One Branch Kept Minutes For 177 Years. The Other Eleven Now Cite It Back.

Right of Reply

They Buried contacted Sixtus Aldington-Nwosu, Clerk to the Fenmarch chapter on 5 August 2026, in writing, with the full draft, the transcription and the founding-date table attached, and no deadline imposed. Replied 21 August 2026, over five pages, asking that it run entire. Printed unedited, including the paragraph in which he corrects this newspaper and the two in which he corrects himself.

Three weeks ago I would have told you that our minute books were a private matter. Then your letter came, and I went and ordered volume 44 myself, over the counter, for nothing, like anybody else, and sat in a public room in Lincoln reading my own chapter's business of 1911. So I am not going to claim a privacy I no longer have and did not defend when I could have.

Here is what you have got right, and what you have got wrong, and the wrong is mostly mine rather than yours.

You are right that the books are ours in substance and not in law. Hollis Marchbank-Ozoemena was clerk to this chapter for thirty-six years and he wrote those volumes in his own hand, at his own table, on winter evenings, and the chapter never once paid him for a book or bought him so much as an inkstand. When he died his widow had seventy-one volumes in a cupboard and a county archivist who was kind to her, and she did the sensible thing. This chapter has never applied to have them back and I do not intend to be the clerk who does. They are safer where they are than they were in that cupboard, and they are safer than the other eleven chapters' books, which is a sentence I can only write because ten of those chapters' books do not exist.

You are right about the three dates, and you are being gentler about it than you need to be. Trentside says 1842, Coldharbour says 1863, Sallowick says 1885, and this chapter minuted the deputations that constituted all three, with the names of the men who went, what the coach cost, and what they ate on the way home. There is no reading of that evidence in which the chapters are right. They are not lying to you. They are doing what every old institution does, which is to date itself from the first time anybody in it met anybody else in it, and then round downwards.

Now the part that is mine.

You have found that two of those three chapters cite the Fenmarch minute books as their authority for dates the Fenmarch minute books disprove, and you have been careful to say that the books do not support them. The reason they cite the books is that I wrote the 2019 handbook, and I put "Fenmarch minute books" under the table of foundations because that is where I had taken everything else on the page. The dates themselves I took from the chapters, because the chapters were who I asked. It is a lazy footnote and it is mine. Since your letter arrived I have had two stewards tell me, in writing, that their date must be right because the Fenmarch books say so. I have made an authority out of a document I had not read.

I would ask your readers to notice what that means, because it is not the thing they will assume. It is not that we are sinister. It is that we went a hundred and seventy-seven years without anybody checking, and the first body to check was a newspaper.

On the 1947 entry I will say more than my Warden would like.

You have the wording of the 1948 amendment in this chapter's book on 12 June 1947, and you want to know why. The answer is that Ambrose Coldstream was ill and everybody who mattered knew it, and three men in this room spent eleven months drafting the sentence that would seat his daughter, and when he died in the April of 1948 the twelve chapters passed it in eight weeks because eight weeks is all it takes to pass something already written. Your colleague's article this month calls 1948 a repair made in under two months. It was made in a year, quietly, by people who could see what was coming and did the work before it arrived.

I want that on the record for one reason only. In 1998 this institution had precisely the same problem in front of it, with five years to run at it, and nobody drafted anything. There is no minute of that in this chapter or in any other, because nobody called a meeting. What you can prove from our books is what we did the first time. What nobody can prove from anybody's books is why we did not do it the second time, and I have been clerk here for fifteen years and I do not know either.

You may not have the books after 1993, and I will tell you exactly why rather than leaving you to guess. They name living people, and living people have not been asked. Write to me when you have found a way for me to show you the entries without the names and I will think about it properly, which is more than a no.

One correction of tone, and then I am done. You call our seventy-one volumes the institution's authority. They are not an authority. They are a man's handwriting, kept up for thirty-six years by somebody nobody thanked, and the reason you can check them against the moon is that he minuted the moon, because his predecessor minuted the moon, and it never occurred to any of them that the practice was worth a remark.

Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.