Projects

The Cogenhoe Oral History Project is now complete and the book which has been produced from it has been launched along with a CD of extracts from some of the interviews.

The project represents a lot of hard work from many people and during the past two years, interviewing, word-processing, script-writing and many other skills have had to be learned. Over 50 people from many walks of life have been interviewed and their memories recorded. Some were born here, others worked here and still more came to live here but all have, in one way or another, contributed to the history of the village.

Apart from the oral interviews, the book also draws on information from old photographs, maps and other documentary sources, as it looks at Cogenhoe life under a number of headings which include a description of the village at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the 20th centuries; two world wars; school and work; transport recreation; administration and many other aspects of village life. A Century of Change is, however, more than just a collection of facts and names.

There are many stories from the past including the dark affair of the Parish Council’s Rochester oil lamp; the passing over the village of the first aeroplane; a description of some of the Cogenhoe residents by a war-time evacuee; the shooting down of a German bomber; and what happened to the girls who didn’t wear an oak leaf on Oak Apple Day. The interviews have generated a large collection of transcriptions which have been collated and bound. 

The Society's current project includes the House History Group with the general remit of recording the history of interesting houses - some past, some present. The idea of recording floor plans and the materials in the form of a data base has been looked at before moving on to think about the people who lived in the houses being studied. During the Oral History Project, a splinter group set bout another task , that of researching who lived in Cogenhoe in 1925.

That year was chosen because it was the year that a new and hopefully up-to-date map of the area was published and also there was an electoral register available for that year. The small group who worked on this project found it quite difficult because there were only a few people left in the village who could remember that far back and so verify the documentary evidence. After a great deal of effort, some very good results were obtained and these appeared in the book A Century of Change.

What the group aims to do is to try to examine the village 10 years later, in 1935 when, it should be a little easier as this is in living memory of several people and there is another electoral register. Several of the older residents have been helping by looking over maps and lists of names to reconstruct the 1935 village of Cogenhoe. The aim is to repeat this exercise at intervals covering 10 year periods to create a major database of the properties and the occupiers.

Left: Tollgate Cottage, in Station Road