Daily Photo – The Hampden Soldiers’ Memorial

Hampden is one of those places most people only ever experience at 100 kilometres an hour. It slips past in the rear-view mirror as a blur of highway noise, a brief glimpse of the chippy announcing itself in a puff of steam, or people walking from the local shop with ice creams the size of their head, and then it’s gone. 

Two of the town’s more important historical events occurred within a few years of each other. The first was a visit by the newly appointed Bishop Richards, whose official arrival in February 1920 was celebrated with a special service followed by a garden party reception. The second was the unveiling of the Hampden Soldiers’ Memorial in 1922, erected on a local reserve. What made the Bishop’s visit particularly memorable was that it coincided with a sugar shortage, which had become quite the topic of conversation among local residents.

It seems Bishop Richards arrived in Hampden to find a town performing a delicate balancing act. The Bishop’s visit featured a special service followed by an elaborate afternoon tea featuring all sorts of sweet-treats, homemade of course, and requiring sugar. In the vicarage garden, parishioners maintained the polished rituals of an Anglican welcome, likely pooling their last cups of sugar to sweeten the Bishop’s tea, even as the so-called sugar famine threatened a basic commodity they relied on.

The scandal arose because one of Hampden’s two general stores had recently closed. At the time, sugar was distributed based on a store’s previous year’s turnover, meaning the remaining shop was unlikely to have been allocated the additional quota needed to serve customers from the now-closed store. The result was a town left with only half the sugar required to feed its population. A topic that was “quite the talking point” at the garden party.

The irony, of course, was that the visit from the newly appointed Bishop also brought with it a major social occasion, featuring an elaborate afternoon tea of scones, sponges, and jam tarts. Thus creating a quietly strange small-town tension between the demands of Victorian politeness and the very real anxiety of empty pantries.