The Marnhull Food Heroes Drive-in Picnic is on Saturday 26 September from 1pm-6pm at the Recreation Ground.
We will have local suppliers offering a range of food for people to order in advance, or just turn up and enjoy as a picnic on the Rec, or take away and eat at home.
As well as The Box Pizza, The Happy Meat Company selling hog roast baps and Hotch Potch Savoury Pies, we are excited to be introducing two new vendors, including Arctic Cow with its fresh rolled ice cream and The Truckle Truck offering a range of cheeses to take home, as well as Raclette (melted cheese over potatoes with charcuterie and pickles) – how tasty does that sound?
Natirally all Covid precautions will be in place – pre-registration will help with Track & Trace, so please email chris@christine-drake.com if you intend to come along.
Meet for 10am – run starts at 11.15am. £10 Per Person for the Run Only (includes a Tea/Coffee and a Bacon/Sausage Roll!). The run itself will be approximately 25/30miles around the lovely Dorset countryside, with a halfway point for us to stop at.
We will aim to return to the sports club at around 3.30pm – bar will be open from 3pm. There will be a BBQ from 4pm until late, and live Music 5pm – 8pm from Jordan Lindsay.
For those that dont wish to join the run, please do come along and enjoy the afternoon. If you have a classic vehicle please bring that on down in the afternoon and enjoy the evening entertainment.
Steam vehicles, Military , Classic Cars , Motorcycles, Lorrys and others, are all welcome to come to turn up.
Please state if you are attending, as this will help with numbers for food in the morning.
Yetminster Community Sports Club – Contact Matthew 07535774281
The Gillingham Craft Fair, with Riversmeet Leisure Centre, are holding their annual Magic of Christmas Food and Craft Fair on Sunday 29th November from 10.30 to 4.00,
The event, now in its 7th year, attracts visitors from Gillingham and the surrounding towns and villages. Visitors come to purchase high quality handmade items from sellers from the local area, listen to local choirs and visit Father Christmas; the past two years we have also had a children’s play area.
Sadly, due to covid, this year’s event is on the slightly smaller scale. We will, however, still have over 50 stalls selling a wide range of products, from art, jewellery, homeware, candles and cakes.
The stalls will be set out in the sports hall which benefits from a fresh air ventilation system, there will be a one way in and out system and hand sanitizers stations are placed at every doorway. There will also be a one way system in place once inside the hall.
Entry to this event is free.
So please make a note in your diaries and come along and see for yourself.
We decided that for the first edition, ALL personal Births, Deaths & Marriage Announcements are FREE!
Obviously the Blackmore Vale area has had no over-arching local paper for six months now; and we realise that’s a lot of births, deaths, big birthdays, anniversaries, marriages… All those personal announcements which haven’t had anywhere to go.
So for our first edition we’re opening the Announcements section not just for the last few weeks but for any and all births, deaths & marriages from 2020 – and we’re making it entirely FREE too. Submit your announcement by the 14th September – and have a picture ready, you can include one too! Go ahead and use the form below, it’s super-easy.
The Covid pandemic has resulted in very little rent for the hall since March, and we are in the midst of refurbishing the kitchen. We need to get this job done now, so that we are fully operational when things go back to some sort of normal. Please help us raise money for the Okeford Fitzpaine village hall.
We have published a competition in our local magazine the Fippenny News, but it would be great to widen this everyone!
There is a cash prize for two winners amounting to half of the money raised. So the more entries there are the bigger the prize.
You can enter via email and pay the entry fee of £5 by PayPal. sfinklaire@gmail.com
As one door closes and another opens, Roger Guttridge looks back on the Blackmore Vale Magazine’s early years
Sipping a pint in his local one evening, session singer Alan Chalcraft had no idea he was about to make a life-changing decision.
Alan and Ingrid Chalcraft with an early BVM
As they chatted in a Stalbridge pub, a fellow customer threw out a random offer.
‘Would you like to buy a magazine?’ he asked.
‘How much?’ said Alan.
‘£5,000,’ said the other man.
Alan promised to consult with his wife and return the next evening with a decision.
‘Offer him half,’ said Ingrid Chalcraft.
The £2,500 was accepted and the couple suddenly became owners of the Blackmore Vale Magazine.
The free distribution weekly was the humblest of outfits, launched six months earlier, printing just four pages a week and already on the point of collapse.
‘People said we were mad,’ Ingrid told me 15 years later. ‘We put out our first issue with no typing skills, no business experience, no knowledge of layout and having never written anything in our lives.’
Alan and Ingrid had previously made their living as session singers. Their voices can be heard on many hit songs and jingles from the ’60s and ’70s and they actually met while backing Engelbert Humperdink at London’s Talk of the Town.
They left London in 1976 for a quieter life in Dorset.
By 1978 they were almost broke – until that fateful pub meeting.
Despite having no publishing experience, they negotiated six weeks’ credit from the printer and set up an office under the stairs.
Issue number 11 featured Alan’sfront page lead about a Stalbridge cow giving birth – a story he described (with no lack of irony) as a ‘BVM scoop’
They used an electric typewriter to set the type and Letraset for headlines and display advertisements.
‘We had a telephone but it rang so infrequently that we did gardening between calls,’ said Alan.
But free newspapers were in the ascendant and interest steadily grew.
Then in 1979 came the break the Chalcrafts needed – a strike by the National Union of Journalists, which kept the Western Gazette off the streets for seven weeks.
Many advertisers transferred their business and the BVM jumped from 12 to 24 pages overnight.
By 1993, it boasted 112 pages and a reputation that attracted a £1m takeover bid from major newspaper group Trinity International.
When I dared, 27 years ago, to suggest to the Chalcrafts that they were about to become millionaires, they laughed off the suggestion, pointing out that they were only 70 per cent shareholders and that 40 per cent of what they received would go in tax.
That still left them with a few hundred grand, which seemed to me like a fair return on £2,500.
The monthly Sturminster Newton Car and Bike Enthusiasts meeting was held on 5th September. This event has gradually grown over the two years it has been running. It started with between 8 and 10 cars and bikes, but over 30 owners came to Sturminster Newton with their vehicles.
It’s a challenge running an event like this safely in the current COVID environment. We ran this event mostly on the main car park, given the growing numbers, with kind permission of Dorset Council. We were limited to 30 attendees in a cordoned area to meet government restrictions. Another 10 owners visited the town and parked in the rest of the car park. We strictly followed Social Distancing and had a track and trace process in place to minimise risk.
Not only was this Sturminster Newton Car and Bike meet one of the best events we’ve had so far; the variety of vehicles was the best so far too. The atmosphere was really friendly and enjoyable. As well as being interesting for the attendees, it met our objective to bring more people into the town to help our local businesses.
We had vehicles from the 1920s up to the latest. We had a wonderful completely renovated Imprezza, a rare 412 Ferrari, a very rare Citroen SM, Oxford, Laguna and beautiful Jaguars, Alvis and several MGs. There were too many stunning and interesting vehicles to mention here, but it was certainly a car and bike enthusiasts’s dream!!
The latest government laws regarding the size of outdoor gathering means we may not be able to run in October – it’s usually run on the first Saturday every month.
It’s been home to a pump, a horse trough, market stalls and parked cars, but now the roadside spot at Sturminster Newton’s Market Cross has begun a new incarnation.
It’s latest life as a street café began in June in response to the government’s lockdown call to encourage the takeaway food and drink trade.
From the Barry Cuff Collection
It now looks likely to stay that way providing the town council agrees to manage it.
In the old picture, dating from the early 1900s, a boy with a toy rifle stands to attention before the pump as a camera-shy dog looks the other way.
The location caught the eye of royal surgeon-cum-travel writer Sir Frederick Treves when he passed through Sturminster in 1906.
‘In the centre of the town,’ he wrote with his usual caustic humour, ‘is the semblance of a square to which all roads lead.
‘Here an officious gas standard carrying aloft the latest pattern of lamp, the stump of an ancient stone cross, and the town pump.
‘The latter is of wood, is small, black and vixenish. On it is a notice spitefully warning the passer-by that he will be prosecuted if he does it hurt and adding further that no children must use the exclusive structure.
‘There is a sourness in this, for all children delight to play with pumps.’
Treves failed to add that the steps of the cross have been warn down by generations of Sturminster bottoms, including mine.
Behind the stump, alone on its island, is Market House, then home to draper and costumier C S Draper and for much of the 20th century to fellow draper Alex J Hicks.
The White Hart to the left has changed little in a century and carries the date 1708, suggesting that it survived the fire that swept through the town centre in 1729.
A few years after Treves’ visit, the pump gave way to an ornamental drinking fountain and horse trough erected in memory of long-serving GP Dr John Comyns Leach, who died in 1907, and his surgeon son E Comyns Leach, who died in Sierra Leone aged 33 in 1902.
The trough later became a flower box until demolished when a motorist lost control in 2018.
Council staff salvaged the pieces and there are plans to re-erect it.
