octane local history. We shall encourage our audience to come and go, eat and drink, question and heckle even, as the fancy takes them. Please come along, Thursday 14 September.

 

John Chandler,

Consultant Editor, VCH Gloucestershire

Visit https://www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/counties/gloucestershire for more information

 

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

                                          

One of our activities is an annual Local History Day, the most recent of which was held at Churchdown Community Centre on 18 March 2017, with the theme of ‘Gardens for Food, Fun and Flowers’.  Around 150 people attended during the day to view displays on the chosen theme, prepared by 12 of the County’s local history groups, and to hear our three speakers. These were Dr Jan Broadway, who spoke on the history of the County’s gardening societies, Dr Jeremy Burchardt (University of Reading), who explained Gloucestershire’s place in the early allotment movement and Michael Brown (aka ‘The Historic Gardener’) who talked on ‘Ghastly Gardening: Horticulture’s Horrible History’.

       

Each year, three judges decide on the ‘best display’, which was won this year by the Forest of Dean Local History Society.  Their display contrasted the development of the pleasure gardens at Lydney Park with the use of gardens for food – and later also for flowers – by the average Forester.  It also covered the Bream Garden Show, which has been running for 150 years and still gets strong support.

    

The Local History Day is also when the annual Bryan Jerrard Award is presented. The award is given for what its judges believe is the best journal article on an aspect of Gloucestershire’s history written in the preceding year.

This year’s winner was Dr Nicholas Herbert for an article on the squatter settlement at Woolridge Common, Hartpury. Runner-up awards were given to Sally Self for an article on Cheltenham malt houses and to Keith Walker for an article on roads in the Forest of Dean.  All three received book tokens, kindly provided by the History Press.

This year’s Local History Day was generously sponsored by the Mid-counties Co-operative Community Fund, through the Gloucestershire Community Foundation, to which we are most grateful. The sponsorship enabled us to make the Day a free event.

Our next Local History Day will also be held at Churchdown Community Centre, on Saturday 28th April 2018, and will take as its theme aspects of life in Gloucestershire between 1918 and 1939. Further details will be available on the GLHA website, gloshistory.org.uk in due course.

The Dowty Project

We now have two new interviewers, John and Margaret Clifton (thanks for coming on board) trained to collect oral histories relating to local engineering firm, Dowty (now operating as Safran).  And we have recently completed a very full interview with Alan Davies who retired around 20 years ago.  We'll be planning more interviews as the year progresses.

   Alan Davies (left) with Graham James

We've also had recent contact with Mr Arthur Taliana, Head of Administration and Security Corporate Services at Malta Enterprise, asking for information about Dowty Malta for their 50^th anniversary commemorations. We’ve exchanged a little information (see below) and hope to be able to share more information with them when the Dowty Archive is fully catalogued.

  

Sir George Dowty (right) visiting Malta in 1961                                      The Dowty Shop Floor at Mriehel, Malta in 1971 

It will be interesting to maintain this link, and any other information about Dowty offshore companies would be welcomed.

For more information about the Dowty Project visit https://gloucestershirearchives.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/the-dowty-story/