Forsbrook’s 2017 Fête: Tracing the £547.20 Marquee Refund

Forsbrook Parish Council reimbursed the fête committee £547.20 for hiring a marquee for the 2017 Blythe Bridge and Forsbrook Charity Fayre. The clerk handed a cheque to Councillor Morris at Blythe Bridge Village Hall on 17 July, just over a fortnight after the event at Foxfield Railway. If you search the minutes for “marquee”, though, you’ll miss the payment. It appears in the accounts as “Marquis hire refund”.

The clearest picture of what residents were invited to comes from the original 2017 fête poster. It advertises Saturday 1 July, with music, games, a dog show in the marquee and special diesel trains. Entry and parking were free. Anyone entering the dog show was asked to bring the slip on the back of the leaflet, complete with the dog’s name and competition class.

Read the poster and the accounts as different kinds of evidence. The poster tells us what was advertised; the minutes show what the council recorded about expenditure. Neither supplies a complete statement of the committee’s eventual income or the number of people who attended. Linking those sources answers a small, definite question without turning it into an unsupported account of the whole event.

A request made a year before the fête

The marquee first appears in this trail on 18 July 2016. Under item 12, Councillor Shufflebotham asked whether the parish council would contribute towards one for the following year. Councillor C Hopley was to obtain a quotation. Once it arrived, the clerk would seek two more and bring the matter back for discussion. The £547.20 figure came later. Anyone reading only the record of the July 2016 meeting would know who had been asked to get prices, but would still have no figure to put against the hire.

Meanwhile, the committee needed somewhere to put the money coming in. On 19 September, Councillor Shufflebotham thanked Councillor Giblin for setting up the bank account. The September minutes record a £750 district councillor contribution being passed on through the parish council’s account. That sum is easy to mistake for the answer to the marquee question, but the payment is described as a transfer of a district councillor contribution, not the £547.20 hire refund. The September entry also prints the fête date as “01.07.16”. Preserve that wording as a source discrepancy rather than silently changing it to 2017. The dated 2017 poster and the July 2017 payment are the firmer evidence for the specific event and refund considered here.

What the dog-show leaflet adds

The leaflet tells us how people were invited to take part. The reverse of the fête leaflet offered a trade stand for £25 or a charity stand for £10. It also asked for help setting up and packing down. For the dog show, there were nine classes running from puppies under twelve months to best in show. Put the two sides of the leaflet together and the marquee becomes more than a line in the accounts. Someone arriving with a dog and a completed entry slip knew where to go.

The leaflet supplies context for the committee’s role. Local groups could raise money on their own stalls, and the organisers hoped to distribute any surplus from the event. The price of a pitch, the money a charity took on the day and the cost of hiring the tent were three different sums. The records give us the advertised pitch prices and the hire refund. Working out what the fête raised overall would take the committee’s own accounts.

Where to find the £547.20

Open the July 2017 minutes at the payments table. The sixth page of the PDF has the printed page number 22. Look just below the payment for the lengthsman and you’ll see “Forsbrook Fete”, the hire refund and 547.20 on one line. Two pages further on, under “FETE”, the clerk records the unanimous agreement to cover the cost and the presentation of the cheque. The table supplies the amount. The final entry tells us who received it.

For anyone tracing another village occasion through our 2017 meeting papers, this one offers a useful search tip. The public poster calls it a “Fayre”, the minutes use “Fete” and the accounts give the tent its unexpected spelling. A photograph captioned simply “dog show” could be harder still to place. Match the venue and date against an identifiable image before adopting the proposed caption; the event leaflet alone cannot identify an otherwise undated photograph. If you have one from that Saturday, a few words on the back would give a future reader a fine starting point: Blythe Bridge and Forsbrook Charity Fayre, Foxfield Railway, 1 July 2017.

Who paid for the marquee at Forsbrook’s 2017 charity fête?

A request made a year before the fête

What the dog-show leaflet adds

Where to find the £547.20

Sources

Sources and further reading