Letters to the Editor

Dear Editor

Staff at Dartford Borough Museum and Dartford Library would like to say a big ‘thank you’ to the people who were kind enough to contact us with answers to our questions about the mystery photo of a royal visit to an unknown town in Kent, which appeared on the back page of the autumn Newsletter. The first two replies were received from KAS members who actually live in the street itself!

We now know that the photograph shows Stone Street in Cranbrook, at its junction with the High Street. The central footpath leads up to the church and the people who appear above the bunting are actually standing in the raised churchyard. As to the details of the actual occasion, we have Dr Phil Betts, President of the Cranbrook and District Local History Society, to thank for informing us that it shows the visit of Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein on 14 July 1906. She was one of Queen Victoria’s daughters and undertook much charity work. On this occasion she had visited the church to unveil a new East Window, dedicated to the Tooth family, and was going on to open the first section of the National Sanatorium, later known as Benenden Chest Hospital. Rodney Dann, the Curator of Cranbrook Museum, has also been very helpful and we are currently arranging for a copy of the hitherto unknown image to be lodged in his Museum’s archive.

Dr Mike Still
Assistant Museum Manager
Dartford Borough Museum

Dear Editor

Some years ago when I was embarking on my thesis ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Deer Parks in Kent’ I asked Newsletter readers to contact me if they had information about individual parks or might offer me access to explore former park boundaries etc. I had a very encouraging response from several KAS members, I would now like to thank all those involved, having now successfully achieved my doctorate. I am still very interested in the subject so would welcome further exchanges. Many thanks to all who have helped me and given encouragement.

Susan Pittman

Dear Editor,

Reading PenniIle Richards article on the West Farleigh sparrow club (Autumn 2011) reminds me of two family stories. In 1933 my mother went to live with her parents in a house near the North Pole pub on the Teston/Wateringbury border. One particular day when the men came along to shoot the sparrows roosting in a holly tree in the garden, my Gran, who was a passionate animal lover, ordered the men off in no uncertain terms. Although the men tried to point out the benefits of their sport, Gran, standing less than five feet in height, was not unnerved by a group of armed men and told them to ‘never come back’. Nice one Gran! It happened at dusk sometime between 1933 and WWII. The article also mentioned the capture of butterflies. I presume they might have been the cabbage white. My brother has told me that during the war children were rewarded by their school for the most cabbage whites that could be caught with the nets provided. He said the creatures were so numerous ‘it was like walking through a snow storm’.

Sandra Manser

Hasted Prize

The Hasted Prize, inaugurated in 2007, is a biennial prize awarded by the KAS for what is assessed by a panel of judges to be the best thesis on an aspect of the archaeology or history of the historic County. The purpose of the Prize is to encourage research at a higher level on the County’s past, and to rescue academic theses that merit publication from the comparative obscurity of university library shelves. The Prize is worth £3000; £1000 goes directly to the successful entrant, and £2000 is retained by the Society to be used as a supplement towards the cost of publication once the work has been accepted by a publisher. Two books have been published with the help of the Hasted Prize.

The Hasted prize for 2011 has been awarded to Dr Alison Klevnäs for her Cambridge PhD thesis (2010): ‘Whodunnit? Grave robbery in early medieval northern and western Europe’.

The thesis draws on recent, mainly German, literature on grave robbing in central Europe and then closely examines and analyses similar practices and processes in Thanet during the 7th century. All copies of theses submitted for the Hasted Prize are available in the Society’s Library at Maidstone Museum.