EMHG History

By Michael Blakstad

By 2010 the East Meon parish council website was receiving enquiries from around the world from relatives who had lived in the village and who were looking for information about their antecedents. A retired solicitor, Freddie Standfield, had written a History of East Meon ten years earlier, but he had died and there was no other historian to whom I could refer enquiries, and as yet no Ancestry.com to which I could refer. I tried passing enquiries to either the vicar, Reverend Terry Louden, who like most men of the cloth had a literary interest in the history of his church and parish, or to Denys Ryder, who had lived in East Meon for over 50 years and knew every family of long standing in the village. Denys had a fund of anecdotes about East Meon, not all of them founded on historical fact.

Some of the web enquiries were addressed to the non-existent History Society and it occurred to me that a village with such a colourful a history as East Meon really should have one. So I canvassed neighbours who might have an interest in history and invited them to an initial talk to be given by Tim Concannon, a local barrister and had written about Saxon East Meon. The talk did not go well but several of those present demonstrated that they were indeed knowledgeable about history. We agreed to give a small, informal society a go, focusing on local history and keeping the membership small enough to hold meetings in members’ sitting rooms, those which were large enough to hold 20 or so. That limit did not last long. In our first full year we decided to move to the new Church H+all which sat 40 comfortably and more at a pinch. We had to pay for the hall and the speakers, so we started with a subscription of £10 a year.

The first speaker to fill the hall was Nick Barratt, an archivist at the National Archive, who had been discovered by the BBC when they were preparing the first series of “Who do you think you are?” He briefed us on tracing House Histories which became our first research project in which members studied the history of either their homes or other village buildings. These were written up for a series of exhibition panels which were displayed in the summer of 2012 in The Hall of The Court House.

I now abandoned the parish council website and commissioned a new website for the History Group: www.eastmeonhistory.net. The following year I applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a grant of £7000 to enable us to organise an Open Day in the Village Hall. Villagers were invited to bring any old photos, documents, memorabilia etc which we would scan digitally and then take them home again. We then indexed the files and uploaded them to a new archive website, www.eastmeonhistory.org, the creation of which cost the bulk of the grant. We arranged quizzes for families, dressing up in historic costumes and, in association with the Saxons in the Meon Valley project, we staged an event for school children in which they enacted the Norman invasion in 1066 and the resistance of King Harold.

The Saxon re-enactment marked the first of several collaborations with East Meon primary school; we subsequently took classes on walks around the village describing to them, for instance, life in Victorian East Meon and in November 2018 helped commemorate Armistice Day with a large exhibition in the Village Hall.

We also engaged in recording ‘Oral History’ interviews, which are a valuable resource of local history. This involved persuading members of the community who had lived a long time in East Meon to recount their memories of the past.

We soon notched up a range of villagers including Malcom Painter, the shepherd who had appeared on the cover of Freddie Standfield’s book and a reclusive couple who lived in one of the oldest houses in the village. The rules were strict and the interviews had to be transcribed exactly as they were recorded. They were made available to the Wessex Film and Sound Archive and the Petersfield Museum. We also loaded them onto our archive website where there are now 20 interviews including two by myself.

The History group arranges a couple of visits each year to places of local places of historic interest and is often asked to help organise visits to East Meon by other groups such as the Hampshire Archive Trust and the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeology Society.

In 2016 we started our biggest project to date, Farming in the Valley. I applied for a second HLF grant which enabled us to employ David McCutcheon, a professional cartographer, to create maps of East Meon over the centuries and Zoe Kay, a designer, who is responsible for the layout of the book. I also obtained another grant from the Hampshire Archives Trust to cover the production costs of the heavily illustrated book ‘Farming the Valley’. Since East Meon had only one source of income for over 100 years, this was in effect the history of the community which in its time had been the largest Hampshire estate of the Bishops of Winchester.

This was an ambitious project and we were keen to involve as many members as possible. However, this didn’t really pan out. The content of the book is based on 18 research reports which are published on our website. Ian and Betty Wesley took over writing about the early history of the valley up to Norman times, Robert Mocatta covered the 19^th century and I wrote the rest and edited the book. Although we received a grant to cover the costs of printing, we decided to raise further funds to cover the cost of producing a hardback edition of the book. Residents of East Meon were invited to pay £100 for this limited edition in which their names appeared as subscribers.

In the course of our research we had collected hundreds of digital files including maps, images and source documents. Our grant from HAT provided us with an allowance to index and place these files in our archive website (eastmeonhistory.org.)

During the Covid lockdown the History Group suffered, as most societies did, from not being able to meet or organise visits or other activities. We tried some Zoom meetings but these were less than satisfactory. However, we managed to resume activities in October 2021, with a normal winter programme of meetings which continues to this day.

Creator

Michael Blakstad

Place

East Meon

Contributor

Ian Wesley

Copyright

EMHG

Reference number

EM/

Format

online

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