Meeting reports 2024

Speaker Ian Sanderson described how he and some other enthusiastic amateurs formed the Archaeology Rheesearch Group in 2004 (named for the river Rhee, a tributary of the Cam). They carry out investigations of sites of archaeological interest, broadly in the South Cambridgeshire area, by simple field walking, land surveying, and using geophysical techniques.

The Whipple Museum was founded in 1944 and is located on Free School Lane, Cambridge, though the impressive doorway has “Laboratory of Physical Chemistr” written above it. Alison Giles, the Learning Coordinator, brought along 10 objects selected from about 7,000 and told us all about them. They represented several of the ‘shiny things Mr Whipple liked the look of’.

Tales of village life in Stapleford and Shelford, a talk by Helen Harwood The rural poor were extremely poor and living at a time when the Poor Law of 1601, with its use of workhouses, was still in operation and there was no system for pensions or Welfare State provisions that we take for granted today. People were not paid enough and by 1855 a hundred and twenty people had set off from Shelford and Stapleford searching for a better life somewhere in the new world.