1956, the Village Hall
In 1956 Mr Dennis Vosper MP Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Education was a guest speaker at the opening ceremony of Stowupland village hall on March 3rd 1956.
Other visitors included Lord Tollemache, (chairman of the Village Halls Committee of the Suffolk Rural Community Council), Lady Tollemache, Mr E. Beattie (National Council of Social Services), Mr G.C. Lightfoot (clerk of the East Suffolk County Council), Mrs Lightfoot, Mr L.R.Missen (Chief Education Officer for East Suffolk), Mrs Missen, Mr B.J. Reid (secretary of the Suffolk Rural Community Council), Mr Malcolm Fiske (chairman of Gipping Rural District Council), Mr E. Harwood (Clerk to Gipping R.D.C), and Mrs Harwood.
The School Government Chronicle carried a report on Mr Dennis Vosper’s talk that he gave at the opening of Stowupland Village Hall. He noted that in 1951 ‘financial grants totaling about £250,000 have been offered by the Ministry of Education towards 166 new village halls ‘ and emphasized that village halls were important venues for continuing educational opportunities and that TV’s should not ‘deprive us of our power to make our own amusement and recreation which has for so long contributed to the vitality of English life’. He went on to say that ‘the continued prosperity of the countryside did not depend solely upon the operations of the agricultural Wages Board and the February Price review. It was dependent also upon the services and amenities in the village being competitive with those becoming available in the towns.
