This introduction was contributed by Mrs Bennett of Rock Cottage, Thursley Women’s Institute President from 1963 to 1965.
In the sixty-five years of this century, Thursley has changed much less in outward appearance than many other villages within 40 miles of Hyde Park Corner. We have no industries and no housing estates. There has been very little private building except for two shortish roes of council houses, Homefield (built between the wars) and Streetfield (built after World War II), three pairs of bungalows opposite the church, originally meant for old people, and the new old people’s flats that stand in what used to be the school playground, the village looks much as it did – only tidier and better painted – when the older of us were children.
Perhaps it is this comparative lack of outward change that gives us the historical sense that comes out so clearly in the following contributions to our Jubilee book. We all set out to give an account of what we are doing now: we almost find ourselves starting from what we used to do, so this is very largely a picture of the present as it has developed from the past.
How will our present seem a generation hence? For although the village may look much as it did, it has probably changed socially more in our lifetime than in all its previous history. None of us can remember very well the time when there was no drainage and no electricity, when one or two cottages did not even have ovens, and when it was still possible to see a farmer sowing broadcast, pacing from one end of the field to another with the rooks behind him. Now houses are comfortable and well equipped and farms highly mechanised.
Then children went to the village school on foot often wearing their elders’ cut-down or patched clothes. Now, nicely dressed, they go off to Milford on the school bus. Then most of the land and buildings belonged to one landlord, and most of the village made its living in one way or another from farming. Now a great many people, and all the farmers, own their own property, and people who live in Thursley, practise, or have retired from, many different occupations. Then there was an active smithy. Now many people – perhaps most – have cars. And so on.
Will the next generation see changes comparable to those we have seen? Perhaps this record of Thursley in 1965 will help them to find out.