Celebrating Our Village News Heritage - The Chronicle
Before The Village Tribune Arrived in Helpston…
The Helpston Chronicle, A4 in size, ran from 1986 to 2001 and replaced the smaller, church-focused Parish Magazine, which ended with the retirement of Reverend Blade. Originally set up by Joe Dobson with support from Nola Crowson, The Chronicle’s Editor for most of its existence was Roy Hinchliff, who has conscientiously kept ring binders full of old editions.
The Chronicle was a wonderful community newsletter, produced on a shoestring budget in the days before easy computer editing and modern printing techniques. Getting each edition out to the initial 240 households in the village was a laborious process by today’s standards! By the time The Chronicle finished (a year after the turn of the Millennium) the print run had increased to over 400, with households in Woodcroft and Etton added to the distribution area.
When asked about The Chronicle today, Roy Hinchliff says, “The Village Tribune is very professional, The Chronicle wasn’t. I was very proud of The Chronicle. I thought it was worth doing because it had an effect in the village. It helped sustain the mood that Helpston was a great place to live. You can still see the evidence of it on the front of the village hall today – all those plaques proclaiming, ‘Winner: Village of the Year’.”
As Roy recalls, the adjudicators for ‘Village of the Year’ or ‘Best Kept Village’ awards were keen to see evidence of community involvement in support of a village’s application, “over a period of ten years or so, Helpston kept winning because The Chronicle had kept a record of everything that was going on. The judges were bowled over and thought Helpston was extraordinary. People were doing all sorts of things in the village to make life better. All The Chronicle did was create a record of them and I think that’s fantastic. Helpston keeps drawing more good people in. The motivation gets passed along and never runs out, so long as people are prepared to come in and roll their sleeves up.”
Plaques on the front wall of Helpston Village Hall show that the village won the award for ‘Best Kept Village’ in 1986 & ‘Village of the Year’ in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 & 2001. 21st century residents of Helpston should be grateful for the hard work put in, at the end of the 20th century, by dedicated community-focused residents like Roy, Joe and Nola. Old editions of The Chronicle certainly give modern readers a tantalizing glimpse of past events and some of the hard-working, friendly locals, such as Martin Jackson, who consistently made them happen.
The front cover of the 1990 Summer Edition of The Chronicle displays the Editor’s impressive skills as an amateur cartoonist. Roy Hinchliff’s speedily hand drawn comic strip reveals the true story behind the cover’s creation!
Another Chronicle cover of note, this time from the Winter Edition 1990, served as a reminder of an earlier visit to Helpston by John Major and his wife, Norma, before John replaced Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. In May 1985, Major was still a backbench MP and our village sat within the boundary of his then Huntingdonshire constituency. Helpston certainly gets around! In poet, John Clare’s day (1793-1864) the village of Helpstone (it had an extra ‘e’ back then) was in Northamptonshire. Yet, today, it lies in Cambridgeshire.
The final edition of The Helpston, Etton & Woodcoft Chronicle, delivered in Winter 2001, commemorated the unveiling of the bespoke village sign, so familiar to those living in Helpston today, hand-carved by Glyn Mould of Sacrewell Farm. Any funds left in The Chronicle account, when it ended, went towards the purchase of a big cooker for Helpston Village Hall and, as of 2023, it’s continuing to warm things up nicely.
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