Eye - 31 October 2014

From adventurous living to surprising revelations

Living adventurously

Philip Morris, of Stratford-upon-Avon, is determined to make the most of intrepid opportunities, as he demonstrated earlier this year. He explained:

‘I was helping on the Transition Stratford stall at the River Festival and had just peddled the ball to the top of the tube, generating electricity, when I saw another challenge: the climbing wall.

‘This is the way, at nearly eighty-seven, I am finding new ways to live adventurously. The man running the climbing wall said the youngest he’d had on it was only three, but I was the oldest he’d ever had.’

Dialect discovery

A jocular jotting prompted Keith Reeves, of Skipton Meeting, to write to Eye.

‘A friend of mine has been researching the history of a house in Great Asby, a very small village in Cumbria. His researches brought him to the Kendal branch of the Cumbrian Archive.’

He found an 1899 edition of A Glossary of the Words and Phrases Pertaining to the Dialect of Cumberland, by William Dickinson. ‘There on the Q page (254) he came across the handwritten margin note – “Quaker Hay. Hay got in without rain – not baptised”.’

Surprising revelations in Bentham

Some unusual facts were unearthed during recent research into Bentham’s first world war heritage.

An exhibition about the war ran throughout August at St John the Baptist Church in Low Bentham, North Yorkshire.

Little did organisers know that delving into the records would shed light on some surprising facts about the parish.

The exhibition listed 209 men, fifty-five of whom had died, along with a brief summary about each of them.

One of the men was Theodore Bayley Hardy, who was the headmaster of Bentham Grammar School between 1907 and 1913. He went on to become a chaplain in the army and was one of the most decorated noncombatants of the war, although his name was omitted from the town’s war memorial.

However, one of the main surprises was the dramatically large number of conscientious objectors in the area. Historian Cyril Pearce’s work on creating a national database of conscientious objectors, along with local information, revealed that there had been thirty-one in Bentham.

The Lancaster Guardian reported: ‘This was an unusually high number in proportion to the 209 who served in the forces and from a total Bentham population of approximately 2,300…

‘The figure is largely explained by the powerful Quaker influence in the area and the support provided by the Ford family, prominent Quakers, who owned the local silk mill.’

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