Tuesday 30th January 2024 at 2:30pm
Cley Village Hall
Talks by Members
Two interesting finds from Blakeney and Salthouse
Roger Bland
Two interesting objects have recently been found in our area. The first is a silver seal matrix (a stamp for sealing documents), found by metal detector user Steve Lancaster at Salthouse in April 2022, with the name of Robert of Kellingge (Kelling). The first rector named on the board of rectors in Kelling church is Robert. This has now been acquired by Norwich Castle Museum.
The second find, made by Mr and Mrs Bould in their garden in Blakeney, is a very worn religious medal showing St Peter and St Paul. It was struck for the Holy Year of 1750 inaugurated by Pope Benedict XIV. We will probably never know for certain how it came to be lost our village, but Italian Prisoners of War were based locally during the Second World War.
Five Cley Men Went to War and Died.
Richard Jefferson
The sad story of loss in World War II.
Tuesday 27th February 2024 at 2:30pm
Cley Village Hall
Whaling from Norfolk
Charles Lewis
This is the story of Norfolk’s “Greenland Fishery”, the annual fishery for whales which took boats from Yarmouth and Lynn into Arctic waters hunting for whales from as early as the 17th Century. When did it start?, which ports were involved?, how was it conducted?, when and why did it end?, and what evidence for this industry still survives in the county.
Tuesday 26th March 2024 at 2:30pm
Cley Village Hall
Crisis Before the Shipwreck: The Gloucester and Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design, 1654-1656
The discovery of the Gloucester warship off Great Yarmouth in 2007 by Norfolk divers Julian and Lincoln Barnwell has captivated the nation. An important warship to both British and global history, when the Gloucester sank in 1682, it was transporting the future King James II to Scotland. This talk considers the wider career of the Gloucester by focusing on its first expedition as part of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design in the Caribbean, 1654-1656. Accounting for the ship’s involvement in assaults on Spanish colonial holdings including Jamaica, Dr Benjamin Redding will also explore the experiences of the Gloucester’s crew, revealing how they faced extreme physical and mental hardships in an unforgiving environment.
Dr Benjamin Redding, Senior Research Associate in Maritime History, University of East Anglia
Johan Danckerts’ painting of the Gloucester wreck held by Royal Maritime Greenwich & Ben Redding