That Precious Legacy: Vaughan Williams and Essex Folk Song. Our talk on 24 July 2014

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 -1958) and his folk song collecting in Essex during the Edwardian era will be the subject of Sue Cubbin’s talk to the High Country History Group on Thursday 24 July at Toot Hill Village Hall commencing at 8pm.  Sue is a retired sound archivist from the Essex Record Office, and folk song singer forming one part of ‘Potiphar’s Apprentices’. In 2003 she organised an exhibition at the ERO entitled ‘That Precious Legacy’ to commemorate the hundred years since RVW began collecting rural songs which were in danger of extinction.  The first song – ‘Bushes and Briars’ – was collected from Charles Potiphar of Ingrave.  This promises to be a great evening of local history and song – with perhaps audience participation!

Members: £1.  Visitors and potential new members welcome: £3.

Tour de France in Essex Today

Edward Henry Lisle Reeve
(future Rector of Stondon Massey)
with Penny Farthing bicycle c.1880

Journal No. 52 (June 2014)

Members of the High Country History Group received their copies of the latest Journal at the meeting last week.  Items in this edition include:

- Anniversaries

- Unhealthy Occupation: The Derby Mercury commenting in 1749 on the high number of clergy who had died in the Ongar district

- Centenary of Chelmsford Diocese (1914 - 2014)

- Dedication of Church at Theydon Mount, taken from the Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society 'New Series' Volume 12 Part 3 (1911)

- William Sworder of Stapleford Tawney

- Christmas Eve: taken from Leaves of a Hunting Diary

- Inquest of the body of William Reed, 1788

- Hue and Cry: Stanford Rivers Imprisonment for Fowl Stealing, 1897

- The Queen's Jubilee and the Woes of Stanford Rivers

- Opening of a Jubilee Fountain at Stanford Rivers, 1898

- The Pilgrims Way: a reference to St Edmund

- Place Names Quiz (answers)

- St Michael's Church Theydon Mount 400th Anniversary Weekend, advertisement

- Parliamentary and Parochial Electors for Stapleford Tawney, 1914

- Dr. Livingstone I Presume!

- That's My Seat. Anne Archer of Theydon Garnon