From Hillingdon to Helmdon – and the Rest Is History

an article by Audrey Forgham

Audrey Forgham.

I came to the village in 1990. I previously lived in Fulmer, near Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, having taught for the previous 20 years mostly in the London Borough of Hillingdon.

I did not know whether to go to live near to my elder daughter in Bloxham or my other daughter in Cambridge, but since I had to gain a bit of equity to provide for a more comfortable retirement, with property cheaper in this area than in Cambridge there was no real choice, and I opted for here.

Helmdon seemed a nice quiet village such as I had been used to, and I found the recently renovated Old Bakehouse in Church Street was just where I wanted to be.

Fellowship committee 2002. Front from l. to r: Rosemary Gulliver, Pauline Payne,
Doreen England, Sheila Somerton, Ann Smith.
Back row from l. to r: Audrey Forgham, Wilf
Forgham, Ann Harman Carol Brookhouse and Alan Watson.
The first person that I met was a neighbour, Ann Harman, who invited me to join the WI, which I did, knowing that it would introduce me to Helmdon people, and I have enjoyed the company, the meetings and the events of the WI ever since. The second person I remember was Carol Brookhouse who visited me and kindly invited me to become a member of the Fellowship (the organisation for the over 60s). I recall my quick retort that I didn’t think I was old enough to join! Carol and I have laughed over that since, and I soon did join the group, albeit as one of the committee, and this was the start of a continuing interest in Fellowship, the meetings, the coffee mornings, and the outings which I have been happy to attend over the years. I stayed on that committee for a long time and, indeed, got to know my future husband, the treasurer, Wilf Forgham there. Eighteen months after his wife died we got together, moved to The Old Barn at the head of Cross Lane, and had a very happy twelve years before his death at the end of 2013.

A toast to…. Audey (left) with Liz Woolley at a Fellowship garden garty at
Trudie Buxton’s home, 2015.
Soon after I came to the village I met Peggy and Alan Ryalls at the Fellowship who became dear friends, and when Alan was in unsuccessful in finding a secretary for the Reading Room I stepped in for several years. This was a time when the Reading Room had little money and most of the time seemed to be spent trying to get bookings. I regret to say that I did not make my mark here, something I am sad to say even as I write, but it left me with a continuing love of the Reading Room itself.

Mike Barnes, too, was trying to find a secretary, this time for the WEA, the organisation for adult education, which was at that time meeting in the school. I agreed, and so began what was, and undoubtedly still is, an enthusiasm for local history, which is the most interesting and rewarding part of my retirement.

Poster of the WEA “Discovering
Antiques” course.
The Helmdon branch of the WEA ran courses twice a year, ten sessions in each, the committee’s task being to make sure that we decided on a speaker, and in 1995 John Raybould tutored a course entitled The Changing Village. It covered the last hundred years and focused on Helmdon. His enthusiasm lingered long after the course was over whetting the appetite for further historical research, and several members of the original class formed themselves into a Local Studies group. At the beginning Val and Stewart Moir, Judy Cairns, Jean Spendlove, Will Watson and myself were the main members. From the outset the group felt that what was researched should be recorded in some way and so, steered by Ross Vicars in the early years, and then by myself, Aspects of Helmdon 1 was published, followed later Aspects 2 – 6.

In between all this WEA courses went on year after year, with some great courses from people such as Geoffrey Starmer whose enthusiasm was railway history and told us about the two old Helmdon lines, the Great Central and the “nibble and clink”, Elaine Rawlinson with “1066 More Than Just a Battle”, and trumpet player Owen Bryce (who had at one time formed a band which included Chris Barber) on “The History of Jazz”.

The wonderful garden at The Old Glebe.
We also had many memorable social evenings, often at The Old Glebe, Will Watson’s home, at the edge of Brackley (now demolished to make way for a new housing estate), and in 2001 we were very fortunate to have Jenni Murray of Woman’s Hour, my step daughter-in-law, come to speak. Her subject was a thought provoking “The Changing View Of Women Over the Last 50 Years”. In later years Judith Hodgkinson, a popular returnee speaker, kept us amused with “Are you Sitting Comfortably? A Short History of Privies and Water Closets”, and we were fascinated by Peter Hill’s lecture on “The Origins of the Green Man”.

Memorial to John Pratt

drawn by June Drew

All this while, local studies were proceeding apace. Under the direction of my great friend Val Moir we recorded the gravestone inscriptions of St Mary Magdalene church. This was not an easy task, but it was one she ably undertook, masterminding it with her husband Stuart (who helped with the typing and checking of the results) and helped by Judy Cairns, Ann Smith, Ross Vicars, Gerald Holt, Conrad Woolley, Celia Terrey and myself. We scrambled among the gravestones (many of which are overgrown and covered with moss) trying to see them in a light that made the words more legible. No doubt we made errors but we did what we could to record accurately what we saw. I remember that June Drew contributed some great illustrations which we put at the end of the project.

In 1999 the idea of the Helmdon website was first mooted, a joint venture between Danny Moody and myself, upon which we have worked harmoniously for around twenty years. Realising the internet was going to revolutionise the way everyone recorded information I thought the WEA should record Helmdon’s history in the form of a website. I saw an AWARDS FOR ALL project being advertised by Northamptonshire County Council whereby bids could be made through them to the National Lottery Fund, and I applied for £75 “to start a website” (how naïve I was then, thinking somehow I could do it myself!). Parish councillor David Brookhouse supported my application and Terry Glassett, then chairman of that august body, suggested that it become a village website. Another councillor, Renhart Gittens, came on board and helped me publish the beginnings of the village trail. Progress stalled because Renhart was busy at work but then a knight in shining armour appeared. Danny Moody, new to the village, met Sue Lidgley up in the churchyard and asked her if there was a village website. She pointed him in my direction, he knocked on my door one day, and the rest is history, as the saying goes. With Ren stepping back, Danny developed www.helmdon.com as webmaster, with myself as editor. I remember much burning of midnight oil, particularly on Danny’s part. It has been an excellent partnership. I kept www.helmdon.com current (hardly went a day without it being updated in one way or other), and he ably managed the various technicalities of the website, also getting me out of presentation difficulties of which there have been more than a few!

We were in the vanguard of village websites and over the early years www.helmdon.com received much praise. In March 2002 it received the Amdow Web Design Community Website Award. Then the website was reviewed by BBC’s Radio Five team as part of Simon Mayo’s regular “Top Websites of the Week” feature; in April 2002 they placed it fourth. A year later the site was acclaimed the UK Villages Online Website. We were pleased to have further success in the Calor Village of the Year 2005, when the site won the countrywide Village of the Year title for Information Communications Technology for Central England. The judges said that Helmdon’s was “a demonstration of the way a community website should be built”. The award giving itself was an exciting day. Danny and I went up to London to a reception and dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel and we were given a trophy and a cash prize of £500 by Alan Titchmarsh. Not many people can boast of having a kiss on the cheek from him – luckily it was not something accorded my colleague! By the second decade of the twenty first century there were many more village websites on stream but in 2013 the website again won an award, this time for being the most informative website in Northamptonshire in a competition run by Northamptonshire ACRE.

In 2018 the parish council website, www.helmdonparishcouncil.gov.uk, took over the transmitting of information about the parish council and village activities and www.helmdon.com became www.helmdonhistory.com, continuing to record the history of the village. After twenty years Danny and I are still working on this together. There is not so much to do, not so much daily activity, but projects such as this one, Reminiscences of Helmdon, are still giving us work and interest.

A poster advertising “A year in the life of a village”.
But I am getting ahead of myself. There were a great many happenings which I remember with pleasure during the many years of the website’s existence. Early in 2000 there were two showings of Will Watson’s film “A year in the life of a Village” at the Reading Room. It was produced with posterity in mind and a DVD was deposited at Northamptonshire Record Office. The Local Studies group this time consisted of Cec Harrold, Judy Cairns, Val and Stuart Moir and myself. I vividly remember us all sitting both at The Old Glebe and College Farm watching film clips which Willie had taken and trying to decide where to cut. Then Judy added a voice over to what was happening and Liz Woolley was asked to add some music. This was Willie’s first film and no doubt with the new techniques available today it would had been even better, but it was shown several times in the Reading Room and was very well received.

Photos for the Snapshot Photobook.
I must mention the 2011 Snapshot project. It was dreamed up by the parish council, funded with money from a first place win in the Village of the Year competition in 2011, and was to commemorate the life of Helmdon during one week, the 11th day of the 11th month of 2011. The Local Studies group were not the drivers of this project but I was involved in it with Danny Moody, Chris Thorpe and Mike Barnes. We asked villagers to take photographs around in the village in that one week, and I recall sitting for several hours in Chris’s home reviewing hundreds of photographs; we were having to make snap decisions as to what to put in a commemorative book. All of a sudden photo captions were needed and I was asked to write them, and to this day I wonder if they were all correct.

November 2014 saw the completion of the War Memorial project which traced the history of the war memorial itself and of all the servicemen who had served in the First World War. Ross Vicars spent a great deal of time on the project, as did Danny Moody on the presentation, with Cec Harrold, Judy Cairns, and myself also responsible for a great deal of the research. Charles Binns restored some of the old photographs. The project was produced in book form, put on the website, and we mounted a display of artefacts and photographs twice in the church.

A Kneelers project in 2017 recorded the 150 or so kneelers in Helmdon church. The onerous work of recording the stitching and history of each kneeler was undertaken by Jenny Overson and Mary Nash, and Colin Nash took the accompanying beautiful photographs. They spent hours in the church, and I also remember the many hours in my study at the computer, with Jenny overlooking my shoulder as I typed the project, which was eventually made into two albums which can be seen in the church and on the history website. It is a highly regarded piece of research that was accepted by The National Needlework Archive to be added to the national register of such projects.

In 2016 Judy Cairns and I decided that it was time to update the inscriptions. It had been twenty years since the bulk of the work had originally been done since there were now graves in the new arm of the churchyard to the left of the path and rows had been re-numbered due to it re-positioning. Judy did most of the work, helped by Conrad Woolley who checked the rows and Bill Elkington who drew a new map. I am glad to say that at present the inscription list won’t get out of date since Judy keeps an assiduous eye on what is going on there and I update the history website accordingly.

Unfortunately, in spite of valiant efforts by the chair, Cec Harrold, and the secretary, Richard Farquharson (who had taken over from me around 2003), the Helmdon branch of the WEA closed in 2019, but its spirit lives on in the Local Studies group and while there is something still to research I am certain that members will keep recording. Indeed Ross Vicars, undoubtedly the village’s most knowledgeable historian, last year published Helmdon In 1939 and 2019, which draws upon the National register of 1939 to look at how the village has changed and expanded since that time from 174 dwellings in 1939 to over 340 in 2019.

Writing this in April 2020, albeit in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, with social distancing and confinement to the house, I can but think of the many activities in the village that I enjoy and am missing, particularly the Fellowship, the WI, the Film Club, the village café, my reading group, the functions put on by Helmdon Presents and Friends of St Mary Magdalene and church social activities – I could go on. Without these occasions, which make the village such an interesting and exciting place to be I do not think I would have been so ready to help to research and record its history. Living in such a friendly and welcoming place like Helmdon has given me one of the most enjoyable times of my life and I would not want to have lived my retirement years anywhere else.

Audrey Forgham
2020