Hooray For Henry
Finds out how a village in the West Country is sharing the stories of its residents in person and online
Henry Howes wins the National Skating Association’s Amateur Skating Championship at Bury Fen, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, 19 February 1947
The first recognised speed-skating competition in the country took place in the Fens in 1763. This low-lying region in the east of England – comprising Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and parts of Suffolk – has always been vulnerable to flooding, making it a hotbed for the sport since the Dutch engineers who helped drain this marshy land for agriculture in the 17th century came over with their iron skates. In 1947, future Olympian Henry Howes set a new record in the Amateur Skating Championship, completing the one-and-a-half-mile course in 4 minutes 54 seconds. You can view wonderful newsreel footage of his triumph at bit.ly/ap-arch-howes.
Thanks to the generosity of one local woman, you have a wealth of online treasures to discover if your family comes from the Devon village of Bishopsteignton. When lifelong resident Molly Coombe (1929–2007) died, she left her house and land to the village’s Museum of Rural Life to provide it with space to expand. The plan didn’t work out, but the museum ultimately sold the house and other properties and built two new houses, generating rental income. Bishopsteignton Heritage Charitable Trust used the money to finance a bold new scheme – creating a digital archive preserving local people’s stories and mementos: bishopsteigntonheritage.co.uk.
“The village itself is the museum, and we’re using the website to display it and make the information available to people,” explains James Hooper, Bishopsteignton Heritage’s digital-assets manager. “So it’s not just what we keep in our own archive. It’s the stuff that’s in people’s attics, in boxes underneath their beds, the stories that they have to tell that we’re trying to gather, so that we can store all of this material digitally then distribute it online to people who are interested.”
With the help of professional archivist Imogen Smith, the project has collected reminiscences, photographs and artefacts from local people and those farther away who have a connection to Bishopsteignton, including in Australia and Japan. Visitors can explore the wide range of documents, artefacts and photos in Bishopsteignton Heritage’s collections at the Hub, a dedicated room in Bishopsteignton Community Centre.
Some of the most extraordinary items in the collection come from the Coombe family themselves. Molly’s father Philip, a builder who constructed many of the village’s houses, served as a sergeant with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. He had the responsibility of writing to the families of his men when they lost their lives, and his papers include moving letters from the bereaved families.
“A lot of this stuff was buried in a solicitor’s vault and only came to light last year,” says curator Yvonne Hellin-Hobbs. “We were in tears reading the letters. Such documents really bring it home that these are real people, real families.”
The Bishopsteignton Heritage website is regularly updated with content from the archive and stories of local people. One recent post, for example, focuses on Dr Rosaleen Cooper. She was born in Wimbledon in 1894, the sister of the First World War poet Robert Graves. She worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the conflict, and then, inspired by her experiences and the arrival of women’s suffrage, became a doctor. She moved to Bishopsteignton in 1939, where she worked as a GP until 1964. Her nephew remembers her as an old woman in the 1980s: “At 90 she still drove straight out onto the main road in Bishopsteignton, and the locals knew to be careful with Dr Cooper’s car!”