Meetings 2022: Difference between revisions

Our first external speaker for two years, Anthony, a local historian with a diverse range of interests focused on maritime and industrial history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, brought the competitive story of these local collieries to our attention.  He told the story of the use of remarkable construction and engineering ideas in successfully mining coal in this period. Individuals, as different as the engineer George Stephenson and Emma, Lady Hamilton (later, Nelson’s mistress), played a part in the story as did the dangerous, appalling conditions of work along with the living conditions and health of the individual miners and their families of Neston.

Anthony Annakin-Smith

 

===Saturday 23rd April 2022===

 

Society's AGM and Christmas social. Some of the business at our AGM can be a little dry, so this year we added a pantomime (with an all-star cast!) which had been specially "written" for the Society. The subject is the somewhat tragi-comic [[Osborne Aldis]] who was the benefactor of Plegmunds Well, and most of the text is adapted from his various court appearances and other actual historical documents researched by members of the Society. Osborne, as you will recall from our talk at Plemstall, was a Cambridge graduate who was catapulted to fame (and prison) for his fraud on the Bank of England and then spent many years living off relatives while failing at various business schemes. He eventually moved to Chester where a chance meeting led him to restore Plegmund's Well, before his dodgy dealings had him back in the dock. Was he really a crook? - or does his reputation require repair? After the panto the jury gave a majority vote that he WAS a crook! As Osborne said before a somewhat agitated judge, quoting some other playwright, "whether the evil that men do lives after them and the good is oft interred with their bones".