The Volunteer
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The Volunteer The Newsletter for all Ashdown Forest Volunteers Issue 17 – September / October / November / December Well, that was all a bit weird!! Probably the oddest summer weather we can recall. The Forest has been a quagmire with endless days of rain suddenly followed by the odd hot sunny day! Luckily one of those days happened to coincide with the BBQ IN THIS ISSUE: and we were able to eat outside! Thank you for all your very positive feedback, we are really pleased you enjoyed the evening! • Introduction… • Recipe of the season… • Grazing Update – enter the Hairy Cows… • Forest History - Dame Margery Corbett Ashby • Health Walks… • Wag Log… • Conservation Group… The wet weather had one benefit – we were able to ‘fire’ up the Jubilee • Conservation and Beacon, without setting anything else alight! Here are a couple of rather Management News… nice pictures. • From the Director’s Chair… • Forthcoming events and exhibitions… • Events review… • Coffee morning… • Christmas Party… • Christmas Trees… We also had a very successful opening night for Mervyn Hathaway’s lovely exhibition. Over 100 guests enjoyed a glass of wine and nibbles. Sales on • Barn – Christmas and the night were brisk. The photographer who attended took some really Winter Opening… nice shots of the barn – here is just one from the early part of the evening! A very big thank you • Uniform… must go to Richard and • Mileage expenses… Julie Lowe and Jane Withey for their help • Length of service… setting up, behind the bar, washing up, sales and car park/traffic management – you were great guys! Succulent braised venison… This Scottish venison recipe, by well-known TV chef Nick Nairn, really does benefit from long, slow cooking, and develops a beautifully earthy sweetness - try it as an al ternative to turkey, or for Hogmanay. It serves 8 and can be easily doubled. Preparation time is 15 mins and cooking time 1 hr 50 mins or until tender. Heat oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. 1. Fry the vegetables in a little oil and butter in a heavy-based casserole for 4-5 mins until golden. Ingredients 2. Tip in the garlic and fry for a further min, then 2 carrots, roughly chopped set aside. 3. Put the venison into a plastic bag with seasoned 140g turnips or swede, roughly chopped flour and shake to coat. 4. Add a little more oil and butter to the pan, then 2 onions, roughly chopped fry the venison over a high heat, stirring now and 3 celery sticks, roughly chopped then, until well browned. 5. Don't crowd the pan - cook in batches if olive oil and butter, for frying necessary. Set aside with the vegetables. 6. Add the redcurrant jelly and wine to the pan, 1 garlic clove, crushed and bring to the boil, scraping up all the bits that 1kg boned leg/shoulder of venison, cut into chunks have stuck to the bottom. 7. Pour in the stock, and then add the thyme, bay 5 tbsp plain flour, seasoned with salt and pepper leaf, meat and vegetables. 8. Season if you like and bring to the boil. 2 tbsp redcurrant jelly (or rowan or hawthorn jelly) 9. Cover and transfer to the oven for about 1½ hrs 450ml dry red wine (Rioja is good) or until tender. 10. Remove from the oven and check the seasoning. 450ml beef stock 11. Serve with mash or a jacket potato 2 thyme sprigs and 1 bay leaf Update on Grazing…from Caroline FitzGerald The spring deluge continued all summer, as you all know. From our point of view, this at least got us out of having to haul water. But, it also meant that there is a huge gr owth of grass this year making the efforts of the animals inadequate to the sea of molinia. Our cattle trial has gone really well, with our six borrowed Highlands having a lovely summer wading in the stream and trashing birch trees. They are really wel l designed to utilize the course vegetation and seem to thrive on it. You can still see them until the end of September if you go to Townings car park and walk down the hill. Our Sunday checker, Karina, is moving house so we are looking for somebody who is interested in looking after the sheep at the weekends. Please get in touch with the Office if you would like to get involved. You will need to make a regular commitment of time on a Sunday, training will be given. We are also interested in anyone up and around the Forest who may have vacant farm buildings that we could use. The Volunteer - Page 2 Forest History – Dame Margery Corbett Ashby, suffragist … Dame Margery Irene Corbett Ashby, remember lying on the floor reading week -end parties…. At college DBE (19 April 1882–15 May 1981) contemporary accounts of the Margery was intensely keen on was a Briti sh Liberal politician, Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War civil libert ies, free trade, feminist and suffragist. in my grandfather's library, where international good will, there was a complete set of democracy… She spends time She was born at Danehill, the Illustrated London News. He had and energy without stint or daughter of barrister Charles Henry bookshelves to the ceiling… In my personal ambition… She has an Corbett who was sometime Liberal father's library the big bookcases immense sense of duty, and must MP for East Grinstead and Marie also went up to the ceiling. have spent a very large part of Corbett herself a Liberal feminist and her entire life on committees and local Councillor in Uckfield. For many years Charles and Marie at meetings. Not to like her is Corbett made public speeches on and always has been impossible; Margery and her younger sister, the subject of women's rights in she has charm and complete Cicely Corbett , were educated at East Grinstead High Street. East sincerity, and has made a success home. Charles taught the girls Grinstead was a safe Conservative of life, in its essential classics, history and mathematics and seat and the crowds were usually relationships. She was a good Marie taught them scripture and the very hostile. A survey carried out in daughter: she is a good wife and piano. A local woman gave them 1911 suggested that less than 20% mother. The one boy, born during lessons in French and German. of the women in East Grinstead the 1914 war, when his father Margery Corbett Ashby wrote fondly supported women having the vote was in Fra nce with the B.E.F., about her childhood and h er account in parliamentary elections. was, as a baby, so delicate that it was included in her Memoirs did not seem possible he should published after her death: At the age of eighteen, Margery, live; Margery insisted that he her younger sister Cicely and a should; he has grown up a superb “No one can have had a happier group of friends formed a society physical specimen. childhood than myself, brought up, called the Younger Suffragists. In with a younger brother and sister, in 1901 Margery won a place at a large, old-fashioned, country Newnham Colleg e, Cambridge to house. In my youth I shared every read Classics. At university she advantage with my brother equally - joined the Cambridge branch of the from love and affection to the best National Union of Women Suffrage possible education and opportunities, Societies (NUWSS) and by the time and the critical but unstinted she was nineteen she had become encouragement which to the young is secretary of the Constitutional like sunshine to a plant. Suffrage Movement. My mother became an energetic Her friend, Mary Ha milton, cyclist, rebuked by her neighbours for described their youth and time at showing inch es of extremely pretty University: feet and ankles; regarded as highly indecorous. It was not only to the "Margery's mother, Marie Corbett, ankles that the neighbours objected. was an ardent Feminist, one small My parents were Liberals… at that external sign being the fact that she period as much hated and distrusted regularly wore the breeches she had Although Margery Corbett by the gentry as Communists are taken to when bicycling came in, at passed her examinations, today, and regarded as traitors to least a decade before war-time because she was a woman, their class. In consequence they made them permissible. She was a Cambri dge University refused to boycotted them… I suspect this woman of great drive, active in grant her a degree (Cambridge boycott threw my energetic mother local affairs and local government University granted the first even more fervently into good works and all good causes. The house was degrees to women in 1947). In amongst the villagers, where, in the apt to swarm with people. The 1904 Margery obtained a place days before the welfare state, Corbett's hospitality was in the best at the Cambridge Teachers poverty was widespread. We were English tradition. Friends of Training College but after educated a t home. Lessons were Margery, of he r younger sister completing the course she divided. Mother took scripture and Cicely - extravagantly pretty, and at decided that teaching was not music. My father taught us history, the time we were at Cambridge, for her. geography, mathematics and Latin. preparing to go Oxford and of her From the age of four I read elder brother Adrian, then at The Volunteer - Page 3 everything I could lay my hands on. I Oxford, assembled for dances and In 1907 Margery Corbett was After the passing of the appointed Secretary of the National Qua lification of Women Act in Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 1918, which gave women over the (NUWSS) and was given the age of 30 the right to vote, Margery responsibility of editing their journal.