Proclamation read at various points in the town

Next Thursday at 12 noon The Square at Torrington will be a blaze of colour, and visitors from other towns will mingle with the local inhabitants under the flags and banners as the Town Clerk of Torrington (Mr S.J. Parkes) reads the traditional proclamation that sets in motion for yet another year the annual May Fair, standing just outside the Town Hall.

The proclamation is read at various points in the town, and then there comes the highlight of the fair – the crowning of the May Queen.

Each year the two primary schools at Torrington – the Halsdon Road and the Barley Grove school – take it in turn to provide the queen, her attendants, and two heralds. This year it is the turn of the Halsdon Road School and the girl chosen by the popular vote is 10-year-old Elizabeth Somerfield, the only daughter of Torrington’s station-master, Mr .R. Somerfield, and Mrs Somerfield.

Her crowner will be Pauline Burridge, 10-year-old daughter of Mr and Mrs Peter Burridge of Well Street, Torrington.

It was 405 years ago that Torrington received the first of its three charters, and it was this one, which was granted by Philip and Mary, that decreed that the borough should have one market on every Saturday in each week and to hold and keep two fairs – one on the Feast of St Michael the Arcangel and “the eve and morrow after,” and the other on the Feast of St George the Martyr and the two days following.”

Under the Fairs Act of 1873 the dates for holding these two fairs were altered to May and October and eventually, after the October Fair had become defunct, the first Thursday in May was fixed as the date on which all future May Fairs should be held.

The date of the very first Torrington fair has been lost. The date 1226 has been mentioned but the historian Lyson published 100 years ago, gave the original date as six years earlier. Many people think that the fair does date back much further, perhaps as far as the days of the Saxons.

At one time Torrington was in very real danger of losing the fair, but since 1924 when the local Chamber of Commerce organised the event’s revival after a lapse of many years, the fair has taken on a new lease of life. Even the war years could not upset the traditional reading of the proclamation which kept the fair in existence: each May the proclamation was read to a deserted Square.

Gazette article 1 May 1959