10th April 2019

Sophie Clapp, the Archivist at the Boots Company was due to deliver this lecture on the 10th of April but unfortunately was unable to attend. More fortunately, she was able to ensure that we had the power point presentation and accompanying notes in time for our Chairman, Pat Smedley, to step up to the podium and to deliver a fascinating picture of a man of great character.

Jesse Boot had little in the way of early advantages except an exceptional father whom he described as “…without wealth, without money, without any business experience; his only asset was character”. John Boot moved his family to Nottingham when his health deteriorated and he had to give up his work as a farm labourer. There, he established the city’s first herbalist store, preparing and selling remedies and giving consultations, so preparing the way for a future retail empire.

13th March 2019

Captain Geoff Dyer’s presentation on March 13 drew one of the Society’s largest audiences; perhaps unsurprising given the local importance of the RAF. In fact, those present included other past crew members.

Given his 10,000 hours of pilot experience and his studies in aviation history, Captain Dyer was more than qualified to give a rounded and fascinating view of life behind the scenes in the RAF during the Cold War.

In 1946 it was understood that any future war would be nuclear and that the potential enemy would be Russia. Captain Dyer highlighted the enormous and rapid development during that crucial period; there were just seven years between the Lancaster and the Vulcan. The World War ll Lancaster carried around five tonnes of bombs whilst the Vulcan carried two million tonnes of TNT; and in the event that just one got through to Russia it could have wiped out Moscow.

Issues around the Vulcan’s design and its construction , as well as the responsibility of the captain for the rear crew who didn’t have the safety of ejection seats were also covered as were the experiences of being a test pilot and demonstration flying. But this presentation also had its lighter side; we heard about how the captain’s biggest responsibility was to stop the crew from misbehaving during stop-overs and how exercises over Canada provided opportunities to bring back large quantities of whisky – custom officers’ inspections were thwarted by hiding the bottles up the nose in the scanner bay.

6th February 2019

Presented by Jeremy Lodge

This was the intriguing title of Jeremy’s talk which followed the Society’s AGM. He opened with a reminder of just how many traditions and rural events had disappeared over the last 60 years or so. Some of these could be seen in the way village people ‘sorted out their own’. In other words, dispensing justice to local miscreants. We all know about the humiliation of the stocks, but ‘Ran Tan Tan’? Alice Bealby, recording her memories in 1960, remembered a man being punished for abusing his wife with ‘ran-tanning’ or ‘rough music’. This was when a band of villagers assembled outside a house armed with sticks and old tin cans to make a lot of noise and would sing, for example:

‘Ran Tan Tan with an old tin pan,
This man’s been beating a good woman’.