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An older village gentleman with his walking stick sitting in a flower garden at Pembridge in England, circa June 1966. During the summer of 1966 British photojournalist John Bulmer visited the village of Pembridge in rural Herefordshire. At that time the village was home to approximately 800 inhabitants, and had only recently been connected to electricity and the supply of mains water, although not every cottage was connected, with oil lamps and the Parish pump still in use. It had lived though the Industrial revolution, and the first 66 years of the 20th Century with little outside contact. The village was only connected to Hereford by a bus service on a Wednesday and Saturday, and the local railway station had closed eleven years earlier, 99 years after its opening. Less than a third of the children at the village school had ever visited London, but the Headmaster always made sure that they could see the sea, and Bristol Zoo, on the annual coach outing. It was a surviving rural community, not the ordered countryside of the commuting businessman or the retired colonial civil servant. The Church and the village pub were central to village life. Ten years earlier the Reverend Eric Andrews had been installed as the priest in charge. Unfortunately the congregation had not warmed to him after he gave a sermon that local farmers should not work on Sundays during harvest and in the ensuing ten years he had failed to win them over. His subsequent announcement that he would be taking up a living in Kenya was widely welcomed by the local community, who he described as rather conservative and resistant to change. This series of color images offers an insightful look at the Social History of rural England during the mid-1960s. (Photo by John Bulmer/Popperfoto via Getty Images)