Editor's Note

First things first, I would like to personally thank the person who provided the Church with the parish magazines of 1892 to 1897. That kind gesture has enabled many to find out about a fascinating time in Enderby's history and its Parish Church. I hope that by putting these extracts on the Internet that we have made these events of Enderby's history available to all who are interested (and have an internet connection); deaths from Typhoid, celebrations of royal weddings and jubilees, the church schools, the quarries, e.t.c....

Through the words of the Reverend A. Frewen Aylward, in the one page letters that were attached to a national magazine, we can see a Church and village that were very different from today. The magazine sheds light on a village that was centred on the quarries, essentially rural, educated through a mixture of Church and secular schools, class based, and with a Church that was very much part of village life.

It was a joy to have these magazines for one week to produce these reviews and I hope those that read the extracts on our site will find it fascinating as well.

A Hope

In 1897 the Reverend Aylward sat down to write a brief review of Cecil Drummond's life; a 15 year old lad, the son of the Church patron and "lord of the manor", who had died of dysentery in the Queen's service in Hong Kong (See the 1897 review for details). As the vicar did so he looked across his desk at a copy of the January 1882 Enderby Church Magazine that mentioned the same person's birth and the celebrations that greeted it. Where is that magazine now? Does it still exist? If it does, it would be a marvelous chance to see into a time when the Rev. Edwards pastured the church; a man reputed to have fervently led the temperance movement in Enderby. What light would it shed on that time of Enderby's past?

Later on, in the 1900s and 1910s, the vestry minutes, quoted on this site, talked of the distribution of the magazine. What if we could see those magazines? Would the magazines of 1914 have reflected the patriotic fervour that began World War 1? and would subsequent magazines be a reflection of the sadness and loss of the next 4 years?

And further forward in time, we have a gap in the bound magazines of the Rev. Hibbert between 1937 and 1939. Lost?, permanently borrowed? or stolen?, we do not know. But if we could see those magazines, we could see how Enderby and the Church greeted Chamberlain's claims of "peace in our times" and then reacted to the declaration of war with Nazi Germany.

My hope is that some of those, or other, Enderby Parish Church magazines have survived and that someone will be generous enough to let us share in what they have (just photocopies would be great). So please, please, if you have any Enderby Parish Church Magazines, contact us via the contacts page.

Mark Brown

Enderby Parish Church Webmaster - 5 March 2004