Price: £290 each (twin room) or £540 (single supplement).
Limited places so don't miss out. Please return the slip below, with your
payment to Simon Lace, Maidstone Museum, St Faith's Street, Maidstone,
ME14 1LH. Cheques should be made payable to Maidstone Borough Council.

See here for more information.

Suitable for 16yrs+.

(MMF members £1.50)

Transport to venue not provided.

Suitable for 16yrs+.

(MMF members £2)

Transport not provided. (Contact the Museum for full details 01622 602838)

(MMF members £1.25)

Suitable for 16yrs+

(MMF member £1.50)

Suitable for 16yrs+

(MMF members £1.50)

Suitable for 16yrs+.

Booking advisable. Suitable for 16yrs+

(MMF members £8)

Well, that statement ‘The Royal West Kent’s – everyone is talking about you’, was a comment passed to us by a member of the press (little realising it had been said before) at The War & Peace Show at Beltring last week after we won the Best Small Group Display for the second year running.

The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent (50th & 97th) Living History Group was only officially formed last November after that years’ success at Beltring. Many members have close family connections with the Regiment – mine served from the 1840’s to the 1950’s and I have been involved with the Regimental Museum and Association for 30 years, just as one example. There are three categories of membership – Full, Associate and Friend – allowing for varying degrees of commitment to our work in explanation and demonstration of the life, arms, uniforms and equipment of Soldiers of The Queen’s Own throughout its long and distinguished history, though primarily The Great War of 1914-18 and also to assist people who wish to find out more about their relatives who fought during the Great War or other related research.

'We are extremely proud to be associated with, and have the support of, the Regimental Museum at Maidstone as well as that of The Queen's Own Buffs Association. We have displayed many times at the Regimental Museum (the next being 30th October) and will also be at The Military Odyssey, Detling on August Bank Holiday Weekend (27-30th August), where we will have a Great War Regimental Transport Lines, complete with period wagons and horses, set up for the public to visit.'

Now we are firmly established, we are more than happy to attend fetes, fairs and functions, etc where availability allows. Chris Jupp also carries out talks on Regimental History on behalf of the Museum or our group – so please do not hesitate to get in touch!

For more information or to contact them visit their website at www.thequeensown.com  
 

Demolition work has been completed to the St Faith’s Street museum’s expansion, the builders are pouring concrete into the foundations and the extent of the new building is now clearly visible. The steel framework is due to be erected at the beginning of August.

The project costs £3.7m and has been made possible largely by a grant of £2m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. We will be launching a major fundraising push to raise money to finish the job… so get out your purses! The wing is due for completion by next summer.

This expansion is vitally important if we are to keep Maidstone as a top destination for visitors and bring prosperity to the area. It will give people better access to their heritage with more treasures on display, exciting new galleries and more ‘hands-on’ contact with objects.
 

During the period 1975 - 1988, both Val and John strove to master the art of flint knapping, and as they progressed, they willingly shared their newly gained knowledge with members of the public. This practical demonstration facility was soon made good use of by the Education Service, and groups of schoolchildren were allowed to see flint tools made, and sometimes used, during their visits.

The time spent at Grimes Graves was a valuable and fantastic experience for Val and John. They were continually exchanging knowledge and information with interesting visitors to the site, and in the late 1970's they met Ray Mears, with whom they immediately began to exchange information. This arrangement has developed into a firm friendship, and John is now the flint knapping instructor on Ray's Primitive Technology & Ancient Skills courses.
In 1987, John left Grimes Graves and English Heritage, in order to lead life as a professional flint knapper. John had been contacted by the construction industry, who were anxious to get their hands on knapped flints to use as a building material. The production of flints for building purposes, meant that hundreds of tonnes of large flints needed to be knapped into fist sized pieces. John, assisted by his son William, provided 160 tonnes for one project alone, (the wall that now surrounds the super-structure above the underground shopping mall at Norwich Castle). The opportunity to smash such huge quantities of flint, though often painful, was nevertheless an extremely valuable and unique experience for the knappers involved.

Val stayed on at Grimes Graves until 1992, before developing her present role as a cordage and textile specialist, with the use of natural fibres.

In 1992, both Val and John decided to pool their technologies, ease themselves away from supplying the construction industry with flint, and put their combined primitive technological skills on the road.
You may now find Val and John demonstrating their ancient art anywhere between Orkney and Guernsey.
 

Now they have happily settled and are breeding here in the Southeast. Other newish arrivals in Kent are parakeets, wild boar and even yellow-tailed scorpions. Some exotic creepy-crawlies have been covered in this column such as mitten crabs in the river and a false widow spider in our buildings. These animals arrived with human help so don’t count as native. They may even be classed as pests. The egrets, however, just flew here like the insects that cross the Channel every year. Most of these colonists are high profile animals, but what about plants? Look out for some strange-looking seeds when you go beachcombing this summer. You might just see them on TV in the autumn!
 

In 1070 Lanfranc an Italian-born Abbot of a Norman monastery was appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury. He had been a close adviser of William when the latter was Duke of Normandy. He was a scholar of acknowledged repute, One of the many manors which had for long been in the possession of Archbishops of Canterbury was that of Maidstone. Odo managed to get into his hands the Archbishop’s manors together with numbers of other properties to which he had no entitlement.. It has been contended by some that he was laying claim to lands which had pre-Conquest been taken into his possession by Earl Godwine, an Earl of Kent in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and that Odo was his successor.

However this may have been, Lanfranc requested the king to order an enquiry into where the rights to his properties lay. William decided that the matter was one which should be settled by the nobles of Kent, and that the outcome of the ‘trial’ should be final. The trial took place on Penenden Heath, perhaps around 1076 (the precise date is a little uncertain) and lasted for three days. It could doubtless be seen as the most important trial ever to take place on Penenden Heath involving as it did, Odo, second only in the land to the king and one of his regents in the king’s absences in Normandy, and the leader of the Christian church in England. At issue was whether fraud had been committed against the crown and the Canterbury diocese. The event was presided over by Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances. Numbers of prominent individuals gave evidence one being Aethelric II a former Bishop of Selsey an expert on Anglo-Saxon law, who had been compelled by the king to attend. We may assume that Anglo-Saxon law was deemed to be of considerable importance in the decision on the issue.

An outcome of the trial was that Lanfranc recovered twenty-five of the manors to which Odo and his family had laid claim. As early as the twelth century it seems to have been possible for justice to prevail, even when the losing party was a close relative of the king, was the largest landowner in the country apart from the king himself, and who both stood in for the king when he was in Normandy and led the royal army against a rebellion led by the Earl of Norfolk against the king in 1073.

As to the future of Odo, in 1082 William, then in Normandy, received complaints against Odo in his role as regent and, on William’s return to England Odo was arrested and charged with misgovernment and, in particular, with having sought to recruit an army for an expedition to what is now Italy. It has been suggested that he had the intention to become Pope, but there is very little evidence to support this theory. Odo was condemned by the Court and imprisoned. His right to the title of Earl of Kent was rescinded and all of his lands were taken back by the king. His bishopric of Bayeux was not disturbed. He remained incarcerated until, in 1087 William, on his deathbed, was persuaded by Count Robert of Mortain, one of their half brothers, to authorise his release.

Just prior to William’s death his favourite as successor was William Rufus who thus became king. He restored Odo’s Earldom of Kent. In the following year Odo, Robert of Mortain and others led a rebellion against the king and in favour of Robert Curthose, the late William’s eldest son. The rebellion failed and Odo was banished from the kingdom. He fled to Normandy where he became an advisor to Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, who he accompanied on the First Crusade in 1096. In 1087 he died en route in Palermo.
 

Doreen was the daughter of the Marquess of Sligo of Westpoint House, County Mayo in Ireland. In 1919 she met and married Lord Brabourne from Ashford.

Doreen was widowed in 1939 aged 42. She loved clothes and followed all the London fashion trends.
Tragically she was killed with Lord Mountbatten who was assassinated in Ireland in August 1979 by the IRA.

The present Lord Brabourne donated her collection of 2000 items of clothes, costume jewellery and accessories to Maidstone Museum.