Little Berkhamsted - its Place in History

Notes on the History of Little Berkhamstead Church

Notebook

This is a hardcover notebook, measuring nine inches long by seven inches wide, containing 111 lined pages, numbered in pencil at the top right of each page, on the face only, so there are 222 surfaces, although some are blank. The title on the front cover is “Notes on the History of Little Berkhamstead Church” but the content ranges much wider and it is really Charles Johnston’s working Notebook for his very thorough and extensive researches into the History of the Village.

There is an index at the front of the book and an additional advantage of making this book available on-line has been to bring Mr Johnston’s pencil index “to life”, in that clicking on any of the page numbers listed in the index will take you straight to that numbered page.

Although there are a few typed pages, as well as some newspaper and magazine cuttings pasted in, most of the content is in Mr Johnston’s own hand-writing, which increases the historical interest, as Charles Johnston has been by far the most thorough of the various historians who have contributed to the recorded history of the village and whose own life was not without interest.

The notebook was thought to have been lost and has only just quite recently been found, in the Church safe, but it is now well over a hundred years old and is in quite a fragile condition, which presented something of a problem when considering how best to record its contents for posterity. Dealing necessarily very carefully with the 200-odd individual pages require some equipment which I didn’t then have and anyway would have taken a considerable amount of time, so I subcontracted it to James at Prontaprint in Potters Bar, who has done a very good job.

Notes on the History of Little Berkhamstead Church