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January 2006
Happy New Year from Feltwell.
The family now stands at 155 members with 3 applications pending. Maybe 2006 will be the year we reach 600 members; a select group of people if ever there was one on the WWW. The new family members are interested in finding out about the Shinfield and Fletcher families so if anyone can help... Website growth has slowed sufficiently for me to take on a new project. Long standing members will have heard me talk about Dan Engle in relation to the history of RAF Feltwell on which he is 'the font of all knowledge'. Well, Dan works at the British Sugar factory at Wissington and the other week he discovered a small archive relating to the early history of the factory. To cut a long story short I spent a couple of hours on Tuesday last scanning lots of photographs of the first factory to be built on the site whilst Chris Cock is spending time scanning photographs relating to sugar beet farming and the Fen 'sugar beet' railway. Suffice it to say that a Wissington Sugar Beet website will be appearing, with luck, later this year. Perhaps this will prove to be of a very minority interest but one thing is certain, the photographs would never have seen the light of day without Dan's chance discovery and would eventually have been lost if the factory ever closed. All we need now is to find someone who can tell us what all the machines in the photographs were used for; a former employee would be a good find. Does anybody know such a person?
St Mary's is now well into its Interregnum but the poor Churchwardens have still got the worry of the steadily deteriorating building to deal with. I have a couple of photographs which illustrate the problem, one shows a bucket of rotten wood which has fallen from the roof and the other shows plaster and stone fragments from the walls. An estimate of £80,000 has been made to treat and restore the roof! Whilst talking about buildings, the Parish Council approved the repair to and improvements of the changing rooms following the demolition of the Youth Centre (A photo of this will eventually make its way onto the website - promise!). The social housing project continues to proceed at a snail's pace so there's no surprise there, and the proposed development behind the Old School has been turned down, but I cannot imagine the developers will walk aware so we await their response. And again, there were more Christmas illuminations in Feltwell then ever before; seems to me that this is becoming something of a competition.
Finally, for those who remember Miss Alice Baker, she will be 100 in February.
