Councillors and Clerk
(alphabetical order)
| Ian ANSELL (chair) | Big Row, 101 votes (68 %) |
| John ASHFIELD (deputy chair) | The Street, 76 votes (52 %) |
| Peter CRACKNELL | The Street, 89 votes (60 %) |
| Johnny CROWFOOT | Big Row, 72 votes (48 %) |
| Richard FOGERTY | The Street, 93 votes (62 %) |
| Jane HAYWARD | Dunburgh, 78 votes (51 %) |
| Tim MORTON | Dunburgh, 96 votes (65 %) |
| Total vote | 149 valid ballots (100 %) |
| Tina NEWBY (clerk) | [Harleston] |
When parish councils, the last and lowest stage in democracy, came into existence a DOWSON stood against a KERRICH to become chair of the new ‘Geldeston Parish Council’. As the largest employer in the parish, Dowson won easily against the parish’s biggest landowner.
A note from the website of the Eye parish council (Cambridgeshire) provides a succinct overview of the purpose and subsequent history of parish councils in England:
“Elected parish councils were first established in the Local Government Act 1894 to reinvigorate local communities and give them a voice. Previously meetings would have been held in the vestry of the local church. … After a difficult passage through parliament and many amendments, this Bill became an Act in 1894. Its effect was to transfer all non-religious functions from the church to the elected Parish Councils.
… Today there are some 9,500 parish councils in England. It is not unusual for seats on parish councils to be uncontested, and for members to be co-opted where the number of candidates is fewer than the number of seats available.”
There have rarely been contested elections to Geldeston Parish Council. This year was the first in decades.
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Geldeston is unusual in being an industrial village.
More important than its farms, or its smokehouses on Station Road, our small village was dominated by a canal (Geldeston Dyke aka The Cut), seven maltings, and stores for coal and salt next to the wherry basin (today Rowan Craft). At one time that industrial complex included a brewery behind the Wherry Inn, supplying ten public houses in the Waveney valley and Norwich.
The Dowson family acquired the maltings and the Dyke as a going concern in the late eighteenth century; in the 1920s they sold up and moved away.
In 1921, almost thirty years after the appearance of Parish Councils, the Church of England created the PCC (Parochial Church Council) to help the incumbent run individual churches. These new bodies were headed by the rector (vicar etc), and had their own treasurer, secretary, deputy chair and other members.
In that year, the parishes of Geldeston and Stockton were amalgamated under a single rector who lived at the Rectory next to St Michael’s and All Angels church in Geldeston.
JC / 26 May 2023
(revised 3 June)
A Geldeston Miscellany 