SARUM U3A

The well attended monthly Coffee Morning of Sarum U3A was held in its usual venue of St Francis Church Hall on Wednesday 17 August.
New members were welcomed and asked to get together with the Chairman at the end of the morning.
Information was given out about some of the group activities such as “Town and Country Inns”, “Collectibles”, “Strollers”, Trafalgar Day lectures, British Museum lectures and also about places in group programmes of other U3A’s. Thanks was expressed for the excellent response to help with the coffee mornings’ coffee rotas.
A packed hall heard Ena Baldock welcome the speaker, Ruth Newman, whose topic was “Salisbury Life in the 1780’s”. Much of the speaker’s information came from intensive research, a lot of it from archives of “The Salisbury Journal” – set up in 1729, one of the oldest newspapers in the country. It was published on a Wednesday, cost 3 1/2d, had a circulation of 4000 and had 4 closely printed pages of international and national news as well as local news. The latter seemed similar in many ways to the topics covered today.
Salisbury’s past, at one time the 7th largest city in the country, with its industry based on wool, had become a provincial town apeing fashionable Bath. By the 1780’s this was no longer true, its industry was mainly based on penknives and scissors but there was also an accomplished musical instrument maker and it was a thriving market town. This was the starting off point for the talk, which was both informative and entertaining being accompanied by amusing anecdotes and interesting slides taken from contemporary drawings. Ruth Newman talked about the influence on local architecture and the culture, social life, politics and economics of Salisbury in the 1780’s. These topics were well illustrated by light-hearted and entertaining snippets from news items, adverts and notices from the local paper. Among the great variety of examples Mrs Newman gave was the setting up of the infirmary and its beneficial pioneering work, the arrival of a Montgolfier type balloon on its flight to Winchester, the fire in the Elizabethan Council House which led to the building of the present Guildhall, the controversial changes to the Cathedral by James Wyatt and incidents of the work of footpads, highwaymen and smugglers.
It was a talk packed full of interesting facts about Salisbury’s past and, as Mary Compton said in her thanks, it was not only stimulating but set off a train of memories and showed that in many ways things don’t change very much.