One of the most enthusiastic workers for the Abbey Church is David Tabor who has been associated with the historic building for more than sixty years.

His first appointment was as a boy in 1950 when he joined the team of altar servers but in 1963 he was elected to the parochial church council, becoming secretary the following year. There have been many appointments since, at parochial and diocesan level, including verger, parish clerk and churchwarden, a post which he eventually gave up in 2002. During this time he was also a busy shopkeeper in Bourne and has therefore witnessed the changing scene in a town that has more than doubled its size since he first arrived.

David GeorgeTabor was born at Grantham on 12th December 1937, son of Reginald Tabor, a carpenter and joiner, and his wife Muriel, but with the outbreak of the Second World War, the local munitions factories were regarded as a potential target for enemy bombers and so Mr Tabor decided to take his family back to his father’s home town of Bourne.

By 1941 they had settled into a house in North Street and the following year David became a pupil at Bourne Grammar School, starting in the preparatory department which was then situated in one of the old wooden huts alongside the main block. He later transferred to the senior school and after gaining his school certificate with good marks in science, he went to work in the research department of Pedigree Petfoods, commuting each week to Melton Mowbray although this was not a problem because Bourne then had an efficient railway service that enabled him travel out on a Monday morning and return on a Friday evening, living in digs during the week.

His grandfather, George Spencer, had opened a small shop in Abbey Road selling plants and when he died, the business was inherited by his mother who decided to keep it going while her husband continued with his carpentry. Eventually, the family moved home to a larger property in West Street which had room for another shop which was run by his father while part of the premises were leased to a dentist. But when ill health forced him to cut his workload, David decided to leave his job at Melton Mowbray and join the family business and from then on, he became a shopkeeper.

Church work already occupied much of his spare time and in 1958, while attending the annual meeting of the Anglican Young People’s Association at Great Malvern in Worcestershire, he met Ann McMaster who was there as a delegate from her church at Barrow in Furness and they were married four years later. The ceremony on 24th September 1962 was the last to be held in St Luke’s Church at Barrow-in-Furness where the bride's father, a design draughtsman in the local shipyards, was churchwarden. The couple honeymooned in Great Malvern where they had first met and returned to start married life at the new home in West Street where they had two children, Judith (1963) and Andrew (1967).

New and larger retail premises with living accommodation in Abbey Road came on the market and David and Ann moved in, living in the flat above the fruit and vegetable shop, and as Ann began to take a more active role in the business, David had more time for his church duties and so began his voluntary work for the Diocese of Lincoln. At the same time, be became district secretary for the Stamford and Bourne district Scout Council, a purely back room role mostly doing the paperwork without being active in any scout group and always working from home.

This work grew almost without limit with the need for any person with contact with the scouts on a regular basis requiring a CRB Clearance, the official assessment of trustworthiness. This included all adults, from the regular troop leaders to the mums who took turns to bring several boys and girls in their cars to meetings in the next village. When David finally resigned in September 2011, after 32 years, he had amassed the data of almost 2,000 adults in his care.

David and Ann retired from the Abbey Road shop in October 1998 and the business was sold but new horizons opened. Both felt that they needed a fresh challenge for their spare time and so Ann joined the staff of the Cancer Research UK charity shop in the Burghley Arcade, working on the till for one morning a week, while David spent three mornings a week as book keeper for a local retailer.

Sadly, Ann died suddenly in April 2011, aged 71. David had tremendous support from Judith, who by then was living in Bradford, and from Andrew and his wife, Emma, who had settled at Sandhurst, Berkshire. "In my widowed state, I feel more fortunate than many", said David, "as I had always taken an active part in all the domestic chores and in cooking."

He also decided to continue with his book keeping work and his activities in Bourne Abbey and also become more involved within the local group of National Trust members in Stamford and Peterborough.

Then in 2011, he took on an ever greater challenge when he began transcribing the parish registers into digital format. Progress is slow because the documents are hard to read and often illegible and a painstaking attention to detail is required. But by March 2012, the task was well advanced with three of the baptism registers completed comprising some 2,400 entries from 1837-1899. "This has taken me three months", said David, "and I anticipate that at least another 18 months of work lies ahead."

The project is being undertaken with the approval of the vicar and churchwardens who are the local custodians of the registers which are kept under lock and key in the Abbey Church.

Daughter Judith, an enthusiastic member of the Lincolnshire Family History Society who has researched the Tabor family back to the 18th century, suggested the transcription of the registers as a suitable project and he has tackled it with enthusiasm. Once complete, it is hoped that the registers will be available on the Internet through the Lincolnshire Family History web site.

REVISED MARCH 2012

See also The parish registers