The parish council recently got all their minutes scanned as Adobe PDFs right back to December 1894 and we’ve been helping them get them online as a combined archive with more recent minutes which from May 1998 until September 2003 were posted on their web site as simple HTML and from then on were posted as PDFs. The result of this work is that you can now find a complete archive of all Milton Parish Council’s minutes online here on their web site.

Some of the early minutes are fascinating (the recipe for Becoeur’s Arsenical Soap for example – no we don’t understand what that’s doing there either) and are often hard to read as they’re scans of hand written minutes but later it gets easier as they’re typed. There’s frequent references to the sewage works going back to the very earliest minutes so some things never change.

But the one that puts a chill up our spine is minute 370 in July 1958 where the County Council’s civil defence officer comes along to explain about what will happen in the event of a nuclear war as “the chance of Cambridgeshire becoming a radio-active area is very high”.