Parish Magazines 1899 - 1909

During the summer of 1898 the vicar of Haddenham for over 40 years, Revd. Henry Meeres, tendered his resignation and left the parish vacant in late September.The patron of the parish, the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral subequently presented Revd. G. Bruce Rhind MA, 56, senior curate in the parish of St Pauls, Deptford to the Bishop of Oxford for licensing as the new vicar of Haddenham. He moved here with his daughter Marion aged 22 and was admitted to the living on October 25^th 1898.  Within 2 months, in January 1899, Revd. Rhind published the first edition of a new monthly parish magazine.It was a simple affair – nothing more than a 4 sided pamphlet printed locally –  but parishioners also received a monthly copy of a national magazine - 'Church Monthly' - containing articles of interest, stories, puzzles, new hymns and poems. alongside their own parish pages.  At the end of each year the intention was for subscribers to return their copies to the vicar who would send them away to a company in London for binding into a more substantial book embossed with the parish name on the cover.  This was then returned to the parishioner and would have provided a rich source of reading material in the days before television or even radio. The cost to the parishioner was then just over a shilling.

Although not a comprehensive cross-section of life in Haddenham at the time, the magazines do portray a particular stratum of village society through the eyes of an enthusiastic clergyman. In reading Revd Rhind's magazines we encounter lacemaking, beekeeping, magic-lantern shows, the cricket club, church garden parties, the National School, choir outings and more. These documents portray an age of innocence which in just a few years would be gone forever – swept away by the Great War, the rise of the automobile and the accelerating changes which the 20^th century was to bring to English rural life.

St Mary's is fortunate to have in its archives a complete set of copies of these magazines from 1899 to 1909 and to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the first ever parish magazine published in 1859, we are making these documents available to all. They may be of particular interest to local historians as well as those tracing family connections in the village as the transcripts contain the names of many parishioners resident during the first decade of the 20^th century. You will need to have Adobe Acrobat or the rather smaller Foxit reader installed on your computer to view the magazines which are available by selecting from the grid below. Links which are not yet active represent magazines which are awaiting scanning - we hope to complete the project during 2010. We have fully indexed the documents to make searching for a particular name or event much easier - you can use the site search facility to search for text within the magazines.  This is experimental at present - we are working on tuning the search results to achieve greater accuracy.