Open Day & Community Award July 2015

The photograph shows Margaret Follows, Sue Hampshire (Chair of CAHG), Anne Forrest and Julia Nash (Friend of the Archive) on the occasion of the presentation of the award for Inspiration to the Newlyn Archive at the Community Archive & Heritage Group Conference at University College London on July 15 2015.

The Newlyn Archive Open Day on Saturday 18 July 2015 ‘When the Quarry Guns Sounded’ was a great success with 146 visitors. Our rather depleted group of helpers did a sterling job with Jean Lodge taking on the job of organising the day and running the raffle, Ann Pilcher helped by Judith Porter on the door, Andrew Gordon selling second hand books, Diane Donohue helping with family research, Denny Harvey showing some amazing film footage, Pam Lomax sorting out archive queries, and David Tredinnick, Linda Holmes, Tom Lodge and Ron Hogg helping visitors around the space.

Two of our committee members not on duty that day (and shown in the photo above) had in the previous week been in London to pick up an award from the Community Archive & Heritage Group for the Newlyn Archive being the ‘Most Inspirational Archive and Heritage Group of 2014’. We had been asked not to publicise this until after the awards were announced at the Conference held at University College London on July 15th. So it was announced to Friends and visitors to our Open Day three days later.

Pam Lomax had entered the Newlyn Archive into the competition earlier in the year. Her entry outlined the work done by the archive in the year leading up to the exhibition, ‘Newlyn at Play: When Newlyners Walked to Lamorna Cove’ held on Friday and Saturday 3-4 October 2014. She described Friday morning openings at Trinity Centre where visitors share information, donate material or consult the archive; the importance of the website which encourages information to be exchanged by email, letter or telephone so that the resources of the archive are shared with the widest community possible; the books on local history themes that are periodically published by the archive; the popular Open Days held 4 or 5 times each year with 125-225 visitors attending, when there are films, photographic displays, competitions and activities in which old and young can participate and become involved with the archive.

Most appropriately Anne Forrest made the presentation for the Newlyn Archive which included a slide show; as President of the Lamorna Society, she has been closely involved with the integration of their archive with the Newlyn Archive and has personally been responsible for new research and bringing new material (and new Friends) into the archive. Supporting Anne was Margaret Follows who is the Newlyn Archive’s link person with Newlyn School and has conducted a number of projects with the children including two in 2014.

This is what Anne had to say about the conference: ‘The speakers and award winners’ presentations were fascinating and inspirational in their diversity. This year, CAHG’s keyword was ‘community’ and our entry impressed the judges by our bringing together two communities, Newlyn and Lamorna. Our entry won the category for ‘Most Inspirational Archive and Heritage Group of 2014’.

See the link with the Community Archives website which has been added to our links. This includes a report on the award the archive received.