2024/5 Lecture Programme

Please note that our lectures are now being held at the Elim Church, Waterside Park, Ashbourne DE6 1DG. Meeting room opens at 2.00 pm and the speaker commences at 2:30 pm. We hope to provide the talks both in person at the venue and via Zoom – please see individual entries below to see if they are available via Zoom. Where applicable, please use the Eventbrite link associated with the talk to receive the Zoom joining details: the cost to non-members will be £5.00. 

To register for lectures and receive the Zoom links, if not posted below, and for any further information, please email ashheritagesoc@gmail.com

2024

Friday 27 September.

Catherine Booth

Catherine Booth (néeMumford, 17 January 1829 – 4 October 1890) was co-founder of The Salvation Army, along with her husband William Booth. Because of her influence in the formation of The Salvation Army she was known as the ‘Mother of The Salvation Army’. She was born as Catherine Mumford in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, England, in 1829 to Methodist parents, John Mumford and Sarah Milward. Her father was an occasional lay preacher and carriage maker.

Friday 25 October.

Shrovetide Football

A presentation by the author of “The Derby Game”. Derby Shrovetide Football was truly wild. One mob pitted its wits and muscle against the other. Players broke down walls, dived into freezing rivers and crawled through sewers. Thousands of fans filled the streets and civilised behaviour was suspended. But why did this game achieve national notoriety and then disappear in 1846?

Ian Collis

  During a varied career as a town planner, ecologist and environmental consultant, he campaigned for the built and natural heritage, writing many publications for charities, local authorities and heritage organisations. He set up projects which protected and enhanced Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, Derby’s riverside and the parks of Stoke-on-Trent, among many others. Now retired, he has combined a passion for writing with a fascination for the interaction between people and places, past and present. The result is ‘The Derby Game’ which he hopes is as absorbing to read as it was to write. His greatest football achievement was scoring five goals against Liverpool Philharmonic – perhaps not the toughest team in that football loving City.

Friday 22 November.

Historic Building Mythbusting

Uncovering folklore, history and acrchaeology. Go to any ancient building and there will be interesting, exciting, and romantic stories presented to the visitor. They are commonly believed and widely repeated – but are they really true? These stories include those of secret passages linking ancient buildings, spiral staircases in castles giving advantage to right-handed defenders, ship timbers used in the construction of buildings on land, blocked doors in churches which are thought to keep the Devil out and claims to be the oldest pub in the country. James Wright will explain the development of such myths and investigate the underlying truths behind them. Sometimes the realities hiding behind the stories are even more interesting, romantic, and exciting than the myth itself…

Dr James Wright

Friday 20 December.

Christmas Event

The last meeting of the year will be a social meeting with a seasonal heritage themed quiz and a festive buffet. Attendees are welcome to bring contributions to the buffet. Any liquid refreshment must be non-alcoholic.

Attendees are also welcome to bring along a heritage related object for discussion and possible identification.

Friday 24 January.

Mapleton: A Tale of Two Manors

How did such a small Derbyshire village end up with two manors?  What were they like?  We take a trip through the centuries to meet the people from all walks of life, some of them from well known Ashbourne families, whose lives were lived between their walls.

Rachel Hodgkinson

Two of Rachel’s great passions in life are heritage and textiles. Rachel has been researching family and social history for ten years now and besides personal research has done work for both individuals and community events. Through an interest in textiles Rachel has developed a variety of fibre art skills. Recently, these skills have been combined with an interest in all things heritage, producing pieces that interpret Rachel’s research in a tactile, visual display.

Friday 28 February.                    

Please note there has been a late change to our programme due to the unavailability of this month’s speaker, Robert Reid, who we hope will be able to present “Frank Beresford: Artist of Royalty, History, Landscapes (and my Grannies!)” later this year.

Instead, we have our very own John Titterton, who will be giving us a talk on “The Origins of some Surnames from the Derbyshire/Staffordshire Border Area”.

Friday 28 March.

No end of a lesson? The forgotten Boer War of 1899-1902

Perhaps some of us have heard of its most unsavoury aspects and seen the memorial at Derby Rail Station or the displays in Derby Museum. The war dominated British public discourse and excited a wide range of emotions from Kipling to the Kaiser. Some, such as A Conan Doyle, defended Britain’s controversial conduct of the conflict. Others, such as the suffragettes, claimed it was “deeply damaging” to Britain’s international reputation. But can Britain’s conduct of the war be vindicated or was it as Kipling claimed ‘no end of a lesson’?

Dr Mark Barnard

Mark will be providing a resume of the often overlooked Second Boer War and its controversies. Mark has taught a number of courses for the WEA for 10 years and now teaches history in Nottingham for the Mechanics Institute. His current course is The Wars of the Roses to be followed by a Re-appraisal of Richard III & The Princes in the Tower. He would be pleased to try and answer any questions you may have on today’s talk or concerning his family history which goes back to the 1500s and almost certainly beyond from an area he was not expecting…

Friday 25 April.

Discover Ashbourne History and Heritage Online (DAH2O): St John Street

A project is underway to research and document the history and heritage of Ashbourne on a street-by-street basis. Results are posted on the Discover Ashbourne website and ultimately may be accessible via QR codes in the windows of buildings. This talk focusses on St John Street and covers the methodology, the sources of data, progress to date, and a few of the more interesting building biographies that have already been posted on the website.

Dr. Paul Thompson

Paul studied Physics and Geophysics at Liverpool University 1978-85 before embarking on a 34-year overseas career in the oil industry as a Geoscientist. During the pandemic, he started a 2-year part-time course in Public History and Heritage at Derby University graduating in November 2023. Other than researching Ashbourne’s historic buildings, he is also researching Derbyshire’s turnpike roads and French colonial Indochina.

Friday 23 May.

A History of Alton Towers, the Home of the Earl of Shrewsbury

Alton Towers dates back as far as the 8th century when the tower’s site became a fortress held by Ceolred, King of Mercia. The Earls of Shrewsbury occupied the castle from 1412 when the Lady Ankarat de Verdun married Sir John Talbot – the title remained in the same family until the 1920s.

David Slade

David was an architect specialising in church architecture and he studied and was awarded a Masters Degree at Keele in History of Architecture. He was a partner at Hulme Upright and Partners at Festival Park, before he retired and did a few years from home. One of his specialist subjects is Pugin hence his interest. He also does guided tours of Pugin’s church in Cheadle. David has also been running a History of Architecture course for Cheadle U3a for some 20 years.

Friday 27 June.

AGM + Talk by Andrew Lewer MBE

Albert Speer: Hitler’s Favourite

Albert Speer, 1905-81, may be familiar to some via his appearances on “The World At War”, the Laurence Olivier narrated 26 episode history of the Second World War He managed in those television appearances – and in his various books – to convey an urbane image at odds with that of the cartoonish grotesques of the rest of the Nazi leadership. Yet Speer was a favourite of Hitler and, as well as being the Third Reich’s leading architect, he was also responsible for War Production at a time when his success may have prolonged the war by many months. What was this deeply fascinating and important individual really like? Andrew Lewer’s illustrated talk looks over Speer’s life, career, imprisonment, partial rehabilitation and then posthumous un-rehabilitation, referencing the great biographies of the man and his own works.

Andrew Lewer MBE

Andrew Lewer has lived in and around Ashbourne since infancy, attending Longford and Osmaston Primary Schools and Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School. He studied history at Newcastle University and Downing College, Cambridge. After a career in heritage publishing, based in Ashbourne Hall, Andrew represented Ashbourne at Derbyshire Dales District Council and then Derbyshire County Council, serving as County Council Leader from 2009-13, during which time he oversaw the construction of the new Ashbourne Library and the refurbishment of the Derbyshire County Records Office. He was a Director of Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust from 2004-17 and Chairman of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Derwent Valley Mills, from 2009-13. He was awarded an MBE and elected as a Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands in 2014. He served as the MP for Northampton South from 2017-24. Andrew now works as a consultant and director of several businesses in education and energy.

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