Whether your interest in history is personal, academic, or just a more general desire to find out how our forefathers lived, the Linton and District History Society offers a friendly welcome and helpful advice.
We meet on the first Wednesday of every month except January, 7 for 7:30 p.m., in Linton Village Hall. Tea and coffee are available at the start of the meeting. Annual membership is £20, and speaker meetings are free to members. Visitors are always welcome, and pay £5 per meeting.
Our programmes aim to cover local, national and international history – there is something for all interests, and we welcome suggestions for topics.
For all enquiries, contact the Society’s Secretary, Mrs Teresa Squires at sec.lintonhistsoc@gmail.com
Our next meeting is our annual Chairman’s Lecture, when Roger will speak on the Korean War. Roger says :
Korea (1950-53) is known as ‘The Forgotten War’ and yet 80,000 British servicemen fought in this remote far eastern peninsula, many on their National Service. Our war dead exceeded all other post-WW2 confrontations even if put together and some 21/2 million civilians also perished. Why did the Allied powers of WW2 end up fighting one another only 5 years after defeating Adolf Hitler? Korea was the only war ever fought in the name of the United Nations but despite access to nuclear weapons its forces, mainly American, were humbled by the peasant Chinese People’s Liberation Army supporting the North Koreans. We are still technically at war with North Korea which is now, of course, a nuclear power. South Korea was excluded by the Americans from the original peace talks. In April 1951, the first battalion Gloster Regiment was needlessly sacrificed by inept American commanders. Why? We shortly celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Imjin River and it is well time we all knew what happened in the Korea war and its consequences for the world order we still experience today.
Programme 2026
Review of our December meeting
| January | NO LECTURE | |
| 4th March | Roger Davies | Korea and the Glorious GlostersChairman’s Lecture |
| 1st April | AGM | Teresa Squires : A National Trust Pot-Pourri |
Review of our February meeting
Gillian White made a welcome return to talk about Mary Queen of Scots. To some a romantic heroine, to others the victim of her turbulent times, to yet others a woman who colluded in the murder of her husband, and the subject of drama, opera, novels and biographies, Mary – and her relationship with her cousin and nemesis Elizabeth – continues to intrigue.
Gillian made a convincing case for regarding the “real” Mary, as far as she can be distinguished amid the varying kinds of propaganda around her, as someone who endured many and painful losses before she was out of her teens, and who truly did not stand any chance of success as a monarch when she returned to a Scotland riven by religious and political faction. Young, a Catholic, and a woman, she was just not equipped to deal with the situation, though she really made things a lot worse for herself by marrying as her third husband the man widely regarded as her second husband’s murderer. Once in exile in England, neither did she help herself by plotting with Catholics planning to murder Elizabeth and to install her as Queen. One of Gillian’s illustrations was Mary’s personal copy of a codebook used in her correspondence, not the action of an innocent woman nor any defence against the sophisticated security service run by Cecil and Walsingham. To her dying day she proclaimed that she was the rightful Queen of England.
Perhaps time constraints meant that Gillian left unexplored the very real foreign policy problems that Mary caused Elizabeth. Relationships with much of continental Europe were difficult enough without a Catholic pretender conveniently sitting waiting for the overthrow of the Protestant Elizabeth. Even if Mary’s death was merely used as a pretext for the Spanish Armada, the threat to English sovereignty was real; and the fact that the Pope declared that Catholics had a duty to kill Elizabeth led to yet more plots.
A large and engaged audience clearly very much enjoyed this well-illustrated talk.
Family history
We have transferred the main part of our Archive to the Herefordshire Archive and Record Centre, which is also the main port of call for those researching family history. Some of our parish records can be accessed via this link
Committee members :
Roger Davies (Chairman)
Teresa Squires (Secretary)
Nic Walker (Treasurer)
Valerie Boxley (Outings Secretary)
Pamela Bruce