The Pembury WI Scrapbook of 1965 was produced as a time capsule to record life in the village in the mid 1960s. Instead of being buried in a hole under a building, it is buried in a box, and locked in a cupboard in the Parish Hall. It gets an airing every few years when somebody wants to examine one of the records or run an article for the Pembury Village News.  On this occasion, in 2013, it was resurrected by Janet Ditchett and carefully transported to my quiet corner of Pembury for inclusion on the Pembury History web site. It will then be taken back to its resting place.

One of the main reasons for its rare outings is its size and awkwardness.  It is 21.5 x 14.5 inches in 1960s standards of measurement – these days expressed as 55cm x  37cm.  The first few pages are full size, then things go a little crazy –  the book is then sub-divided into three sections:  (top) Places,  (middle) People,  (bottom) Pursuits.  Each section has about 45 pages that anchor back to a common spine for all three sections.  The pages of each section can be turned independent of the other sections.  The operation of one section puts an uneven pressure on the spine of the book, making the other sections distort out of place, and interfere with the pages being turned.  It is a very clumsy exercise and could lead to damage in the hands of an impatient user.  In the planning stages it may have seemed like a good idea, but in practice it has delivered a book that is difficult to use.

Each page is about 34 x 17 cm and has been hand crafted from a larger sheet and then cropped. This is evident by some pages having their lower line of text hacked.  I suspect they originally planned the height of each page to be a third of the full page and found at a later stage that they needed clearance between each section to enable the pages to turn without too much interference from the upper or lower neighbour.

There are now signs of ageing.  Not wear – it has not had enough use to be worn. The newspaper cuttings are rich in acid causing the typical brown discolouration so characteristic of the cheap paper used in 1960s paperback books.  This discolouration spreads to neighbouring paper in the form of mirrored patches of discolouration.  The same occurs opposite some illustrations if the pigment or colouring agent carries acid or a detrimental chemical. Some adhesives used for pasting cuttings and photos also contain chemicals that have a long term effect on neighbouring paper.  It will only get worse as time passes. This example of  Pursuits Page 15 shows a few rectangular patches of discolouration.  The previous page was one of the boring fashion pages that had 4 pasted images from magazines. It is the chemicals from the adhesive that has leeched through the previous page to stain the displayed page.

I have attempted a photographic record of this book, and it was not easy.  Ideally I would have laid each page on my A3 flatbed scanner for a perfect, distortion free copy.  Because of the size and awkwardness of the object this was not practical.  A custom built lighting rig was constructed for the book to be subjected to a series of digital cameras.  The pages did not always lay perfectly flat, and the geometric perfection of the lenses could not always be guaranteed.  The images are not be geometrically perfect, but they convey the spirit of the WI effort in 1965, and they provide a record of the project.  Some digital fiddling has been adopted in order to increase the contrast of the text. The pages processed by the old fashioned typewriter suffer most – particularly when they were using worn ribbons. Some pages, dealing with clothing and furnishing fashions of the 1960s have not been included as they are not specific to Pembury and the information is easily found in any social history of the period.
The tables lower down this page give access links to the main content of the scrapbook.

Many WI members were involved in the project as can be seen by variations in handwriting, inks and mixture of typed text.  There was no attempt at consistency of presentation.  Sadly there was no accreditation of content. They had little idea how things would pan out in the future, or how our lives would be changed by future technologies.  The scrapbook visualises transport in 2015 as flying saucers drifting past the spire of St Peter’s Church – little did they know that we would not have the technology to save the spire.   If in a few years the Pembury WI decide to have a crack at a similar project, it would most likely be created via digital media rather than a physical scrapbook.

Placing the contents of the scrapbook on this web site enables a greater audience to appreciate the effort taken in 1965.
Janet Ditchett has written several articles in the PVN about the WI Scrapbook.   Please refer to item 007 on the Articles Archive page.

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Tony Nicholls   2013

Since the original writing of this introduction I have been informed by Janet Ditchett that the scrapbook has now passed from the Pembury WI to the Tunbridge Wells History Museum.       Tony Nicholls  2017

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