Highweek Parish Magazine February 1958

I have never read a parish magazine and I cannot recall any time when I may have received one. So why do I have in my possession a reasonably well-preserved original of this document?

The answer is to be found on page 5 and is simply a date and a name. The date is 28th December 1957 and the name is mine – it is a record of my baptism.

For whatever reason I have not looked at this document until recently and it came as a surprise all these years later to learn that I was baptised on my father’s birthday, and not a year later along with my new-born sister as I had always been told.

However, aside from that there is a great deal else of interest – to me at least and I am sure to some of you – mainly to be found in the numerous advertisements, which provide a great snapshot of the shops and tradespeople of the time. I have provided a sample below – there are more such pages!

Some of the names will be familiar to you. For example, Austins department store and Gerry & Co. jewellers are very much still in existence. The Rockheys department store you see in the photograph is now the Richard Hopkins – Wetherspoons. The jewellers Ham & Huddy closed down only recently and is now a Turkish hairdresser. The ‘heating, plumbing and sanitary engineer’ B.Loder will no doubt be known to some of you – a descendent continues to provide that service to this day.

Any knowledge of any of the others? Let me know!

I have scanned the entire document – all 22 pages – to PDF in a lo-res version (15.3MB) and a higher-res version (22.8MB) if you are interested in a copy.

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