On 31/01/2011 21:21, Humphrey Southall wrote:
> On 31/01/2011 17:41, "John Briggs"<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Now, I am quite prepared to believe that the Havant Civil Parish had
>> been co-terminous since 1894 with the Havant Urban District, but what
>> happened in 1932 was that all the Civil Parishes now covered by the new
>> Havant and Waterloo Urban District ceased to exist - making a nonsense
>> of the entry for Havant AP/CP.
>
> I am afraid that this is pretty directly contradicted by this summary of
> the 1932 changes on page 8 of Part II of the 1931 census County Report for
> Hampshire, which is our source for the listing: it describes a whole bunch
> of parishes being abolished to EXPAND Havant CP.
>
> http://www.histpop.org/ohpr/servlet/PageBrowser?path=Browse/Census%20%28by%
> 20date%29&active=yes&mno=274&tocstate=expandnew&display=sections&display=ta
> bles&display=pagetitles&pageseq=8
>
> It is quite clear that once Urban Districts and Civil Parishes were fully
> aligned, parish councils lost their functions. However, it is not clear
> whether and when the legal entities ceased to exist. One of the ways we
> think about administrative units is as "corporate bodies", but the problem
> with parishes (let alone townships) is that they never had much of a
> workforce. More recently, many rural (civil) parish councils have ceased
> to meet simply out of apathy, but this has not bearing on whether the
> legal entity was abolished.
That *is* baffling. Although the reference suggests that the Urban
Districts, Municipal Boroughs and County Boroughs were being aligned in
1932 to just one Civil Parish each, the question is *why* they did that.
*What* they did is clearer: the new Civil Parish took the name of the
largest pre-existing Civil Parish, even if that had a different name to
the CB, MB or UD. It would have been simpler to just create new Civil
Parishes with the same name as the CB, MB or UD. The new urban Civil
Parishes had no function: the last one had disappeared in 1930 with the
Poor Law. Which makes it surprising that Lee on Solent CP was created in
1930 - the CP was only created when Lee on the Solent was incorporated
into Gosport MB.
Did they have any purpose other than for the census? (Were the Petty
Sessional Divisions re-aligned as well?) Perhaps local taxation was the
answer: perhaps the rate was a *Parish* rate, so fictitious Civil
Parishes had to be created to collect it? Perhaps Lee on Solent
initially retained a lower, rural parish rate?
Perhaps the urban Civil Parishes persisted in this ghost sense until
1974. Whether or not these urban Civil Parishes were legal entities, it
is hard to describe them as administrative units. And all the more
reason not to link them with the Ancient Parishes.
(Analogous to the problem of the Ancient Parishes is case of the
Hundreds - these just faded away when their last legal functions were
taken over by the newly created County Councils.)
John Briggs
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