---
title: "One Branch Kept Minutes For 177 Years. The Other Eleven Now Cite It Back."
dek: "Seventy-one bound volumes of the Fenmarch chapter went to a county record office in 1994 and were catalogued as estate papers. Nine weeks in the searchroom: the roll balances, the dues balance, and three founding dates do not."
kind: analysis (Analysis)
desk: Shadow Governance
author: Marcus Oyelaran (fictional)
published: 2026-08-26T06:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/seventy-one-minute-books
tags: Babylonian Brotherhood, David Icke, Fenmarch, county archives, minute books, Lincolnshire
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

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

*Seventy-one bound volumes of the Fenmarch chapter went to a county record office in 1994 and were catalogued as estate papers. Nine weeks in the searchroom: the roll balances, the dues balance, and three founding dates do not.*

The Fenmarch chapter of the Babylonian Brotherhood has minuted every meeting it has held since 12 November 1849.

Seventy-one bound volumes. One thousand seven hundred and thirty-one meetings. Attendance at each, dues received at each, and the wording of every amendment the chapter was ever asked to vote on.

They are in a county record office. They are catalogued as MISC/DEP/1994/17. The reader's card is free.

The other eleven chapters of the Brotherhood keep nothing that answers to the description.

## Why nobody found them

Hollis Marchbank-Ozoemena was clerk to the Fenmarch chapter from 1958 until he died in office in February 1994. The books were his: his hand, his table, a cupboard in his house.

His widow, Ada Marchbank-Ozoemena, deposited all seventy-one that spring, and the office catalogued them as it catalogues everything a private depositor brings in — under the family surname, as "family and estate papers, 19th–20th cent."

The word Brotherhood does not appear in the catalogue entry. Neither does Fenmarch. That is the whole reason a complete institutional record sat unread for thirty-two years, and it is not concealment.

"They were catalogued correctly," says Edwina Blyth-Acheampong, the county archivist. "A deposit is described by what the depositor tells you it is. She told us they were her husband's papers, and they were her husband's papers."

> **Figure:** What seventy-one volumes confirm, what they correct, and what they are silent on — see https://theyburied.com/article/seventy-one-minute-books

## Three tests

We transcribed every date, attendance figure and dues receipt by hand over nine weeks, then set the institution's claims about itself against its own book.

**The roll.** This newspaper obtained a certified extract of the membership roll in March: 1,113 living names, corrected to 1,117 by the Secretary to the Roll. Fenmarch's 214 seat entries reconcile to it line by line, including the four the Secretary said we had missed.

**The dues.** The Central Fund's rates run from £612 at Fenmarch to £188 at Delaware Bay. Every rate and every change to one is minuted here from 1911, with the vote count beside it.

**The moon.** Fenmarch meets on the Monday on or before the full moon and always has. A research assistant given the 1,731 dates and nothing else ran them against a standard ephemeris. All but three fall where they should, and each of the three carries a minuted reason: a flood, a funeral, and a night the causeway was out.

It means any volume can be dated from the sky, independently of anything the Brotherhood says about it.

## Article 4, eleven months early

Article 4 vests the First Chair in the eldest child "of the body" of its holder. In 1948, after a holder died leaving three daughters and no son, the twelve chapters amended it within eight weeks, as this newspaper reported this month.

The amendment's exact wording stands in Fenmarch's book on 12 June 1947. Eleven months before the man died. A year before the chapters passed it. A year before it was printed.

A palaeographer, paid by this newspaper to count the hands across the seventy-one volumes and never told whose books they were, finds nine of them — and puts this entry in the same hand, ink and gathering as the four hundred pages around it. It is not an insertion.

The institution did not improvise its one successful repair. It drafted it while it could still see the failure coming.

> **Caution.** On 24 August this newspaper said a former steward of this chapter supplied its minute books for 1958 to 2004. He supplied his own typed digest of them. The manuscript volumes were already in a public archive; neither we nor he knew it.

## Three dates that are wrong

Trentside dates itself to 1842, Coldharbour to 1863, Sallowick to 1885. Fenmarch minuted the deputation that constituted each — the men who went, the coach fare, the resolution read out on arrival — in 1851, 1877 and 1904.

Wrong by nine years, by fourteen, and by nineteen.

The other eight chapters' dates check out exactly.

## The footnote

Two of those three chapters now cite the Fenmarch minute books as their authority for the dates those books disprove.

They do it because the Brotherhood's 2019 handbook prints "Fenmarch minute books" under its table of foundations, and the man who wrote that footnote is the current Fenmarch clerk, Sixtus Aldington-Nwosu. He took the dates from the chapters and the citation from habit, and explains himself below at greater length than we would have dared ask.

> I have made an authority out of a document I had not read.
>
> — Sixtus Aldington-Nwosu, Clerk to the Fenmarch chapter

## What this desk takes from it

David Icke's claim about the Brotherhood is a claim about paperwork: an institution with a structure, an officer class and a continuous record. The record is in Lincoln, it is free to read, and everywhere it can be checked it holds.

It is also not evidence of concealment. Ada Marchbank-Ozoemena carried it to an archive in the worst year of her life and a cataloguer described it accurately.

The twenty-four volumes of committee minutes we hold as [[PX-1920]] change the form of their minute nine times in forty-two years. Fenmarch changes twice in a hundred and forty-four.

The part we cannot read is the last thirty-three years, and the reason given is one this desk finds hard to argue with. Those volumes name living people who have not been asked.

## Sources (invented)

- Fenmarch chapter minute books, 1849–1993, Seventy-one bound volumes, catalogued as MISC/DEP/1994/17, 'Marchbank-Ozoemena family and estate papers' — Ordered volume by volume in the searchroom over nine weeks on a free reader's card; every meeting date, attendance figure and dues receipt transcribed by hand and then double-keyed (May–July 2026)
- Edwina Blyth-Acheampong, County archivist — Interviewed twice in the searchroom and once by telephone; sent the full draft and three weeks to answer (June–August 2026)
- Dr. Bettine Quillan-Achebe, Palaeographer; instructed to identify the hands across the seventy-one volumes — Commissioned to establish how many hands wrote the books and where each begins and ends, without being told what the society was or that it was a society (July 2026)
- 1,731 meeting dates run against a standard ephemeris, Independent check of the transcribed dates against lunar phase, 1849–1993 — The dates alone were given to a research assistant who was told nothing about their source and asked one question: do these fall on a pattern (July 2026)
- Sixtus Aldington-Nwosu, Clerk to the Fenmarch chapter since 2011; author of the Brotherhood's 2019 handbook — Sent the full draft, the transcription and the founding-date table on 5 August with no deadline; replied in writing over five pages (August 2026)

## Documents cited (invented)

- PX-1920: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1920

## What we could not confirm

- Volumes seventy-two onward. The deposited run stops mid-sentence on 8 March 1993, because the clerk who was writing it fell ill and died eleven months later. What the chapter has minuted since is at Fenmarch, is not deposited, and Aldington-Nwosu has declined to produce it on the ground that it names living members who have not been asked. Thirty-three years of the best-kept record in the institution is the part we cannot read.
- Schedule 2. Article 4(3) refers to a schedule of chapter seniority which this newspaper reported this month is missing from the certified Instrument. It is not in the seventy-one volumes either. We searched every index, every loose insert, the four hundred and six pages of appendices, and the deputation minutes for all eleven constitutions in case a seniority order was recited into one of them. It is not there. That is a stronger negative than we had a month ago and it is still a negative.
- Why the other eleven kept nothing. We put the question to all eleven chapters. Five answered: two say their books were destroyed by damp, one by a fire in 1971, one says there never were any, and one says its books are 'with a member'. Six have not replied. It is entirely possible that some of these volumes exist in private hands, uncatalogued and unread, exactly as Fenmarch's did until this summer — and the one answer we would most like to follow up is the fourth.

## Right of reply

**Sixtus Aldington-Nwosu, Clerk to the Fenmarch chapter** (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.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.