Since early 2020, Forncett History Group has published regular short articles in the village magazine, the Forncett Flyer. These articles have now been collected here on our new blog - Forncett History Notes. This blog offers the opportunity for these articles, and other news from the Group, to be read more widely and also provides a forum for us to publish short articles which don't fit easily elsewhere within the structure of the website. Please share this new page with anyone who you feel might be interested. If you would like to be added to our email distribution list please Contact Us and then you will receive an alert when any new article appears.
These articles are often inspired by donations of new material (letters, books, photographs etc.) to Forncett History Group and this story is one such example. We were recently gifted the Baptist Church Book from the Forncett End Tabernacle which contains beautiful hand-written reports of the activities of this small chapel from 1860 to 1906. The...
Of all Forncett's many eminent clergy, the one who is undoubtedly most remembered is John William Colenso who served as rector of Forncett St Mary from 1846 to 1853 and went on to become Bishop of Natal in South Africa. However, John Colenso was not the only rector of Forncett to become a Bishop, there was a...
A great variety of subjects arrive as queries and comments through the Forncett History website and they quite often concern the stories of families who lived in the village at some time in the past. One such recent story was of the Lawn family who, like many families, came to Forncett as employees of the Great Eastern Railway.
Today nearly every household in Forncett has a car but there was a time when there were no cars in the parish. Although petrol-driven motor cars began to appear on English roads in the late 1890s, it was almost certainly many years later that anyone in Forncett owned a car. The first mass-produced car in the U.K. was Henry Ford's...
Postcards from the 19th and early 20th centuries can tell us a lot about life in Forncett at that time. They show us pictures of what our village looked like, but they can also tell us stories about the people who wrote them. In 2019 Su Leavesley spotted a card of Corner Farm, Forncett End for sale on eBay and it had an interesting story to tell....
Having lived in Forncett for nearly thirty years, I've always spelled our village's name with two "t"s. However, some recent research about an old Forncett family taught me that this wasn't always the case!
As I write this article there is talk of possible light snowfall here in Forncett next week but, as global temperatures continue to rise, then the chances of serious snowfall here in Norfolk seem to be rapidly disappearing. White Christmases are really not that common, even though to qualify, there needs to be just a single snowflake falling on...
You may be as surprised as I was to learn that the rural village of Forncett was bombed by the Germans in both World Wars! Nevertheless, "The Bombing of Forncett" was the subject of Philip Yull's interesting and well-attended talk to the History Group at our October meeting.
The photographs in my article in August were taken by the Norwich photographer, Tom Nokes, who chronicled much of life in the villages of South Norfolk from around 1891 until 1926. Living in Norwich, Tom travelled around the villages of South Norfolk by bicycle and then developed his photos in a shed at the end of his garden!...
At the September meeting of Forncett History Group, David Kirk, from Wreningham Heritage Group, gave an excellent illustrated talk on the life of Rev. John William Colenso. Colenso is best known for his time as Bishop of Natal in South Africa from 1853 until his death in 1883 but he served as rector of Forncett St Mary from 1846 to 1853. ...