HUDC Handbook: Difference between revisions

The Hoole Urban District Council "Handbook" of 1947 contains a history of Hoole as seen at the time, but is a historical document in of itself. The following article looks at whether it presents the history of Hoole in an accurate way. The images in the gallery below show the entire handbook and can be enlarged by clicking on them.

 

 

Council Handbooks are in some ways a phenomenon peculiar to their time and frequently reflect a very regulated attitude to society during the 30's and 40's. They were frequently supported by advertising and a very large number were produced just after ww2. Some go into rather extreme detail. The Welwyn Garden City "Citizens Handbook" of 1948, included a Directory of Roads which gives, for each house in each road the name of the "head of the household", and, a Directory of Residents which is a single alphabetic list of names of heads of households giving the street address for each name. These handbooks frequently contained a fold out map. Pyramid Press seem to have printed a huge number of them (the Hoole Guidebook is Number 158 and is a relatively early one) and as there are many far more local printers it might be suspected that Pyramid had found a lucrative market niche in persuading UDC's to produce a Handbook to a more or less set formula - using local "historians" to provide content at no cost to the publisher.