Tom Hastie (GH) Our Resident Historian

It is with great sadness that I have to report the death of Tom Hastie on 23 February aged 82.

Tom was a remarkable person in that he had collected a massive amount of newspaper cuttings, tape recordings and videos of Foxearth and surrounding villages. He had accumulated this invaluable history of our area over many years and had deposited various items with the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford.

When the history society started over twelve years ago Tom offered his collection to us to preserve them for posterity. Andrew Clark gradually added the cuttings and photographs to our website to make it one of the foremost in the UK.

Tom’s family kindly donated all the additional stored items to the society and these will be sorted and added to the website in due course.

We all owe a huge debt to Tom for his diligence in collecting so many articles of historic interest over a very long period of time and in recognition of Tom’s work it has been decided to call the collection The Tom Hastie Archive.