Our columnist tells us that the society behind the Bath & West Show has not been resting on its laurels over the years
REGULAR readers of Somerset Life will have become accustomed to my guilt-edged promotion of the Royal Bath & West Show, but rarely have I looked back at the 240-year-old Society that hosts this iconic event and what it stands for today.
Our first minute book of a meeting held at York House, Bath, on 8 September, 1777, is quite succinct in its purpose: ‘A meeting held this day for the establishment of a Society for the encouragement and improvement of Agriculture, Manufacture, Commerce and the Fine Arts in the counties of Somerset, Wilts, Gloucester and Dorset’. So what on earth was the Society doing between 1777 and 1852 when the first Bath & West Show took place in Taunton?
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