Archived News and Events

Beryl George, Vice-Chair of The Survey of Lincoln, died in 2023. In the past few years Beryl researched and wrote two historical studies in connection with the Lincolnshire Co-operative's Sincil Street/Cornhill scheme. She participated in several of the Survey's projects elsewhere on this website. GT 17/5/2023

A Tribute webpage https://beryl-george.muchloved.com/  has been opened The page provides opportunities to make donations to WaterAid; Breast Cancer Now; and CPA (Christian Partners In Africa, a small Lincoln-based charity).

Dennis Mills died suddenly on 23 March 2020, a few days short of his 89th birthday.  Rob Wheeler has provided the following obituary:

Dennis Mills was the son of a gardener and grew up in the estate village at Winthorpe, near Newark, and then at Canwick outside Lincoln.  One of his grandfathers was a small farmer at Scothern who, by hard work and a canny business sense, was able to buy his own farm at Thurlby.  Rural society was already changing under the influence of the internal combustion engine and the shadow of the approaching war but it still retained its traditional structure.  Dennis was thus one of the last of that select group of academic geographers who could write about traditional rural society with the benefit of personal experience as well as academic rigour. 

After reading geography at Nottingham, with National Service looming, he chose to join the Royal Navy.  The Cold War was getting hotter, there was a massive requirement for Russian translators, and so the Navy sent him to the Joint Service School for Linguists.  He thus became one of that select group of kursanty who have so influenced the academic and artistic worlds.  After service in Germany, observing a different pattern of rural society, as well as putting his Russian to good use in the service of military intelligence, he returned to Nottingham as a Demonstrator and Temporary Assistant Lecturer. 

During a spell as a schoolteacher, he took a part-time external PhD at Leicester.  It was in this period also that he met his wife Joan, whose subsequent support has meant so much to him, academically as well as domestically.  A subsequent move to Melbourn Village College introduced him to that well-documented village which provided the material for a rich vein of research.  Three years as a senior lecturer at Ilkley College followed, after which he joined the Open University, first as a Staff Tutor, then as a senior lecturer within the central academic staff.  That made it possible for him and his wife Joan to move house closer to their home turf, as a result of which Dennis became involved with SLHA's publication programme, chairing its History of Lincolnshire committee and himself editing the Twentieth Century Lincolnshire volume.

The academic field for which Dennis was best known, the extension of the traditional Open / Closed classification of English villages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, started with his Leicester PhD, but then drew on the wealth of material he had uncovered relating to Melbourn, and led to a dozen papers between 1972 and 1988, as well as various books.  A 1978 paper on the techniques of house repopulation may have seemed a mere diversion at the time but was enthusiastically received by the growing band of amateur local historians, people who needed advice on the potential and quirks of the key sources for eighteenth and nineteenth century social history and a demonstration of how those sources could be used.  This linked in to the activities of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.  In due course it led to a series of papers and books on the Census Enumerators' Books, on Land Tax Assessments and on trade directories.  There must be thousands of local historians who have never read a word of Dennis's papers on open and closed villages but who regularly turn to these useful aids whenever they encounter some new oddity in these sources.

After his retirement from the Open University in 1985, Dennis's papers widened in subject matter.  He was now able to pursue topics that he found interesting, without worrying about whether they would be viewed favourably in academic circles.  He wrote extensively on the village of Canwick and the Sibthorp family.  He wrote on hermaphrodites – which may seem a remarkable jump in interests to those unaware that a hermaphrodite or 'moffrey' is a farm cart that can be converted to a wagon.  An interest in the large-scale map produced in 1848 by the engineer George Giles to set out his proposals for Lincoln sewerage led to further work on that phase of Lincoln's long-running sewerage controversy and on the career of George Giles himself.  Even in his eighties he worked extensively on the history of Branston and in recording the recollections of his fellow Russian linguists. 

Not the least of the benefits Dennis has conferred on Lincolnshire historical work has been his encouragement of researchers from a wide range of backgrounds, of whom the writer is just one.  He was one of the initial organisers of the Lincolnshire Archives research seminars.  He was one of those responsible for the greater breadth of interests of the Survey of Lincoln, compared to its predecessor; and was the originator of the Survey's project to republish Padley's large-scale Lincoln maps.  His influence will live on for many, many years.

Geoff Tann adds: Rob Wheeler produced 'A Short Biography' of Dennis Mills, which you can read online in our newsletter The Lincoln Enquirer 20, May 2011, pp 5-6.  

Peter Hill

Peter Hill, an active member of the Survey in its early years and editor of our first neighbourhood booklet, devoted to Wigford (2000), died on 19 March 2021, aged 76.

Peter trained in stone masonry and worked for a while at York Minster. He moved to Lincoln in 1982 to take up the post of Clerk of Works at the cathedral, renewing acquaintance with David Stocker, whom he had met while in York and who then worked for the Lincoln Archaeological Trust.  He always advised me not to walk too close to the minster(!), concerned at the state of its fabric, and found the great demands of the job not to his liking, leaving his post in 1988. His great passion was Hadrian’s Wall, and as a keen member of the Hadrianic Society arranged for one of their annual conferences to take place in Lincoln. With support from the group based at Durham University, he produced several articles and then a PhD about the Wall’s construction from the point of view of a stonemason, later published as a book.

Subsequently, his expertise as a stone consultant was in demand, and he appeared on the Time Team programme based in Wickenby, where he had to inform the locals that the columns that many presumed were of Roman date actually belonged to the 18th century.

Peter had retired to his native Lowdham in Nottinghamshire, which he also used as a base to co-write two recent books about Civil War officers.

Mick Jones