THS

Wendy Snarey

Tewkesbury Historical Society

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“Valete”: Wendy (& Alan) Snarey

Wendy and Alan are making a long overdue visit to their daughter and family in Australia. Sadly for us, she has decided that this is a good time to review her commitments and to resign from the committee, along with being the Society’s secretary. It is no cliché to say that she will be a very difficult act to follow. However, Wendy seemed to emerge from “nowhere” to play an increasingly vital part in our developing organisation.

An engineer by training and profession, she brings a unique discipline to her historical research which keeps my enthusiasm in check, yet which compliments the skills of the humanities discipline. She actually is happy to read instruction books and will teach herself anything, which she feels that she needs to know. It was she who developed our website and trained me to operate it during a painful learning experience on her last visit ‘down-under’, from where she guided me by email as Sydney seemingly burned around her.

The Woodard Database owes so much for her painstaking and precise transcriptions. The late Bob Woodard started off putting census data on computer, but it was Wendy who finished it off so that now we have almost the complete census data from 1841-1901 available to the public on the Library Woodard Database. She promises that she will finish the rest of 1901 upon her return – especially as the Library bought her a gang-plug to make her life easier! In addition to that, she has made great progress into transcribing the inaccessible Tewkesbury Record, which is much more detailed and which offers a real insight to mid-Victorian values among the literate classes. I have mainly failed to persuade her to write articles based upon her transcriptions, but I am delighted often to include Wendy’s name as ‘joint-author’ of my talks - because without her contribution I would be veritably struggling for material.

I did succeed once in overcoming her other trademark: her overly modest reserve and lack of confidence in her abilities. One of the most important sources she has transcribed is the Lloyd George Domesday Book – the 1909-13 Tax Survey. It does not sound like fun, but it is a vital exhaustive record of each property in the town, who occupied it and, most importantly, who owned it. It also tells you who boasted - and who did not boast - a toilet in that deprived era. She did eventually succumb to blandishments, wrote her article for the Bulletin – and won a national award from the British Association of Local History!

She is also the member of a formidable team because she always has the unwavering source of her husband Alan. I am always trying to distract him away from politics to history, because his skills and interests have much from which we could benefit.

I will, therefore, be somewhat bereft, as I was last time they went ‘down-under’, to lose my historical team mate. Last time, I was so relieved when she returned; this time I will be delighted - but conscious that we will have lost her guidance as secretary. This is because she has been one more Secretary in a, thankfully, long line who have earned the accolade of being a “safe pair of hands”.

Wendy Snarey will, therefore, be a most difficult person to replace – but replace her we must. Perhaps, like her, someone who may not have been a trained historian and who also will emerge from “nowhere” to bring other vital skills, which – in Wendy’s case - have so enriched the Tewkesbury Historical Society. We still hope, historically speaking, that it will be, not so much “vale”, but “au revoir”.

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