Village Life

Hungarton c1900. Courtesy of the Records Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Interviewer: When you first came, in ’36, it was still a village..

Mr Barnett: Oh yes, yes, very much a village, more so than any village we’d been in before. Everybody worked together, the church and the chapel, they all worked together. Of course, up at Quenby Hall, Sir Harold and Lady Nutting lived there, and Lady Nutting was very keen on the village life and liked to see everyone working together, and she was a great Red Cross woman. The village hall was built about 1929, I think, somewhere near there. Everybody worked together all the time. The chairman of the parish council, he was head of the chapel, Edwin Bates, and the old vicar, Mr Patterson, I don’t think he lasted, I think he went to Norfolk and retired about ’38. We had a young man come but I’m afraid he was a trouble maker, he found fault with the way the village hall committee was composed, it shouldn’t have chapel people on it, and various things of this kind you see, he was poking his nose into various things and stirring up trouble one way or another. Well, of course, Sir Harold, he was patron of the living (?), and of course at these halls there’s always a bush telegraph that tells them all that’s going on, and Lady Nutting sent for this new vicar and told him, this has been a happy village and everyone works together and they’re still going to continue to do so, told him straight, and he had to draw his horns in.

©EMOHA