The Eversholt Branch of the Women’s Institute closed a few years ago, although there are sporadic plans to revive it. The original branch was very active. It celebrated 50 years in 1965, and produced a scrapbook to commemorate the event. It is a wonderful and beautiful thing, a jewel of Eversholt’s heritage.
It is also a copyright nightmare, since various people hand-wrote the text, and it also has photos by various people stuck in, and cuttings from various papers and magazines, all of which have their own copyright issues. Most of the contributors are now dead, most of the papers are bust, so the copyright they owned will have been inherited… goodness knows where.
I (EJW) despaired of being able to publish it. However, I eventually found that Chris Hawkes of Rads End actually owns the paper scrapbook at the moment. He inherited the book from his mother, Joan Hawkes, who was chair of the WI at the time the scrapbook was compiled. And, he inherited any copyright she held in the document. Chris tells us that Joan wrote most of the book herself – he remembers her labouring over it – and he is very happy to see it published for the good of the community. So, although there are other copyright holders as well, I have gone ahead and published a copy, for the good of the community. It is so lovely and such an important part of village heritage. If you think that you own the copyright of some of this book and you don’t want it published, please get in touch and we’ll fix it straight away.
The scrapbook is published as a picasa web album, because it’s quite large. Click on the image below to open the picasa web album directly. There, it’s possible to browse individual pages (click the + symbol to zoom in) or download the whole album. These pages have been cropped, contrast-enhanced and colour-corrected, as well as reduced in resolution. If you’d like the original images, please do get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.
We’re trying to work out what to do with the original scrapbook. It’s been touched by so many mothers of the village that it is a fantastic heirloom, and we want to keep it safe while letting people see it. Any ideas? Get in touch!
Thanks you so much, ladies of the WI, for this treasure. And thank you Chris for letting us publish it.
Google have monomaniacally changed the link to take you to a google+ version of the album which is not very nice. They’re obsessed with google+ at the moment. When you first enter the google+ page, a tiny box appears at the top saying “click here to go to picasa web albums” and you can click there if you prefer the older picasa view. It’s possible that clicking here will (if you’re lucky) take you to the picasa view directly. Ot it might not, it seems a bit unpredictable.
TODO: Get these images in order.
