WILBRAHAMS’ MEMORIAL HALL CENTENARY 24TH MARCH 1921 – 2021

This year is the centenary of the Wilbrahams’ Memorial Hall. It opened on January 28th 1921 but the official unveiling was on the 24th March, with local clergy and dignitaries in attendance. (If anyone has any account of this ceremony, we would love to have details for our website.)

We will be celebrating the Memorial Hall’s Centenary in the summer with an appropriate Roaring Twenties event, as soon as it is safe to do so. But in the meantime, here is some information about how the hall came about, and the role it has played in village life. If you have any photos of the original 1921 hall, please let us know!

 ~ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF OUR MEMORIAL HALL~

Wilbrahams’ Memorial Hall is one of more than ten thousand village halls in the UK. Like many, ours is at the heart of the community. Sixty percent of village halls provide the only meeting place in their village, and over 50,000 people rely on village halls to make their living, in addition to all those who volunteer. The first village halls, in the 15th and 16th Century were really open market halls below with a meeting room above. Our farmers’ markets hark back to a very old tradition.

Our hall was part of the golden age of village hall building just after WW1. The devastating conflict in Europe (17 of the 86 combatants from the Wilbrahams died) and the Spanish Flu pandemic, left a country in tatters, with half the workforce lacking full time employment. Squire R S Hicks of Wilbraham Temple donated the land for the village hall, in memory of those who had been lost, and to help his fellow returned soldiers. The construction of the hall provided employment, and returning servicemen (many of whom had PTSD) had somewhere to socialise. After WW2 Squire Hicks also donated adjoining land for the recreation ground.

Over the last hundred years, the hall has met social and educational needs, and provided a meeting space for the WI, the Parish Councils, Community Choir, craft clubs, exercise and dance classes, coffee mornings, and many other groups. The fabulous annual flower show is ever a centre of genteelly cut-throat competition(!) and delicious cakes and tea. In wartime it was the haunt of jiving GIs from Bottisham airfield, and in peacetime it provided a meeting place for Covid volunteers to organise themselves at the start of the first lockdown. From the very young in Mums and Toddlers groups, to some of our most long-lived villagers, it is a welcoming space for everyone. It is now a modern space with technology available that was not even dreamt of when it was first built. When we are finally able to get together again, we are determined more than ever to keep up this tradition and build on it. Long may it continue!