PROGRAMME
Our lectures and visits
The lectures will be held either in the Methodist Church in Nichol Hill, LN11 9NQ, or online using Zoom. Visitors or members may request a Zoom link by emailing start.david@btinternet.com.
The lectures will be held either in the Methodist Church in Nichol Hill, LN11 9NQ, or online using Zoom. Visitors or members may request a Zoom link by emailing start.david@btinternet.com.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Andrew is a former London Broadcasting and Yorkshire TV journalist, running Blow by Blow Productions as a filmmaker and media-allrounder for many years now. Many of his productions lean towards nostalgia topics e.g. “Birth of the Tanks”, “A Farmer Looks Back” and “The Ruston in the Blue Lagoon.”
On the night Andrew will play many old film clips of City and County roughly between the 1920s and the 1970s and explain how the films were found. Some of the roads lead to his Uncle Ron, an amateur filmmaker from 1936 until the 1980s, whose old films Andrew inherited.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Brian Davey taught history at the Immingham School, the University of Lincoln and for the WEA.
In the summer of 1791 the future Viscount Torrington toured Lincolnshire with his nightcap in one pocket and a bottle of white brandy in the other. He was hampered by Ranger, his ‘indescribably stupid’ dog, admitted that too much port had made him ‘a little muddled’ when he visited Lincoln Cathedral, and only just endured his night in Cleethorpes; but every night he wrote up his journal, which survives (complete with port stains) in Lincoln Reference Library. This illustrated talk follows him and uses his words to discover the people and places of eighteenth-century Lincolnshire that he met along his, usually irritable, way.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Born in Boston, David read Music at Nottingham University. Some years later he undertook research into the composer Bruce Montgomery (aka Edmund Crispin, author of detective fiction), his biography of whom was published in 2007. For 32 years David was Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School. He is active as an organist, giving recitals here and there, as well as playing in big bands and folk groups. He has been convenor of the East Midlands Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association.
As well as writing entertaining detective novels and short stories in the Golden Age tradition (featuring his idiosyncratic sleuth Professor Gervase Fen), Edmund Crispin (1921-1978) was also a composer under his real name of Bruce Montgomery. Although he had success with pieces for piano, orchestra and voices, his most lucrative work was composing the scores for films including the two series started by Carry On Sergeant and Doctor in the House.
The talk will progress from a summary of his life to how Crispin’s musical career is reflected in his novels. There will be plenty of illustrations as well as some short musical excerpts.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Bob is a volunteer at Louth Museum and a member of the Ants & Nats board. He holds a history degree from Leicester University and is a journalist, author and filmmaker with an interest in local history, culture and travel.
Archivists feed on scraps. They unearth tempting historical morsels and beaver away until they have revealed their fascinating wider stories. For the last 10 years Ruth’s Blog on the Louth Museum website has been a treasure trove of archival research and inspired storytelling, shedding new light on the events and the lives of the people, both high born and humble, that have shaped the town. With the publication of the Louth Museum Book of Blogs, Ruth Gatenby, and her co-authors, have invited me to share an illustrated review of this landmark book where each curated blog is retold and becomes a colourful thread in the rich tapestry of Louth’s story.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Mark Gardiner has worked in University College London (where he was the Deputy Director of the Field Archaeology Unit) and at Queen’s University Belfast (where he was joint head of Archaeology-Palaeoecology) before taking a post at the University of Lincoln. He is now Professor Emeritus at Lincoln. He has particular research interests in medieval buildings and is currently working on a book on houses in England between 1150 and 1250.
While the medieval buildings of the city of Lincoln are well studied, those in the remainder of Lincolnshire remain poorly understood. In the last few years, work by a group of buildings archaeologists have begun to change that. The discoveries are altering not only what we know about Lincolnshire, but also have wider implications for England as a whole. The talk will consider two Louth buildings, as well as others from elsewhere in the county.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Michael Jones was Director of the Archaeology Unit for Lincoln 1980-2000, later City Archaeologist (2000 until retirement in 2012), and currently an honorary professor at Lincoln Bishop University. Since retirement he has written a memoir of his life as an archaeologist.
Drawing on his new publication, Digging Lincoln, the author will recount his background and initiation into archaeology and describe how the archaeological team for the city of Lincoln operated over the next few decades. He will describe this exhilarating time, full of important archaeological discoveries, and demonstrate how appreciation of the importance of Lincoln’s archaeological story and its public presentation have grown remarkably, such that it has now become a major heritage destination. He will bring some copies of the book along for sale at a discount.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Geoff was a Production Manager at a publishing company in Surrey, before moving to Bristol, where he spent 20 years working as a Technical Illustrator and then lecturing in computer graphics at a Further Education College in the city.
After taking early retirement in 2006, Geoff and his wife moved to her home town of Louth, where he became a member of the Lincolnshire Bird Club and for 17 years has volunteered as a ‘Seal Warden’ at Donna Nook, with the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust.
Living opposite St. James’ Church, Geoff has monitored the peregrine falcons since they first appeared on the church in 2007. Selecting videos and photos from a wealth of information recorded by cameras we have placed on the tower walkway, this talk takes us through all the stages of nesting, from courtship, egg-laying, hatching and feeding the chicks, and finally the moment the juveniles fledge.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Dr Andrew Walker has a long standing interest in the history of Lincolnshire. Between 1992 and 2010 he worked at the University of Lincoln and its predecessor institutions, latterly as Head of the School of Humanities and Performing Arts. Between 2010 and 2020, he was Vice Principal of Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance in Kent. He now lives in Worcester but maintains close links with our county. He is a member of the Lincoln Record Society and The Survey of Lincoln and has served on the History of Lincolnshire and Local History teams of the Society for Lincolnshire History & Archaeology. Andrew is currently Chair of SLHA.
Agricultural shows were opportunities for the latest agrarian knowledge to be transmitted and technology to be exhibited. However, they were much more than that. This talk will focus particularly upon the Louth shows arranged by the North Lincolnshire Agricultural Society between 1838 and 1868, and the Lincolnshire Agricultural Society between 1878 and 1949. It will plot agricultural developments in the locality as displayed on the showground, but, as will be explored, changes in the nature of the shows at Louth also reveal much about the transformation of the town socially and culturally. Civic pride, too, was on display during the period of the show’s visit, and will also be considered.
Attention will be paid to the showgrounds themselves, focussing upon their locations and layouts, which revealed much about the agricultural societies’ priorities.
This illustrated talk will draw upon a range of sources, most notably newspaper reports, and agricultural society records, including maps and plans of the show sites.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held on Zoom. For details contact David Start.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.