The Queen's Jubilee Scrapbook of Blisworth, 2012

     
In 1953 there was a County-wide competition, between parishes, for the best scrapbook generated about village life and history. George Freeston won this contest pretty easily with his 90 page submission. He used his own 'copperplate' style and glued in 100s of copies of photographs that he had collected, dedicating pages to streets, activities, industries, the Canal, the Church and village characters, both present day and historical, etc. In fact, the beginnings of this website in terms of design owed much to the scrapbook. There is available a file (see historical index) which presents the pages in relative miniature and there is a CD, on sale from the Heritage Society, on which all the pages can be displayed at full size on an IBM PC (ie. none-Mac computer).

   
The 1953 "Elizabeth II Coronation Scrapbook" is presently cared for by the Blisworth Heritage Society and in honour of the Queen's Jubilee in 2012 it was decided that the Society would invite pages for a new scrapbook, a "Queen's Jubilee Scrapbook", to serve as a modern record of the village. Whilst the 1953 scrapbook was based on an old 'Empire' paper size, roughly A2, it was considered best to opt for A3 as the new standard page size. At the beginning of the year it was explained that each page should be the product of one person or group and the nature of the material "could be anything" - any personal or group subject, any historical or present day aspect.  It was thought that 6 months should see the job of collecting the pages completed but it actually took nearly the whole year. Accordingly, on November 30th 2012, for two days, the pages (bar one or two...) were on show in the Village Hall before they were grouped for binding.

The 2012 scrapbook will also be available on a CD.  The pages will not be placed on this website because there is a copyright and permissions problem attached to such new and diverse material, this notwithstanding the fact that a few people, in generating their page, have derived material and images from this website, which is fair enough. There are a few exceptions to the above applying to subjects that are new and relevant to an archive and in those cases specific permission will be sought from the page authors.

The output has been impressive as there are over 150 pages and it is intended to append an index of the pages and authors to this article as soon as that is possible. On this subject; an important village project, it seems a shame that more cannot be made of it here - of course, it is the work of the individual contributors' that says it all. Some prizes were offered by the Society to those who generated the 'most impressive' pages within various classifications and that enhanced the Christmassy fun of the event. Winners are listed below. The photos which follow were taken in the Village Hall on December 1st 2012 when all pages were laid out for inspection.

Spring 2014   This has been a major project but the A3 printed and bound scrapbook has now been completed and has been available for inspection a few times - there are a total of 186 pages. About five full copies have been printed and it is hoped to launch later in the year a A4 version which will be for sale. In the meantime a number of villagers have thought to generate a page and as a result the page count will likely exceed 200 pages. A view of a feature of the cover, ie. some motifs from the recently completed tapestry kneeler covers,  is shown below, along with a list of the sections in which the scrapbook pages are grouped.

List of sections: Village Institutions, Village Societies and Organisations, Education, Buildings and Households, Notable Events,  Notable People, Blisworth Images and Tapestry Covers.
[Blisworth Images, here, is a compilation of photos by a half dozen or so villagers, ie. no relation to this website]

There are indexes available, prepared by Robin Freeston, for people and subjects. In both, the section number is given in bold type and the page number(s) follow. Thus, an index entry showing entries in pages 4, 8, 9, of section S3 would appear as S3.4.8.9.        Link to subject index.       Link to people index.