Kay Books

Heckington Show – an insider’s view of the greatest village show

Ray Bell was born in 1930, in a ‘one up, one down’ farm labourer’s cottage in Eastgate, a stone’s throw from the main entrance to the Heckington Showground. Schooled in the village, leaving in 1943 aged 13 years. He became a ‘bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire’ and served his time as a joiner. Following this he was conscripted into the RAF. After his wife’s death in 2000 he became a mature student, enrolling in the University of Lincoln to read history, gaining a BA (Hons) Hist.

He remembers sitting on his father’s shoulders watching the bike racing at Heckington Show and that started his lifetime’s interest in cycling and the Show. He has been actively involved with both since the Show was resurrected after the end of WW2 and in recent years has had the ambition to write the ‘follow-up’ to Charles Pinchbeck’s history of the first 125 years of the Show.