The roll
People who attended, sometimes for thirty years, and no longer do. The Institute prints their names because they are part of what it is.
The Institute prints this roll because a practice which keeps only its current members has not understood what it is for. Everyone here gave time to the houses, in some cases for decades. Several of them are the reason a house still stands.
The phrase no longer continuous means one thing only: that a person's attendance has ended and has not resumed. It is not a judgement, it carries no finding about conduct, and nothing follows from it. It has been objected to in writing since 1993, most forcefully by stewards, on the grounds that a phrase describing a person as a discontinuity in our records is a phrase about our records and not about the person. The stewardship accepts the objection and has not found a better term. We continue to use the worse one, which is worth saying plainly.
What we keep: the years of attendance, the house, and what the person gave. What we do not keep, once a person has asked: correspondence, ledger detail, steward notes, and anything entered at a continuity review. A former member may ask for their entry to be withdrawn from this page at any time and no reason is asked for or recorded.
1979 – 1994
River House
Ran the River kitchen for fifteen years and taught most of the house to cook for forty people without hurrying. Her objection of 1986 to the designation memorandum is held in the archive and is still the clearest thing anyone has written about how the Institute talks about the people who leave it.
1974 – 1988
North House
One of the nine who took the lease on the grange hall. She set up the hospice rota in 1981, having decided the Institute should be useful to people who would never attend an observance, and she sat with a great many of them herself.
1983 –
—
Surveyed and drew the schematic of the houses which is still in use, walking most of the distances involved. He was a patient man in meetings and an impatient one on a roof.
No leaving date is recorded. The entry reads: continuity reviewed, 1986. The archivist has twice requested clarification from the stewardship and has received the same reply on both occasions, which is that the entry stands as made.
1984 – 2011
River House
Rebuilt the seawall at River after the 1990 storm, largely at weekends, largely alone until people were embarrassed into joining him. He left after a disagreement about the Fellowship which he described at the time as ordinary and which the stewardship agrees was ordinary.
2002 – 2019
Seawall House
Catalogued the correspondence from 1974 to 1991, some eleven thousand items, and wrote the finding aid that makes the archive searchable at all. She held that an archive which cannot be searched is a cupboard, and she was right.
not recorded –
Western House
Kept the accounts of the western reconciliation for a period which the ledger does not fix, and was, by the accounts of three separate stewards, unfailingly courteous about being asked the same question every year. His last written report ends: “I am content to remain where I am for as long as the work requires it, and I would ask only that the houses stop describing the arrangement as temporary, since
The remainder of the sentence was not carried over when the report was reconciled. The original sheet has not been located. The archivist notes that reconciliation is not supposed to shorten a document and that this is the only instance she has found.
A member who wishes their entry withdrawn should write to the archivist at the North House. Withdrawal is done in the week it is asked for. How to write to a house.