The talk has been arranged by Millom Historical Society and so Rev Bracegirdle seems to imagine we all know most everything about the church, and I guess many of the others in the audience probably do. But I didn't even know where the building was.
I thought the most interesting snippet he revealed was that the rather ancient looking stations of the cross came from a skip at Wormwood Scrubs Prison.
The fate of the wife of one of the clergy (she drowned while bathing on the edge of the Duddon in a July 200 years ago) made me respect the estuary even more than I had in the past. It is clearly not a waterway to be trifled with.
Yesterday I went to see a play at the local Beggars Theatre, a surprisingly large venue. It was about the last day of the iron works, Friday September 13, 1968. Apparently, the ironworks was just on the point of developing a new technology for making steel and I guess this could have saved the steel industry if the Labour Government of the time had put a little money into it. Surprisingly the ironworks was not nationalised but had Spanish owners. The play gives a caning to Harold Wilson rather than Franco, who was running Spain at the time.
Beggars Theatre was completely heaving. I've been to several events there before but I've never seen an audience anything like this before. Clearly people will leave their tv screens if you give them a powerful enough reason to do so.
Jonathan Brind