For the Women’s Institutes Jubilee Year competition over two and a half thousand villages recorded their lives in scrapbooks. The 121-page book from Radwinter in Essex is one of four winners, and in this article we reproduce excerpts from their book. Here, in fact, the people of Radwinter write their own story.
The Radwinter scrapbook was compiled by fifteen members of Radwinter Women’s Institute with help from friends and relations. Meetings took place throughout the year in The Old Vicarage. All agreed that “we enjoyed them and discussion was frank and free.”
Radwinter is a village in the north-west corner of Essex. It is fifty miles from London, neighboured only by similar parishes and away from the high roads. Cambridge is seventeen miles away, and “town” for Radwinter is the little market borough of Saffron Walden.
All told, the parish of Radwinter holds nearly five hundred people. Many families have been here from time immemorial - perhaps since the Stone Age. The names on the ancient headstones in the churchyard, the names in the parish records of four centuries ago, still flourish in Radwinter. There is a strong sense of community and a great pride in belonging. Few wish to leave, and those who do are usually forced by the lack of housing or accessible work.
The village remains, indeed, remarkably unspoiled. It has been little touched either by new development or by the over-contrived picturesqueness which sometimes is the fate of villages when their beauty has become widely known. Radwinter has not the character of a beauty spot. It has, instead, a special charm and dignity which are felt by all who live in it. It is, as Miss Mitford wrote of her village, “a little world of our own... where we know everyone, are known to everyone, interested in everyone, and authorised to hope that everyone feels an interest in us.”
Our Church is an early 13th century building of flintstone and white limestone, it has a square tower and spire. On each side of the tower is a clock face and the clock chimes for each quarter-hour and strikes the appropriate hours. Every year, our church has a spring clean and the men sweep the walls and beat the carpets. Next day, the women scrub and polish.
The Lion, The Plough and The Brewery provide casual meeting places, as opposed to pre-arranged parties at the houses of friends who met for a drink, a game of cards or a meal.
The village is kept neat and tidy by our seven Road Men, who see to the roads, hedges and grass verges. Our Post Office is unique in having an all-female staff - Post Mistress and Three Postwomen. Our Milkman, besides delivering milk, also kindly takes messages.
The last twenty years have seen a succession of new things in the village: television aerials, cars at doors, electricity poles. On one hand, modern amenities are desired; on the other, there is the question whether this kind of village life can survive.
This is an edited extract of the article that appeared in the Observer’s magazine on 21 August 1966
