Since early 2020, Forncett History Group has published regular short articles in the village magazine, the Forncett Flyer. These articles have now been collected here on our new blog - Forncett History Notes. This blog offers the opportunity for these articles, and other news from the Group, to be read more widely and also provides a forum for us to publish short articles which don't fit easily elsewhere within the structure of the website. Please share this new page with anyone who you feel might be interested. If you would like to be added to our email distribution list please Contact Us and then you will receive an alert when any new article appears.
This month's article is based on another photograph taken at Forncett school, 74 years later than last month's 1914 photo. It was taken at a quite remarkable reunion that was held at the school on Saturday 14th April 1988 when nearly 100 ex-pupils gathered to reminisce, to share stories and to look back at old photographs. The event...
Every parent and grandparent is familiar with the annual school photograph and I guess that many readers have a collection of their old school photos as well as some of their children or grandchildren. The tradition of the school photo dates back to the mid-19th century and consequently these photos are an important part of local history. The...
As many Forncett residents are probably aware, the large disused Methodist Chapel in Forncett End is up for sale. The chapel, which was built in 1865, closed its doors in May 2022 having served the community for more than 150 years. However, this is not the first time in its history that it has been on the market!
St. Peter's church has four beautiful stained-glass windows, each of which has a story to tell. I have written about three of the windows before (see St. Peter's church) and this is the story of the fourth – the Joseph Bell window.
It's oft-lamented that "we never see a policeman around here !" but of course there was a time when every village, including Forncett, had its own local bobby.
These articles are often inspired by donations of new material (letters, books, photographs etc.) to Forncett History Group and this story is one such example. We were recently gifted the Baptist Church Book from the Forncett End Tabernacle which contains beautiful hand-written reports of the activities of this small chapel from 1860 to 1906. The...
Of all Forncett's many eminent clergy, the one who is undoubtedly most remembered is John William Colenso who served as rector of Forncett St Mary from 1846 to 1853 and went on to become Bishop of Natal in South Africa. However, John Colenso was not the only rector of Forncett to become a Bishop, there was a...
A great variety of subjects arrive as queries and comments through the Forncett History website and they quite often concern the stories of families who lived in the village at some time in the past. One such recent story was of the Lawn family who, like many families, came to Forncett as employees of the Great Eastern Railway.
Today nearly every household in Forncett has a car but there was a time when there were no cars in the parish. Although petrol-driven motor cars began to appear on English roads in the late 1890s, it was almost certainly many years later that anyone in Forncett owned a car. The first mass-produced car in the U.K. was Henry Ford's...
Postcards from the 19th and early 20th centuries can tell us a lot about life in Forncett at that time. They show us pictures of what our village looked like, but they can also tell us stories about the people who wrote them. In 2019 Su Leavesley spotted a card of Corner Farm, Forncett End for sale on eBay and it had an interesting story to tell....