Parish Magazines/Community News

This section contains parish magazines dating back to 1898, continuing until the present day.

In the 1860s, bishops had started to promote the idea amongst their clergy that using magazines to communicate with their parishioners would help them to maintain regular contact. Gradually this idea was implemented, more successfully in some parishes than others. In the Victorian era though, a lot of initial attempts at publishing parish magazines faltered for economic reasons. Generally, parishioners were charged about a penny for each monthly copy, but this often wasn't enough to cover the costs of production. A number of centrally produced publications started to appear - eg Home Words, Church Monthly, Parish Magazine - and these were often used as the main content of the local magazines, with the parish just producing a single sheet "wrapper" for the magazine, with this containing all of the local church news. This was what happened at Badsey for many years.

Until 2022, all the magazines up to 1996 were kept in the attic at The Vicarage. These have been passed to The Badsey Society for safe keeping in  the Archive (these originals now replace copies which had been made a decade earlier).

To the best of our knowledge, no parish magazine was produced at Badsey between the years mid 1919-1946. There are also a few other years where there are gaps. If anyone has got any copies for these years, we would love to hear from you.