I don't know, she takes a week off from blogging and comes back more plethoric than ever!

The Baptist Historical Society will 100 years old next year and is having a big jamboree to celebrate this - right at the same time as I have to be in Bristol at a DPT summer school, typical.  Anyway, as part of it they are holding a competition to write a biography of a 'Baptist Worthy' - either one of 75 (76) blokes in a composite picture or 'someone else' presumably allowing us to scrabble around for a female worthy.

 

I won't be entering the competition, I have more than enough other things to do, but it is intriguing... Who are the Baptist worthies?  Who is included/excluded from the composite picture and why?

The BHS (the society, not the shop!) are also commissioning a history of themselves, which I will be very intrigued to read when it is published.  Given my growing interest in hisotriography, literary analysis and hermeutics (and eating dictionaries for breakfast) it will be fascinating to deduce who it is written for and what it is trying to say about itself.

Maybe all this makes my work quite timely - and makes me wonder how my thoughts, when they eventually get onto paper, might be received.  Hmm.

In the meantime, I'm going to make a plea for the inclusion of people like Miss Hargreaves whose "help in preparing a clean type-script, reading the proofs, and preparing the index' is acknowledged by A C Underwood in the preface to his 1947 publication "A History of the English Baptists."  Without these worthy folk, the great and good would not have been able to be so great.

Pictures downloaded from Baptist Historical Society website www.baptisthistory.org.uk