Fairford History Society

The Fairford Flyer

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Australian Visitors

A gentleman from Brisbane Australia, and his 15 year old son contacted Alison Hobson recently having seen details of the Fairford History Society on this website. Harold Hope and his son Cameron, were visiting Fairford to retrace their English roots. Apparently, at the turn of the 20th century, Harold's grandfather lived in East End.
Harold knew that one of his grandfather's siblings had emigrated to Canada and another to Australia, but wondered if any other relatives were still here. Before he left, Harold kindly donated a copy of the book “Farmor's School” by H W Hedges, published in 1938, to the Society.
Cameron & Harold Hope with Alison and Nick Hobson .

IT
We are lucky to be living in a time of relatively cheap computer hardware and software and the Internet. We intend as a society to make full use of these technologies so that as many people as possible can see and hear the constantly increasing amount of material we have in our archives.
The scanned archive
Through generous grants we have been able to buy a laptop computer, a scanner and the necessary software to enable Alison Hobson to set up an archive of all the books, photographs and objects people have lent or given to us. Where possible we catalogue these (using a scheme recommended by Corinium Museum) then scan them and store them on our database. This means that we can easily find pictures of any of our catalogued items with just a few keystrokes on the laptop.
We are very grateful to all those who have provided material for the archive.
Our website
We are in the process of setting up our own website. It is hoped that this will include details of the society, and some short articles
about various aspects of Fairford history, together with photographs and sound recordings. Later we hope to make an edited version of our full archive available which will be searchable and will be a serious research tool for the amateur historian and for schools.
Thanks to donors
We would like to thank Rob Knight, the Fairford Town Charity, the Fairford Preservation Trust and the Ernest Cook Trust for grants towards all the equipment we have bought. Our work would not be possible without their generosity. JR

Chairman’s report
The outstandingly successful ‘School Dinners’ was the last event of our first year and this newsletter rounds off the 2004-5 programme. I think we should congratulate ourselves that our new venture is now established and prospering. Our progress has been made possible by financial help from local organisations (see IT) and by our own fundraising efforts. Do you remember the cake stall? Our working groups will continue through the summer and our autumn meetings open with :-

Fairford at War
a talk
by June Lewis Jones
and a photographic exhibition by Edwin Cuss on Thursday September 15th in the 7.45pm Community Centre

Members from afar
At the display stall at the Fairford Festival on Saturday, I was delighted to meet a family who had been evacuated to Fairford during the war. They have fond memories of the Fairford area and were delighted at the prospect of the September meeting’s talk ‘Fairford at War’. Although one is living have in Wales and the other in New Barnet, Herts they have joined FHS and booked their rooms at the Bull in anticipation of the September meeting. They were even more delighted when I showed them June Lewis-Jones book ‘The Cotswold at War’ and found themselves in a photograph with other people they knew. Again this link had been made through www.fairford-tc.co.uk website. AH

Oral History
Thanks to some generous donations we now have all the equipment needed to make sound recordings. Members have been trained in using the equipment and audio CDs have already been produced. Editing is a very time consuming process so we haven’t been able to get on as quickly as we had hoped. If you have offered to make a recording and are still waiting please bear with us, we will be approaching you very soon. GB

We look forward to hearing our President’s talk about a subject on which she is so knowledgeable and the meeting will be augmented with a display of photographs from the Edwin Cuss collection and he will be happy to chat with members.

I should like to end by expressing my personal thanks to all who have helped during the year, especially the members of the committee and to those whose skills, knowledge and goodwill have made our meetings so interesting and happy. KC

From an 1841 map of Fairford

Membership Sep 05-Aug 06 £2.50
You can join at any meeting or by ringing the Secretary or Geoff Hawkes.
Membership forms can be downloaded from www.fairford-tc.co.uk and given to any committee member or handed in at Fairford Town Council Office,
3 London Street .