The Rev. Henry Preston

Henry Edmund Preston was appointed Rector of Tasburgh in 1836 and held that post until he died sixty years later, making him the longest serving Rector in the history of the village. He was born in Yarmouth in 1804 where his father was a solicitor, merchant and also twice Mayor of the borough, and followed his father into the legal profession, being articled at 16 to a solicitor in Wymondham. After qualifying, he retrained as a barrister and in 1827 was enrolled at the Middle Temple, and it was whilst in London that he married Louisa Browne, a young Irish widow, in 1829. Two years later, he changed course again, deciding to become a clergyman, and went to study theology at Queens' College, Cambridge. After graduating he was taken on as curate of West Bradenham, near Swaffham, before being appointed Rector of Tasburgh by Isaac Jermy, Lord of the Manor of Tasburgh, who was a distant relative.

The two previous rectors had lived outside the village, and the rectory, off Low Road, which hadn't been used as such for many years, was in such a dilapidated state that his first task was to organise the building of a new rectory for himself next to the church on land which had previously belonged to Old Hall Farm. The cost was reported at the time to have been £1,000, equivalent now to about £1.2m., but whether he funded that himself perhaps with some of his wife's money, or whether the Church funded the cost isn't clear, although it certainly became church property and the home of succeeding rectors until the 1980s. Unlike his two predecessors, he took a close interest in the parish and the lives of his parishioners. One of his early steps was to provide materials for the repair of what he termed the Pest House, the village Poor House on Marl Bottom, and to insist that the sick and elderly should not be forced to work on the adjoining allotments, but the project for which he is best remembered was the building of the first village school, on land off Church Hill behind his new rectory, which opened in 1844 and remained in use until 1980. It is entirely appropriate therefor that both the new school and the road on which it stands should bear his name.

Although he remained the rector for nearly sixty years, there was a four year period from 1868 to 1872 when he left the parish in the care of a curate and went to be the minister of St. Peter's in Montrose. Although part of the Scottish Episcopalian Church, St Peter's was for historical reasons under the care of the Bishop of Carlisle, by whom he had first been made a deacon in 1835 while still studying at Cambridge.

In 1884 his wife Louisa died but from the earliest days they had employed at least one and usually two of domestic servants to run the rectory, and towards the end of his long life he also increasingly relied upon the services of a curate to run the parish for him but the parish registers record that he would still officiate at what he regarded as the more important events, such as the baptism of the sons of Philip Berney Ficklin of Tasburgh Hall when he would have been in his late 80s. He and his wife never had any children but the parishioners were his family, and after his death they erected a memorial to him in the chancel of the church in recognition of his long service and all that he had done for the village.