You may recall that a few years ago we spoke with Graham Watts, and others involved in the ESSEX WOMEN”S COMMEMORATIVE PROJECT.
This project had been established in 2021 by Jennifer Tolhurst, the Lord Lieutenant of Essex to commemorate famous women in the county, with the objective of installing around 65 plaques between September 2021 and the end of 2022, to mark the Queen’s Jubilee.
Notwithstanding that, I was joined today by our old friend MIKE DAVIES from the Rayleigh Town Museum to take a wider view of the origins of the scheme, the criteria and issues involved in the installation and maintenance of bluer plaques.
Mike started out by explaining that the scheme had originally been established by the Society of Arts in 1867, taken over by the London County Council in 1901, but since 1986, the national scheme has been administered by English Heritage.
It seems that the formal Historic England definition of a blue plaque is: – A permanently installed sign in a public space to commemorate a link between that location, a famous person, or a former building on the site, serving as a historic marker of national significance.
The first person to be honoured in this way was Lord Byron.
Obviously you can’t have plaques going up all over the place so there are a number of rules in place including the fact that the named person must have been dead for over 20 years and should have either been born, died, or have lived for a significant part of their life at the property involved, or that a famous event had taken place at the site in question.
Nevertheless there have been instances, of plaques installed independent of the national plan, a number of which exist in Essex.
Mike mentioned a few of these, including 38 in Chelmsford, a number in Southend, and of course, Rayleigh!
You can listen again here to all that Mike told me today: –
In the second hour of today’s programme, we turned our attention to the plight of a man who managed to get himself locked in a department store.
Now I’ll be honest with you, being somewhat accident prone, I’m always tickled by other people’s misfortunes.
Having on one occasion found myself locked in a cupboard at Madame Tussaud’s, I was perhaps unkindly, amused to learn of a man being forced to tweet for help after falling asleep in a massage chair in a department store, only later to discover that he was imprisoned in the store!
Posting images of the dark and empty interior of the store, he alerted his friends to his plight.
It seems that at some point he must have triggered an alarm, alerting police to what they imagined was an intruder.
The store manager then arrived at the premises accompanied by 10 police officers.
Police then searched the man to confirm that he was not a shop lifter after which he was duly released.
The store manager subsequently offered his sincere apologies to the customer for the failure of his staff to spot him before closing up for the night!
I very much hope that you will be able to join me once again tomorrow,
Scott
