120 THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
ORDINARY MEETING (819th MEETING).
SATURDAY, 20TH MARCH, 1941.
This Meeting was held at 2 o'clock on the above afternoon in the
Parish Church Memorial Hall, Woodford. In view of existing conditions,
including the illness of our President and the impossibility of calling
together Members of Council and others now scattered in distant parts
of the country, no Annual General Meeting could be held this year. The
present meeting was accordingly devoted to exhibits and short com-
munications by members. Only thirteen members were present. Mr. J.
Ross presided.
Mr. Linder had an extensive exhibit of relics found during his recent
investigations of Red-Hills on Canvey Island, with illustrative photographs
and a carefully executed scale-plan showing the positions of the various
excavations. The objects exhibited included a bone needle or bodkin,
rough pottery, a hone, a curious three-legged piece of pottery which the
finder suggests may have been used as a cover to a lamp, etc., etc. A
selection of the specimens has been generously offered to the Club's museum
at Stratford by Mr. Linder.
Miss Prince exhibited and described her collection of bog-plants.
She divided these into two groups, the typical plants of peatbogs, such
as Pinguicula, Drosera, and Eriophorum, and those found more generally
in marshes, such as Hypericum elodes, Menyanthes, Parnassia, Scutellaria
minor, Anagallis tenella and Wahlenbergia hederacea; she spoke of the
peculiar conditions of soil and humidity to which the first group in
particular had to become accustomed.
Mr. Ross read notes on some of the less common plants still to be
found in Epping Forest, especially mentioning those occurring in the
neighbourhood of Whitehall Plain and the Ching Brook. His account
shows that not a few uncommon plants may still be met with, occasionally
and unexpectedly, hereabouts, and elsewhere in the Forest woodland.
Miss Pollard read various reminiscences by Mr. Theodore Godlee, J.P.
(whose memory goes back to the year 1862) concerning the Friends'
Meeting House at Plaistow, built in 1823, with its pillared portico brought
from Wanstead House, then being pulled down, the later Meeting House
and burial ground at Wanstead, originally Assembly Rooms and an
Archery Ground, and the various houses occupied by prominent Friends
in Leyton, Wanstead and Walthamstow.
The Curator showed, in illustration of Miss Pollard's communication,
photographs from the Pictorial Survey collection of the Plaistow and
Wanstead Meeting Houses and of other buildings referred to by her.
Mr. Crouch exhibited a volume (one of seven) of Leyton items, being
a grangerised edition of Kennedy's "History of Leyton," especially to
illustrate John Strype's vicarage, which recently was totally destroyed
by an enemy bomb : so disappears the only 17th century building in the
borough of Leyton, this vicarage having been built in 1677 and 1678,
largely at Strype's own cost.
The meeting closed at 4 o'clock.