Day 43. Bonfire Night

 Garry Maton, David Monks and Peter Maton build the traditional bonfire on the green, c.1965.

Celebrating the timely discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, threatening Parliament in November 1605, was met with carefully patriotic enthusiasm across Britain from its earliest days. In Preston it was no less so. By a strange quirk of fate, one of the conspirators, Robert Catesby, who was fatally wounded in a subsequent gunfight at Haddington in Worcestershire, was the son of William Catesby, who had once owned Alscot manor.

 

                                    Robert Catesby.

In the 1880s, the annual bonfire was built on the green in front of the school. A former pupil reminisced to the Stratford Herald sixty years later that schoolmaster Joseph Webb would get permission for the children to go into the fields to gather wood for their bonfire.

Several more generations upheld the tradition, which was kept until the 1960s. Many people still have fond memories of the annual bonfire – the children would start building it in the summer holidays – which come rain or shine was one of the highlights of the year.