| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

YateleyMag1981

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 11 months ago

SOCIETY READY FOR LAUNCH ....

 

THE INAUGURAL MEETING of the YATELEY SOCIETY is planned for Thursday 15th January, 1981 in the Drama Hall at The Yateley Centre. The Promoters are the YATELEY STUDY GROUP, who are proposing that the Society should be constituted as a local amenity body along the lines advocated by the Civic Trust. Since Duncan Sandys started the Civic Trust in 1957 the number of registered amenity societies has risen from 200 to over 1200 with 330,000 members. The Yateley Society will remain independent of the Civic Trust but on registration will receive valuable guidance.

 

WHO ARE THE YATELEY STUDY GROUP?

In September 1979 a unique adult education class was started, A Study of Yateley with a team of lecturers each giving 2 - 3 talks on Yateley from its Geology and Archaeology to its recent history and ecology of its gravel pits and commonland. Thirty one participants listened for example to Jean McIlwaine, the Church Archivist; Gordon Peake, the chairman of the North-East Hants Archaeological Society; and that doyen of Yateley's history Sidney Loader.

 

But the course was not all sitting and listening in the classroom. Susan Dawson was arranging "fungal forays" over the common and trapping moths each weekend. Class members were out knocking on doors to survey the present-day residents, assessing how long people have been here, where they were from and what their reasons for coming.

 

The very last lecture was rather different. Richard Warmington an acknowledged expert on timber-frame houses, was invited from Andover to talk about Monteagle House, one of our five Yateley buildings listed by the DoE as "of historic and architectural interest." The whole class followed Richard as he gave his judgement as to when each part of the house had been built, why, and by what sort of person, all by "reading" the timbers of the house. He had been deliberately kept in the dark about the documentary evidence which Peter Tipton, not himself then a member of the class, was then asked to discuss. The correlation between the two was remarkable.

 

This was the turning point for the group. If this could be done for one house, why not for all the old houses in Yateley? The ecologists could study old field patterns, look at the changing patterns of wildlife as food plants changed with increasing housing; the topics for study seemed limitless. - But if you study old houses, fields, hedges and habitats, you start to care about them. A planning application for five houses in Blakes Pond on the Green started the Conservation Group, who are now engaged in enumerating all houses built before 1840 and still existing so that they may be "listed" and so protected to a certain extent.

 

Over the summer months THE YATELEY STUDY GROUP was formed by the tutors and students They then joined with the Yateley Centre to run a five week condensed course. All fourteen members of this group have stayed on to join with the original members to promote the YATELEY SOCIETY. Meanwhile five houses were being studied by the Old Houses group using the manorial court rolls at Winchester. The influx of new members has meant that a study of Yateley for the years 1841 - 1881 can be started, using all available sources from the census returns to the parish archives The Conservation group is in full swing, drawing overlay maps for the 1846 Tithe Map The Ecology group has had a second fungal foray, with results going to Kew, while the moth data is being collated for the computer of the Biological Records Centre at Monkswood, and hedge-dating has begun.

 

AN AMENITY SOCIETY FOR YATELEY?

Winston Churchill said that a nation without a memory is a nation without a soul. With a population leap from 4,647 in 1961 to the present 20,000, most of us now in Yateley are outsiders. To understand the present we must understand the past. Why has Yateley no centralised shopping? Is it a whim of modern planning or does it in some way reflect a thousand years of history? Recently Sydney Loader was asked to contribute his knowledge of the ancient ponds of Yateley to the Town Council's battle with one of our Number One problems: Flooding.

 

Discovering the facts of Yateley's past and present is fascinating and enjoyable. But the most exciting aspect of the Society will be its intent, and ability, to contribute to the present and the future of Yateley The dictionary defines amenity as being "pleasant, agreeable." As an amenity group, the YATELEY SOCIETY will try in every possible way to use its growing knowledge of Yateley for the enhancement and the benefit of the community, so that Yateley may become a more pleasant and agreeable place in which to live.

 

BY PETER & ELIZABETH TIPTON, January 1981


Back to The Yateley Society page on this website

 

Back to 2003 Exhibition Main Page


 

(c) The Yateley Society, 2003, 2008

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.