Report: Kate Hurst

In recent weeks, events organised by Ormskirk and District Family History Society have proved popular on a local, national and even international scale!

First established in 1980, ODFHS is beginning to contemplate celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2020, but in the meantime their August and September events have been drawing larger crowds than usual.

On 22 August, Society member Dr. Andrew Scarisbrick gave his new talk, 'The Search For Scarisbrick Lodge', to a crowd of forty-two, including members of the Victorian Society who had travelled from Liverpool. Inspired by a quest to identify the Southport home of Sir Charles Scarisbrick (son of Charles Scarisbrick, of Scarisbrick Hall), the presentation explored the challenges of finding out exactly where the now-demolished house once stood, on Queens Road.

Despite being unable to find a floor plan of the building Dr. Scarisbrick gathered enough information from other resources, including room dimensions listed in a 1920s auction catalogue, Kelly’s Street Directories from the early 1900s, and Ordnance Survey maps that hinted at the dates when various extensions were added, to build up a vivid impression of how the house might have looked. After studying the given dimensions of the rooms and comparing them to the ground floor area suggested by a sale catalogue, he also managed to draw up a possible plan of his own.

Questions that followed this fascinating look into the history of a long-gone Southport home revealed that Scarisbrick Lodge was demolished after failing to sell at auction in 1923, and many tips were given to help keen historians to discover more about the history of houses and other properties.

During September, committee members Pam Richardson and Jean Gidman led two separate history walks. Supported by Ormskirk Community Partnership and the Heritage Lottery Fund, Pam’s Guided Walk around Ormskirk on 9 September was attended by forty people (including one who made a special trip all the way from Worcester!) and on 15 September a group of thirty-six gathered for Jean’s tour of Ormskirk Parish Churchyard, which offered a chance to see the final resting places of such interesting characters as Sergeant James Nunnerley and Robert Swarsbrick, the 'hermit of Lathom'.

Most recently, about thirty people came along to the ODFHS meeting on 26 September, when Pat Ireland’s illustrated talk on the South West Lancashire Agricultural Strike in summer 1913 provided all sorts of facts, figures, sketches of prominent personalities and impressions of the local political clashes that occurred during a difficult and perhaps less well-known incident in local history.

Packed with details about typical wages, the crops on West Lancashire’s farms and the struggle of farm workers to improve the conditions that they lived and worked in, Mrs. Ireland’s presentation featured touching photos of agricultural families facing eviction, overviews of new laws that improved the lives of workers in other industries (such as the 1910 Shops Act, which gave shop workers the right to one half-day holiday each week) and a brilliant impression of the places that were significant during the dispute, which was resolved with hours to spare before George V and Queen Mary visited the locality.

The next ODFHS meeting will be held at the Guide HQ, Moorgate, Ormskirk on 24 October, when Elaine Taylor will talk about a World War One Memorial Gardens Project that the Lancashire Gardens Trust are involved in.

Doors open at 7.30p.m.; talk begins at 8p.m. and all are very welcome. Visitors are requested to make a £1 donation and details can be found at www.odfhs.website or at https://www.facebook.com/events/188781871976186/