Treasure trove in Send and Ripley

Karen Neville

Clare McCann tells us about Send & Ripley History Society’s 50th anniversary and one of the smallest museums in the country

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the formation of Send & Ripley History Society. Founded originally as the Send History Society we were soon having regular monthly meetings and immediately began the production of a bi-monthly journal – and are about to publish edition 300. Membership soon built up to over 200 and after 10 years the members decided to expand the reach to include Ripley. We now have some 350 members. 

The first journal announced that one of the objectives was ‘to add to the intellectual and social life of the village’ and reported that at its first meeting the Society had established specialist groups focusing on local buildings, genealogy, archeology as well as natural and social history. Ken Bourne, the first chairman, summarised the key goal as ‘increasing our knowledge of local history and helping to preserve our heritage’. 

After a half century – on a very modest budget and with a relatively small group of volunteers – we have a fully accredited museum – one of the smallest in the country – and have certainly fulfilled that initial promise to help preserve our heritage by building up an impressive resource of research material. This includes our collection of over 7,000 photographs; buildings reports on most of the local buildings of architectural or historic interest; 300 indexed journals packed with articles of interest to buildings researchers, genealogists and social historians.  

We also have a treasure trove of local documents covering church registers of births, marriages, deaths and burials; census reports; trade directories and court and manorial documents transcribed and even translated from the medieval Latin, then painstakingly indexed – some of these only available from our collection. In the past couple of years we have begun digitising these records to preserve them for future researchers. 

We have continued to provide services to local schools and have published an impressive list of books and short films whilst staying true to the original objective of ‘adding to the social life’ of the villages. We have achieved this through our regular, well-attended meetings and outings and our popular journal, which won the British Association of Local Historians’ award for best local history magazine in 2021. 

As part of the anniversary celebrations, Send & Ripley History Society are staging an exhibition focussing on the 1970s – polyester, platforms, power cuts & punk which runs until the end of March. The museum, to the right of Ripley Village Hall is open every Saturday, 10am-12pm or by appointment. Call Clare on 01483 728546. More at sendandripleyhistorysociety.co.uk