Today's BT contains a little article about Bevin Boys and finds our very own Baptist Bevin-boy and former BUGB General Secretary, the Revd Bernard Green.  He worked, so the BT says in the "South Leicestershire Colliery in Coalville."  This would not be a good thing to say to people round here!  Coalville is not in South Leicestershire, check a map!  South was, so I am told by locals, the name given to the area, now a small village, some 2-3 miles from Coalville.  You call such places Coalville at your peril - I have the scars to prove it!  People here simply talk of 'South Colliery.'

If Revd Green, then a 19 year-old lad, worked in South, then one of his nearest Baptist churhces, at merely mile or so away, was Dibley.  Did he worship here?  I don't know.  Maybe he worshipped at the one a couple of miles in another direction.  Do my people know?  Again, I don't, yet, know, but I suspect not.  Is it judged relevant?  I doubt it.

I'm not really questioning whether or not we ought to know the answers to this (I think we probably should know if he worshipped in our congregation) or even if his presence was relevant (he wasn't the only Baptist Bevin-boy, plenty of my congregation, and others, were), I am just amused that the BT, in its inimitable way, and with a very different agenda from local congregational history, reports this.

Our Congregational History offers the following on WWII:

"... in 1938 the Rev C W Gregory came from Shore, but resigned three eyars later. The Rev C Walter Rose BA commenced his ministry in June 1942, during World War II, with its terrible upheavals and strain, leaving an aftermath of problems for Church and Nation.  Our own locality was more fortunate than many, and the Church at [Dibley] sustained its life with considerable vigour."

I assume it was WWII, not Rev Rose's ministry, which left the aftermath...!  The "considerbale vigour" was matched by a reduction in membership of more than 30, so I now know how to descirbe my own ministry better.  And as for a whole World War summarised in three sentences, even I couldn't manage that!

Also in this week's BT it says that Gildersome Baptist Church in Yorkshire was rebuilt in 2000 - not when I went there in 2003 it wasn't!!!  It has been refurbished, but that's not the same thing at all. 

Can I really give any credence to anything I read?!  And what does all this mean for my research.  Hmm.