Kent County Show & Sissinghurst Castle Heritage Weekend
Out of the blue at the end of May I had a telephone call from one of the organizers of the Kent County Show offering KAS a free stand to help celebrate the Show's 80th anniversary this year. Even though the time scale was extremely short, this was really an offer too good to miss. Several years ago when the Society attended, the costs proved to be quite high. I am grateful to Joy Sage for putting together the display boards so that we could tell visitors to the Show what we actually do and represent. Chris Pout kindly delivered the display boards to Detling - this was a case of calling on any available resource - President, spouses.........!
We left home at the crack of dawn on the first day so that we could put up the boards and generally make the stand as attractive and eye-catching as possible. Very fortunately we were in one of the permanent buildings as the weather was far from 'summery'. We shared the 'Remembering Kent' section with other heritage organizations, ranging from the Agricultural Museum at Brook, Brogdale, Dolphin Barge Museum, to the Kent Guild of Spinners, Dyers and Weavers, the Country Federation of WIs etc. It was interesting speaking to others of like mind as well as spreading the KAS word, especially in periods of heavy rain when everyone was seeking shelter in our building!
The Earl and Countess of Wessex opened the Show and made a special effort to come round and speak to everyone in our section. The Earl had obviously been very well briefed and I was impressed by the depth of his knowledge of archaeology, presumably gleaned from his brother's interests! With just two of us manning the stand it did seem a very long day, especially as it then took an hour to even leave the showground.
On the Saturday two stalwarts of KAS, Chris Pout and Andrew Richardson, manned the stand as I had to chair an AGM in deepest Sussex. They also had an interesting and busy day. We were back again on Sunday with welcome help from Joy Sage and Vince Burrows. At least this meant that we could have a quick stroll round the rest of the Show, avoiding the showers! Again we had many visitors and were able to distribute copies of the excellent Newsletter as well as many membership forms. I coded these and have had a couple of new members. I am very grateful to those who helped, but it highlights the fact that we need many more volunteers if we are invited in future years. Extra publicity for the KAS can only be a good thing.
The following weekend we took the same display to the History Weekend at Sissinghurst Castle - this was part of the CBA archaeology fortnight which meant that quite a few potential helpers were occupied elsewhere. Again the manning of the stall over the two days fell on myself, husband Chris and Chris Pout. We had much interest from visitors especially with regard to the photographs of places featuring individuals. We have so far gained one new member from this - not a very good result but more people should now be aware of the existence of KAS. One problem was that many of the visitors to Sissinghurst were from out of the County on coach tours visiting other gardens and places of historical interest.
Please let me know if you can help at any such events in future years - it is important that we have more volunteers so that the work does not just fall on a few willing people.
Sheila and Chris Broomfield
