Adderbury History Association

Richard Plackett, a local carrier, decided to move from horse and carrier’s cart into motorised transport based at Three Ways Adderbury.  He was the father of Lucy who gave money in 1938 for a community/playing field

The field behind the house  known as Plackett’s field and the petrol pumps  were  the reason that the Hollis family bought the property as they had an interest in horses  possibly more so than selling petrol, as I understand the daughter was a successful eventer. When they sold to the petrol company they bought a horse riding school.

In 1957 on December 3rd, the Jones family, consisting of my mother Bettina (Betty) and my step father Albert (Jerry) and step brother Allan arrived in Adderbury to take on the running of a garage which had been bought by the National Benzole Company.

Jerry, with the financial support of his father George, had since the 1930s had a garage on the Alum Rock road in Birmingham which was kept working by his sister during the war, while he was stationed on Benbecula.  At this time he also  lost Allan’s mother to cancer.

He and my mother married in 1953 and he, succumbing to the desire of my mother to take the children out of the city, asked the petrol company to let him know of any country sites for which they needed a manager.  Two sites, that of Nell Bridge and of Adderbury were offered.

The Garage on the junction of the Oxford and Aynho Roads at Adderbury was typical of many at the time with petrol pumps mounted inside of the pedestrian pavement with arms that swung out to fuel the vehicles which were parked on the road or the unpaved area next to the kiosk.

It might be of interest here to mention that obtaining fuel via a petrol pump direct to the car did not happen in Britain until the early 1920s; petrol was sold in sealed two gallon cans and the move initially from hand operated pumps such as the Gilbert & Barker pumps used by Tommy & Edith Thacker further down the road only took place once customers accepted by the use of a sight glass that they were getting what they had paid for.  On our way to catch the  school bus from outside the Coach & Horses I would often talk with Mrs Thacker if a local was getting fuel and on occasion Mr Thacker in his workshop/storeroom.

Set back from our pumps which were, in fairness electric, was a dirt area with a wooden kiosk, which even by the standards of the day, was basic, but the saving grace from the petrol company’s point of view was the development potential which included a substantial house with a large front garden and a decent sized corrugated sheet metal  workshop which had been built by Richard Plackett to house his Bus which offered the first motorised  transport between Banbury and Oxford .

When we arrived and for some time afterwords a milking cow or two was kept in the field by Frank Neal – uncle to Anne who had the adjacent Green farm. 

Soon after we arrived and with the removal of the front garden and kiosk and the shortening of the workshop, a new forecourt was created with the new pumps mounted centrally so that vehicles could come off the road for refuelling. All of this was long before the installation of the traffic lights on the junction.

The garage continued to grow with a car sales site (Jerry was not interested) leased to John “the Bishop” and later to Roy Betts. Fuel sales weathered the results of Suez crisis in 1956, the embargo in 1973 and the second crisis in 1979,some time after which Jerry could not agree terms with BP who had taken over via Shell from National Benzole as the landlords. So my parents retired to the Leys  and the tenancy was then taken on by Derek Benefield from Deddington for a short time, before being sold in 1982 for the housing  development you see to day , both on the immediate Garage site and latterly on the adjacent field.  The house was demolished by a wrecking ball as part of the destruction scene in a TV production of “Blot on the Landscape. “

My mother was active in the WI being president for a while and father was heavily involved in the cricket Club,  donating and maintaining the machinery. After my apprenticeship in agricultural engineering and a time abroad I returned to help father in the garage until he retired. 

The First picture was taken during 1958 (I am stood by the pump) and the second picture was taken after the refurbishment in 1960 with the Neal’s barn, and church in the background. The final picture taken in the  seventies shows the cars for sale and the traffic lights.

Bill Baker

Rhoda Woodward’s most ambitious contribution to the history of the village of Adderbury was her account of the Schools of Adderbury. In the first two parts of this account she wrote about the Boys’ School, the Girls’ School and the Infants’ School, using material in the archives of New College, the log books maintained at the schools from 1872, HMI Reports and entries in the Parish (later Deanery) magazine. The final section recounted Rhoda’s memories of her own schooling in Adderbury, and it is this section that we are re-publishing here as the final element in our tribute to the work of Rhoda Woodward.

My own memories of the Infants and Girls Schools date from the 1930s. It is likely that not much would have changed since the beginning of the century. Toilets were still outside, cold and bare, with rusty chains that worked most of the time, except when there was a spell of severe frosty weather. The only hand washing facilities consisted of a chipped sink in the corner of the porches: each one had a cold brass tap, a bar of household soap and a damp roller towel fixed to the back of the door.

Inside, the walls were still painted over the bricks; in spite of all the requests by HMI they never did get plastered. As no-one lived in centrally-heated homes, I suppose we were reasonably warm; each week one pupil was chosen to check the temperature of the rooms and record the results in red ink on a chart which was usually pinned to the cupboard door. As long as the thermometer did not drop below sixty degrees Fahrenheit it was considered to be quite warm enough. A large tortoise stove which burned coke heated the pipes which ran round the rooms. Teachers used to put a pan of water on top of the stove to disperse the coke fumes.

In spite of all the so-called improvements to the windows in the infants school, the big room always seemed gloomy. On very dull days the teacher would have to lower the big lamps from the ceiling, which then had to be lit with a match. It was necessary to get the wicks turned up just the right amount or they would smoke, making the glass black with soot. Both the teachers and the caretakers, who would have been responsible for filling up the lamps with paraffin and trimming the wicks, must have been very relieved when electricity, which had recently come to the village, was installed in 1936.

Physical exercises, or ‘drill’ as we called it, was done out in the playground or, in the case of the older girls, in the road outside the school, as there was not much traffic went up and down Mill Lane at that time. If there was snow on the ground or it was pouring with rain, we would perform our ‘knees bend arms stretch’ at the side of our desks with all the windows open – usually just as the room was getting warmed up. All the windows had to be opened using a long pole with a hook on the end, as they were high so that children could not see what was going on outside and be distracted from their work.

There was no such thing as P.E. kit, although we were supposed to wear plimsoles. We girls had to tuck our frocks in the legs of our knickers, which at that time had legs threaded with elastic. If this broke one leg of our drawers would hang below our skirt and make us the laughing stock of the rest of the class.

At playtime the sound of singing could be heard as we played the same rhyming games as our grandparents must have done; after all, they taught us the words. ‘The farmer’s in his den’, ‘Nuts and May’, ‘Ring of Roses’ and ‘The Good Ship Sails through the Illy Allu O’ are a few that I remember.

Some games changed with the seasons in some mysterious way that I never did get to know when or of any set date. For a while it would be whip and top time; we made our own whips from a length of string – the best sort came from the Co-op grocery parcels. A top cost a penny but were often kept from year to year. Sometimes we would put coloured paper or chalks on the top to make them look pretty when they spun. Then there would be a time for skipping ropes and then ball games. There were quite a few different games could be played by throwing a ball against a wall. In the girls’ school playground we used to throw quite large balls against the wall at the side of Moorey House, but they never complained, although it must have made quite a noise inside their house.

I started school at five years of age. We were each given our special peg for our coats; I do not know how many children could read their own names but probably could recognise their own coat. The new ones sat in small chairs behind small tables, in the small room known as the babies’ room, the second term ones on long desks behind us. I remember that first morning: one of the older children brought round shallow trays of sand for our first lessons; we learned to write the letters and figures that our teacher, Miss Dale, wrote on the blackboard in the sand with one finger, a new figure or letter each day. On Friday we were taught to do small sums and words from the 1,2,3,4 and the A,B,C,D that we had been taught. As each week went by , more and more numbers were added, so that we learnt to read at the same time; it was a very simple but effective way of teaching. When we could show teacher that we could do the lesson, after the blackboard was cleaned we were given another tray and a lump of plasticine; teacher worked with the ones that were a bit slower to learn. While teacher was concentrating on the new ones the next class would be using work cards and a tin of counters to help with the arithmetic, and while they were being taught we would be given the plasticine again or pastels and a drawing book with black pages separated by a sheet of tissue paper.

We were all expected to know the three Rs by the time we went into the big room the following year. After that first year, there were always end of term examinations, which were  all written out by the teachers on the term’s work, and a report, also hand written, though I believe the main part was done on an ancient copier by the boys at the boys school.

Even at that tender age we had the usual history and geography, tables, problems, addition, subtraction, multiplication and mental arithmetic, nature study, sewing, knitting and singing, accompanied by Miss Dale on the piano. The vicar came to give scripture lessons once a week and on other days we had bible stories and sang hymns.

Our teachers often read to us, especially the younger ones, to illustrate a history lesson or to tell us about places in other lands. Even the older ones enjoyed listening to stories, which would sometimes be a chapter from one of the classics. They had a way of making it all sound so real.

As we got older, lessons gradually became more difficult but had to be done properly; if not, it was not unusual to be asked to stay in at playtime and do the whole lesson again. Talking was not allowed in class time and along with any other misdemeanour could result in having to write out 50 or 100 words again at playtime. All words had to be of at least five letters and could not be copied straight from a page from the dictionary; two words the same would always be noticed. Most other schools seemed to get lines, but we got WORDS.

Year after year, if any new books came we would be asked to bring a sheet of brown paper, which was easy to obtain as all groceries from the Co-op were delivered in a brown paper parcel. We were then taught to cover the books to keep the original ones clean and sometimes to renew covers on the older books.

The first arithmetic books had squared pages and the writing books a wide space and a narrow one: this was to teach us to keep our figures and letters to a uniform size. History, geography and nature study books had a plain page between the lined one, which was used to draw maps or to illustrate a lesson. There was also what was known as rough books; these were for a first effort when we had to write a composition or essay. Any spelling mistakes or bad English would be marked with the dreaded red or blue pencil and, when corrections had been made, copied into our best writing books. Should any of these mistakes be repeated, which they often were, there would be more blue pencil and a not very complimentary remark and all to be written out ten times.

Sewing class was always a very important lesson, or hand work as I believe it was called in the infants school. For the first ones we had to fray the edges of a piece of material and later to stitch a border with coloured silks. Then there was wool work; with a blunt needle with a large eye we made borders and designs on canvas. When we had progressed to a larger rectangle, it could be folded into three and two thirds stitched together to make a bag with a flap. With two press studs added, we had a handbag, which in those days was called a pochette, which was proudly tucked under our arms when we went to Sunday School and which housed our secret treasures.

As we moved up in class, we began to make clothes, starting with a baby’s bib, which, like future garments, had to be faced with bias binding, which we had to make ourselves by cutting strips of a contrasting material on the cross. There was a special way of joining these strips so that it made a longer piece and did not pucker when it had been sewn with running stitches and then turned and hemmed on the wrong side; the ties also of the binding had to be over-stitched. Other garments were pinafores, a nightdress, several different types of frocks – the first very plain and graduating to gathered skirts, and finally, in the last year, our own choice of material and pattern. This was the only time we were allowed to use the sewing machine.

We were allowed to buy the things that we had made or, if we did not want them, they were sold at the end of term. As well as clothes we did embroidery cushion covers and table runners; this was a long narrow cloth placed across the centre of the table when it was not being used for a meal. Sometimes some of the gentry ladies, who still visited quite regularly, would ask for something like this to be made specially for them. Only the very best needlework scholars were chosen for this task.

Nobody at that time had thought of forming a P.T.A.; we had fetes and concerts to buy the equipment that we needed. When the West End tennis courts were built we raised money for tennis racquets; there was enough to buy cricket bats for the boys and some large rubber balls for the Infants. We had to find sixpence to play on the courts: I think that would have allowed two of us an hour. The headmistress gave up her evening to coach us. Our very best purchase must have been in 1936 when we raised enough money at a concert to buy a large electric wireless. All three schools could then enjoy a new form of teaching as we listened to the schools radio programmes. Our prize possession was carefully returned to its cardboard box and pushed from school to school by two of the older boys on a wheelbarrow.

Should one of us finish the set work before the end of term, the headmistress would often bring a pile of her own mending for us, which was also supposed to teach us to make do and mend. Instead of the usual darning one year I was given the task of letting a piece into the back of a waistcoat that belonged to her husband, who was also headmaster of the boys school. Shortly afterwards there was a school outing to London: we went by train and while on the platform I was reminded by some friends that the Headmaster was wearing the waistcoat and how I would be in big trouble if my stitching came undone. I did not enjoy my day as I was worried that his waistcoat would fall off, and was very relieved when he arrived back at the station all in one piece.

During the last two years at school we were taken to Deddington by coach to cookery classes, which were held in a rather dingy hall. There was a cold tap but no sink, except a portable one which was erected in the middle of the room, with a large bucket underneath to collect the waste water. Each week two girls would be responsible for emptying the bucket: should it overflow, the penalty would be having to get on our hands and knees and scrub the floor.

In the mornings we would plan a meal and go across to the grocers to buy the ingredients: we were able to buy the dinner at cost price to eat for our midday meal. In the afternoon we would make cakes, each pair would have to complete their allotted cleaning job – usually something had to be scrubbed – and write notes on the day’s work. We did learn quite a lot of practical, plain cooking methods.

There were only two teachers to each school after the Infants, which, after the first year, had the six to eight year olds in one room. The age group eight to eleven were in the small room at the girls’ school, with eleven to fourteen year olds in the big room. We left school at fourteen.

These were pre-war years and there was not much choice of employment. A few girls went to work in one of the shops or factories in Banbury, although there were not so many then. Most school leavers went into domestic service; it was not unusual for the job to be arranged by one of the parents or relatives without the boy or girl having much say in the matter. There was certainly not much advice from the schools on planning our future.

There was, however, a reasonable amount of health care. The health nurses still called to inspect heads at regular intervals. Oh, how we dreaded that we would be called out to go into the porch to have stuff put on our heads: I only remember that there were one or two that did. There were not many school rules, but we were not allowed to wear jewellery and long hair had to be tied back and not loose on shoulders. The dentist called and there were medical tests and eye tests: if there was a problem the health nurse would come and give an extra eye test. A test card was always pinned up in the school.

Everyone walked to school, very few people would have owned cars. Some children came from outlying farms or Milton but still seemed to get there on time. Being late was a serious offence. We always seemed to form groups and walk down together, the older ones looking after the younger ones. After the first day children went to school on their own; if your mother brought you to school you were called a titbab.

The number of pupils according to school photographs was always well over fifty to each school and thought by inspectors tom be overcrowded when they came. We all got very excited when we read in the Deddington Deanery Magazine that ‘A church senior school site had been approved and secured by our Managers on the Milton Road, and that they had instructed the architect to prepare detailed plans for the practical subject rooms and three classrooms to be the first stage. Until the Board of Education has told us just how much they require it is impossible to estimate the cost, but at Mr. Stilgoe’s suggestion it was agreed to set to work to raise money for the school.’

Adderbury and Bloxham held a big fete as they would have used the school as well as Adderbury and we bought blue stamps with ‘Adderbury School’ printed in white lettering, each one costing a penny. However, it was not to be; when a new school finally came it was for a new generation and on a different site.

When I left school in July, 1939, war clouds were gathering and by September we were at war. Pupils were no longer expected to go into domestic service: there were more opportunities as people were needed for war work and to fill vacancies in jobs when men and women had been drafted into the forces or to do war work.

Rhoda reverted to the school log books to tell the story of Adderbury’s schools in wartime. She brought her history of these schools to a close by showing how they changed once all senior pupils moved to secondary schools after 1950. She then concludes her history in the following words.

A tribute should be paid to all those hard-working people who through those years cleared ashes, carried coal and cleaned the schools. The canteen ladies who managed to prepare all those meals on wartime rations and the Institute caretaker who kept the Institute boiler fire going by begging old shoes and rubbish to help out the coke ration. The Adderbury schools could not have survived without them

We were always told that our school days were the best years of our lives. It is only years later that I have come to realise how well we were taught. The discipline was hard to take at times, but must have stood us in good stead when a few years later we were called up or had to take any type of war work we were told to do – something which brought an new independence we had not known before.

Rhoda Woodward

Introduction

Over the 230 years since it first opened to Oxford in 1790, the relationship between the Southern Oxford Canal and the village of Adderbury has never been either close or straightforward (see the paper. “Adderbury and the Oxford Canal over 200 years” elsewhere on this website). But the canal, which traverses the parish from north to south, is in 2020 still in rude health as a waterway and retains the great majority of its historical artefacts, all of which now have Grade II listed status. This stretch of canal is also among the busiest on the whole of today’s canal network, with 3956 lock movements recorded at Nell Bridge Lock in 2018, for example.

This situation has not come about by chance. This paper looks at the broader historical factors well beyond the village that have led to the canal’s survival. Not surprisingly, the key issues turn out to have changed over time.

The Oxford Canal in the 18^th Century

The initial problems of the Southern Oxford Canal are well known, with construction delayed at Banbury for twelve years because the company ran out of money. But this should not blind us to the fact that the enterprise was extremely well-founded, and it was this which, more than any other factor, contributed to the company’s success in the following century.

There’s no doubt that Sir Roger Newdigate was the one man who gave the canal its original character and caused the Oxford Canal to get off the ground so early in the day. His energy was prodigious, and once he had lobbied and encouraged all the necessary groups to come together to seek a parliamentary act, he was no less assiduous in guiding the act through its various stages. He was then for many years Chairman of the Oxford Canal Company. Newdigate’s motivation was threefold. First, perhaps as a result of seeing large-scale canal schemes on his two grand tours in Europe, he undoubtedly believed in James Brindley’s original vision: the construction of a “silver cross” of canals to link the main river systems of England. Secondly, he wished to bring economic benefits to Oxford, where he was a long-serving MP for the university. But perhaps most significant was his wish to open the collieries on his Arbury estate and find markets for their output on the model of the Duke of Bridgewater’s phenomenally successful canal into Manchester.

So the main features of what we can call the business plan of the Southern Oxford were in place from the outset: it had national rather than purely local strategic importance, and it “had coal behind it” and was intended to convey this commodity to London via Oxford and any number of canalside markets large and small, all of which were ready to purchase large amounts of coal for domestic and business purposes.

The Nineteenth Century: Competition with the Railways and other canal routes

In addition to the factors mentioned above, the Oxford Canal had two further advantages to enable it to combat competition from the railways and from other canals during the nineteenth century. First, it was to the canal’s long-term advantage that it was built early, before the large cost increases associated with the era of the Napoleonic Wars. Second, the company was conceived as providing only the infrastructure over which others could travel, trade and do business, with its income hence deriving from tolls alone. These two factors together meant that the company was able to earn substantial revenues from the outset and had paid the debts associated with its construction by the middle of the century. It was then able to take action in the face of dissatisfaction on the part of canal carriers and the threat of a rival, more direct route to London, to shorten and straighten the part of the canal between Hawkesbury and Braunston. Work started in 1829 and the new line was opened on 13th February 1834 at a cost of £167,172. The route was shortened by almost eleven miles.

Reliance on tolls is sometimes said to encourage a largely passive management style, but in the case of the Oxford Canal it was something which repeatedly proved its effectiveness in negotiations with other canals (where passage over the Southern Oxford’s waterway could be allowed providing there was ongoing recompense for lost tolls) and in providing an easy way of coping with competition (whereby tolls could be lowered, for example, quickly and with the minimum of administrative complexity).

A measure of its success was the fact that, after a century of competition from railways and from the alternative canal route to London provided by the Grand Union, the volume of traffic passing over the Oxford canal as a whole remained much what it had been a hundred years before. What had dropped as a result of competition were the toll receipts and the fact that the more profitable long haulage business had been lost to competitors.

The Twentieth Century Survival: War, Decline and State Intervention

The threats to the canal’s continued survival in the 20^th century were greater in number and variety and even more severe in their effects than had been experienced hitherto.  Two world wars robbed the canals of the manpower they relied upon, competition from the fledgling road haulage industry robbed canals of short haul traffic, falling demand for coal led to much reduced activity, while a huge backlog of maintenance issues built up, well beyond the ability of an individual company to manage. Together these problems meant that only government intervention could solve the canal’s problems.

The first round of government intervention came when it was clear that conscription in the First World War had robbed the Southern Oxford Canal together with the other canals of the men needed to keep the canal trade going. As a result, a scheme was agreed which compensated the canal companies for the business they had lost.

The second government intervention was much more far-reaching in its effect and came with the nationalisation of transport by the incoming Labour Administration after the Second World War, in 1948. It has sometimes been claimed that the government of the time was initially unaware that it had nationalised the canal system: many of the canal companies had come to be the property of railway companies, the real focus of the nationalisation movement, with the canals entering the process by default. Whatever the truth of this, it appears that the government had no plan for the nation’s waterways at the time of nationalisation. In the event, it took twenty years until the Transport Act of 1968 for a clear picture to emerge. In this Act, Minister of Transport, Barbara Castle, proposed a tripartite division of the waterways into commercial waterways, that were believed to have a viable future, leisure waterways, which would receive government funding for their maintenance, and remainder waterways, for which there would be no public support.

The recognition of the leisure uses of canals owed a lot to the work of Tom Rolt, whose popular 1944 book, Narrow Boat with its descriptions of the unchanged way of life on canals, proved attractive to many with increasing amounts of leisure time, and to the activities of the campaigning group, the Inland Waterways Association, but also, it appears, to the views of Castle herself. She wrote in her 1993 autobiography, Fighting all the Way, that:

“A source of satisfaction was what I was able to do for the canals. I had always been fascinated by inland water­ways. I had been on a couple of canal holidays with Jimmie and had been struck by how quickly one could escape from drab industrial surroundings as one slipped between the hedges lining the towpath in a flat-bottomed boat. I believed that messing about in boats was a leisure activity which should be increasingly available to everyone.”

There remained a problem for the Southern Oxford Canal. The canal was by this time in bad shape physically and the question was whether it would make it into the category of leisure waterway, or would it be consigned to be a remainder waterway with no financial support and no protection by legislation? In the event, it seems that an amount of subterfuge was required. The story has been told a number of times. Here is one version (Robinson, 2008):

“The death of the veteran canal boatman Jack Skinner, at the age of 88, severs a link going back more than 200 years in the tradition of the coal and freight-carrying trade on Britain’s canals … in 1967, he helped to save the Oxford canal from closure …. Treasury officials had recommended filling in the waterway, arguing that it was no longer commercially viable. Jack was asked to take Barbara Castle, then minister of transport, on a fact-finding trip from Thrupp to Lower Heyford. He took the precaution of going out the night before and getting the cooperation of the lock keepers en route to make sure there would be enough water in the pounds to give the impression that there was more water in the near-derelict canal than there actually was. “She never knew the difference – and it done the trick,” he recalled. Castle decided to save the canal, ultimately securing enough subsidy to keep open 1,400 miles of commercially non-viable canals for pleasure cruising. Everyone who now enjoys fishing in the Oxford canal, or cruising on it, or walking along the towpath should remember with gratitude the trick that Jack played.”

Twenty-first Century Survival: The canal as “heritage asset”

The survival of the canal forward from the late twentieth and into the early twenty-first century looks rather more certain than at any previous time its 230-year life. The reason for this is that the canal, and indeed canals in general, have come to be seen as part of the national heritage, with, as we have seen, local canal assets enjoying Grade II listed building status.

It is difficult to provide a chronological history of the growth in importance of “heritage”. Even the word itself is difficult to define. But it is undeniable that public interest in the past is at an all-time high, as witness the unprecedented membership levels for the National Trust and English Heritage, together with the coverage of historical and heritage topics in television programmes and popular magazines. The beneficial role that canals can have in urban regeneration projects has been shown, particularly in Brindley Place and Gas Street Basin in Birmingham and in Gloucester Docks, and the National Waterways Museums at Ellesmere Port, Gloucester and Stoke Bruerne have provided a focus for historical interest.

But the event that had perhaps the greatest influence was remote from canals. During the August Bank Holiday in 1980, developers demolished the Firestone Tyre Factory on the Great West Road in London. It was widely believed that the demolition was carried out in anticipation of the building becoming listed in the near future. There was a public outcry, and, as a result, the relevant government minister, Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Heseltine, took a series of measures which had the effect of shaking up the old-fashioned and slow-moving protection system described by Thurley (2013). He speeded up the listing process, enlarging its scope to include nineteenth and twentieth century buildings, and in 1984 created a new quango, English Heritage, to become the government’s principal statutory adviser as well as take on responsibility for the sites previously managed by the Ministry of Works. Ten years later, the creation of the National Lottery Heritage Fund in 1994 provided another confirmation of the importance that heritage had assumed.

Certainly, the latest body to have responsibility for the canals, the Canal and River Trust created in 2012, appears to have little doubt that heritage Is a key part of its role, as the following extract from the Trust’s 2018 Annual Report shows:

“The canals and river navigations cared for by the Trust were created for industry and serve very different purposes today. They are free to access and use. They contribute to the physical and mental wellbeing of communities, visitors and volunteers; adding to the quality of life of those who participate and engage with them. They run through towns and cities and across rural areas and permit a range of leisure activities and enjoyment of nature and heritage in a way that few other attractions do. The Trust’s historic waterways deserve to be cherished and passed on to future generations, so that they too may benefit from and enjoy them. The Canal & River Trust is the custodian of a rich and diverse waterways heritage in England and Wales, much of it over 200 years old. Many of the Trust’s heritage assets are designated as scheduled monuments, listed buildings and conservation areas.”

Phil Mansell
2020

References:

Castle, B (1993): Fighting all the Way. Macmillan.
Compton, H.J. (1976): The Oxford Canal. David & Charles.
Cowell, B. (2008): The Heritage Obsession. Tempus.
Robinson, C. (2008): Obituary of Jack Skinner. Guardian, 16^th June.
Rolt, L.T.C. (1944): Narrow Boat. Eyre & Spottiswood.
Thurley, S. (2013): Men from the Ministry. How Britain Saved Its Heritage. Yale University

Introduction

The first half of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented expansion in the efforts of central government to gather information about aspects of national life that had previously been held to be matters for purely local concern. For example, listing only enquiries which gave specific results for Adderbury, Arthur Young had reported on the state of agriculture in 1809, there was an enquiry into charities in 1826 and there would be the report of a commission into Friendly and Benefit Societies in 1874.

What the government wanted to know in 1851, however, was more far-reaching than any of these other enquiries. First, there was the “ordinary” ten-year census, the sixth of its type. This time round, however, the census not only recorded the names and numbers of all household residents in the United Kingdom on the night of 30^th March; but it also wanted more precise details about their place of birth, age and occupation, as well as new information about their marital status, their relations to the head of the household and any disability they might have. Then there was an educational census which aimed to ascertain how many boys and girls were being taught in classes on a specified day and the type and size of the schools they were attending. The third census, a census of attendance at religious services, was the most contentious.

There were two major areas of enquiry in the religious census. First, the government wanted an exact measure of the number of sittings in places of worship compared with the number of the local population; with the country going through substantial change, especially with the creation of new, urban areas, finding out about the availability of places to worship seemed a reasonable enquiry at the time. Second, however, the government wanted to know exactly how many people actually sat on the available seats on 30^th March 1851. It was the answer to this second question that was most eagerly anticipated in the country as a whole. On the one hand, the Anglican church feared that the results of the religious census would threaten the status of their church as the Established Church. On the other hand, members of dissenting congregations looked forward to having their increasing status and legitimacy confirmed by the survey results.

The Results of the Religious Census: National Trends

Although the figures and tables published in 1854 proved difficult to interpret, at the highest level of generalisation a fairly clear picture emerged. Cannadine (2017) puts it as follows:

“… it was generally agreed that in the case of England and Wales only half of the population who could have gone to church on that particular Sunday in fact did so; that half of those attending (which meant one quarter of the whole population) were Anglicans who worshipped at the established Church of England; but that the other half (and thus another quarter of the whole population) attended dissenting chapels or (in much smaller numbers) Catholic churches instead.” (pp.253-4)

The Census Locally

At the time of the census, the parish of Adderbury consisted of the ‘townships’ of Adderbury East and Adderbury West, the chapelries of Barford St John and Bodicote and the hamlet of Milton. Taken as a whole, the parish contained Anglican places of worship in Adderbury, Bodicote and Barford St John and dissenting congregations in Adderbury West (Quakers and Independents), Adderbury East (Wesleyan Methodists), Bodicote (Baptist and Wesleyan Methodist Chapels) and Milton (Primitive Methodists). All of the dissenting congregations had reached the stage of maturity where they had a permanent building for their exclusive use. The wider Adderbury Parish of the time hence clearly shared with others in “Banburyshire” an openness to dissent which revealed itself in the percentage of “dissenter sittings” in the Banbury registration district for the census, which, at 44.29%, was far higher than the 31.34% returned for the county as a whole.

Results for Adderbury and Milton

The census results for Adderbury and Milton, as summarised by Tiller (1987) are as follows. It should be noted that the census asked how many seats in places of worship were free and how many were paid for by subscription (a large source of income for many congregations).

ADDERBURY EAST, Population 978

St. Mary the Virgin: Average attendance 240 (This is, according to Tiller, an “unsigned and extremely scant Anglican return”. The vicar at the time, Rev Charles Alcock, was apparently an extremely assiduous and hard-working parish clergyman (Allen, 1995, pp. 23-24); it has to be assumed that, in failing to give a satisfactory return, Alcock was following the lead of his Bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, who told the House of Lords shortly before the census was issued that “if consulted by the clergy of his diocese as to the course they ought to pursue, he should be inclined to advise them not to answer the queries”. In the event 27.1% of the Anglican returns in the Oxford diocese show clerical failure to answer compulsory questions or carry statements of clerical refusal compared with just 10% nationally)

Wesleyan Methodist Chapel: Erected 1829. A separate and entire building, used exclusively for worship. Free sittings 112; other sittings 60. On 30 March In morning General Congregation 51, Sunday Scholars 20; in afternoon, Sunday Scholars 19; in evening General Congregation 120. Average attendance during previous 12 months In morning General Congregation 60, Sunday Scholars 20; in afternoon Sunday Scholars 20; in evening General Congregation 100. Signed James Claridge, Local Preacher, Blenheim Place, Banbury

ADDERBURY WEST, Population 370

Independent Chapel: Erected 1829. A separate and entire building used exclusively for worship. Free sittings 112; other sittings 60. On 30^th March In morning General Congregation 51, Sunday Scholars 20; in afternoon Sunday Scholars 19; in evening General Congregation 120. Average attendance during previous 12 months: in morning General Congregation 60, Sunday Scholars 20; in afternoon Sunday Scholars 20; in evening General Congregation  100. [Remarks on the National School omitted] Signed James Crockett, Minister, Adderbury West.

Friends’ Meeting House: Erected 1675. A separate and entire building used exclusively for worship. Admeasurement in superficial feet, floor area 561; in galleries 402. Estimated Number of persons capable of being seated 102 and in galleries 60. On 30^th March In morning 16 attendants; no meeting held this afternoon…. A meeting is held at 3 o’clock p.m. during the six winter months, and one at 5 o’clock p.m. during the six summer months, but both are omitted one week in four. The average attendance at these for the last 12 months is 12 persons. Signed Henry Beesley, Adderbury West.

MILTON, Population 164

Primitive Methodist Chapel: Erected before 1800. A separate and entire building used exclusively for worship. Free sittings 200. On 30^th March In afternoon General Congregation 35, Sunday Scholars 25; in evening, General Congregation 27. Average attendance in morning General Congregation 35, Sunday Scholars 28. Signed Thomas Tarver, Steward, Bodicote.

Commentary on Results

It is obvious that the sketchy nature of the Anglican return for Adderbury makes futile any attempt to replicate the national results locally. But it is clear, however, that in Adderbury as in the nation as a whole, fewer than half of the inhabitants attended any form of religious service on the census Sunday. Tiller (1987, p. xxx) suggests that for many there was nevertheless a “strong moral code”, a sort of “popular religion”, which was “a loose combination of unofficial Christianity and large elements of superstition and custom, selectively validated by institutional religion”.  In support of this view, Tiller quotes from Flora Thompson’s description of Cottisford:

“Many in the hamlet who attended neither church nor chapel and said they had no use for religion, guided their lives by the light of a few homely precepts, such as ‘Pay your way and fear nobody’; ‘Right’s right and wrong’s no man’s right’; ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil’ and ‘Honesty is the best policy’”

We can also see in the census returns a clear contrast between the different dissenting congregations. At the time of the census, the Independents were the most numerous, while the Quakers were in decline. The Wesleyan Methodists in East Adderbury were well established, in their first small chapel in Chapel Lane, but had not yet made the strides which allowed them by the end of the century to build a much larger church on the High Street itself.

On from 1851

On the Anglican side, it is sometimes said that the growth of dissent and the relative weakness of the numbers attending Anglican worship could be attributed to a failure in the first half of the nineteenth century to meet the needs for regular services and pastoral support for all parts of the parish. After 1851 the main developments seem to have been intended to address such issues. In Bodicote, after restoration of the parish church in 1854, Bodicote was made into a separate parish in 1855. A new church was built in Milton in 1856-7 and consecrated in 1857. Change at Barford St John, however, had to wait until 1890, when it was annexed to Barford St Michael.

On the dissenting side, there were a number of national developments, which have been summarised as follows:

“The nineteenth century witnessed a very gradual easing of the legislation which had continued to restrict nonconformists. Laws which excluded all but practising Anglicans from government and municipal posts were repealed in 1828-9, and in 1871 it became illegal to debar Nonconformists from teaching or studying in English universities. Unitarians gained freedom of worship in 1813 and the Dissenters’ Chapels Act (of 1844) effectively secured for them those chapels in which they had worshipped for the past twenty-five years. After 1836 Nonconformists had the right to conduct marriage ceremonies and in 1880 they were granted the right to conduct burial services in parish churchyards.”  Wakeling (2016), p.4.

The Independent Chapel in West Adderbury continued in existence. It was registered as a place of worship for marriage 1854-60. The adjoining manse was pulled down in 1870, perhaps because the chapel had by that time had two honorary pastors, retired men with homes elsewhere; the manse was replaced with a school. The chapel closed in 1955 and was sold in 1957.

Despite continuing problems over the financing of their 1810 chapel, the Wesleyan Methodists of East Adderbury founded a much larger church at the junction of Chapel Lane and the High Street accommodating 130 and featuring an attached School Room. Ashbridge (2004) suggests that the members wished to “build a new chapel in the centre of the village and remain no longer in the background” (p.16). This was opened in 1893 and thanks to generous donations was able to begin its life unencumbered with debt (Allen, 1995, p.19). The Methodist Church continues to flourish.

Despite the relatively large number recorded at the Milton Methodist Chapel, it would appear that this nonconformist congregation was absorbed into the corresponding chapel at Bloxham, with whom it shared a pastor. The chapel building was used by the Church of England until their new church was built.

The single exception to the generally optimistic picture for dissenting congregations is that of the Quakers, where the number of worshippers at the Adderbury Meeting House had fallen to an average of 12 at the time of the census. This mirrored a national decline: while the population of England trebled between 1715 and 1851, the number of Quaker adherents had more than halved. The Quakers came to acknowledge that the rules which effectively prevented Friends from marrying outside the Quaker community were a major cause of the decline. An 1859 report, quoted in Thompson, 1972, pp 163-65, says that “Within … the present century, the Society of Friends in England has disowned nearly one third of all its members who have married, a total of not less than four thousand persons”. It was also believed that a general movement away from the land had affected the Quakers disproportionately. An 1806 report said “Almost all the Quakers were originally in the country … but this order of things is reversing fast. They are flocking into the towns and abandoning agricultural pursuits.” At Adderbury the decline in numbers continued: they were down to 4 by 1909 and the Meeting House closed in 1914.

Phil Mansell
2020

References:

Ashbridge, P. (2004): Village Chapels. Some aspects of rural methodism in the East Cotswolds and South Midlands 1800-2000. Kershaw Publishing.
Allen, N. (1995): Adderbury. A Thousand Years of History. Phillimore.
Cannadine, D. (2017): Victorious Century. The United Kingdom, 1800-1906. Allen Lane.
Stell, C. (1986): Nonconformist Chapels and Meeting Houses. Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. HMSO.
Thompson, D,M, (1972): Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Tiller, K. (1987): Church and Chapel in Oxfordshire 1851. The Oxfordshire Record Society, Volume 55.
Wakeling, C. (2016): Nonconformist Places of Worship. Historic England.

For a short period in the 1970s Adderbury played a role in international affairs. Government drivers delivered ministerial red boxes requiring decisions on topics such as the terms of an International Monetary Fund loan to the UK, yet another attempt to find a solution to the Rhodesia problem, the Cod War and the UK presidency of what was then known as the EEC.

All this because Anthony Crosland and his wife Susan had bought the mill on Mill Lane in Adderbury as their “country cottage”. And for part of their time together in Adderbury, Crosland, a senior Labour politician, was Foreign Secretary.

The Croslands had had the idea of a “country retreat” in mind for some years. What attracted them  to Adderbury in the first place is unknown; although North Oxfordshire as an area to search may have suggested itself because of the presence at Prescote Manor near Cropredy of Labour backbench stalwart Richard Crossman. Certainly the Croslands stayed with the Crossmans when they first came to see the Mill. Susan Crosland said they just followed up an estate agent’s advertisement. At all events, it seems to have been love at first sight: according to Susan Crosland in her 1982 biography of her husband, Crosland said later the first evening: “As soon as I saw it, my heart turned over”. The Croslands failed to secure the mill on this occasion, but were successful when it came onto the market again two years later, in 1975.

What the Croslands were looking for was somewhere they could be alone together as much as possible in their busy lives. He was in demand as the author of The Future of Socialism (1956), which has been described as “the most important theoretical treatise to be written from the moderate left of British politics in the first twenty-five post-war years” (Roy Jenkins), as a government minister and as a constituency MP (for Grimsby) and during times when attendance at House of Commons votes was an additional necessity. She was equally busy as a successful journalist who came to specialise in celebrity interviews for the national press, writing under the pen name “Susan Barnes”. Her profiles included ones of Barbara Cartland, Margot Fonteyn, Kenneth Tynan, Kingsley Amis and Jack Jones. Anthony Crosland and Susan Catling (as she then was) had met in 1956 and married in 1964. It was a second marriage for both, and Susan had two daughters from her previous marriage.

Adderbury came to symbolise their marriage to quite a surprising extent. This is clear from the following passage describing one visit to Adderbury in 1976 taken from Susan Crosland’s biography of her husband:

“From the sitting-room we could see the brook, brown and swollen, rushing self-importantly past the bottom of the garden, spilling over into the garden. ‘Think I like Adderbury best of all in winter,’ [Tony] said. ‘Gives an even greater sense of being alone together.’”

In the short period they had owned it, their house in Adderbury had seen both disaster and subsequent triumph in Anthony Crosland’s political life. When they bought the mill, in 1975, Anthony Crosland was Secretary of State for the Environment, but in 1976 came the Labour Party leadership election which followed Harold Wilson’s resignation. Although his friends and supporters advised him against it, Crosland decided to put himself forward as a candidate, suggesting that he would “draw support from the common ground which unites Left and Right”, although with little hope of success. Interestingly, he said that he felt “I could get through the public humiliation because I have a happy marriage and we have just bought a country cottage”.

In the event, Crosland came bottom of the poll and was eliminated on the first round. Yet within weeks he was appointed Foreign Secretary by the incoming Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, and the press was suggesting that this was just a prelude to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer which had always attracted him and which, in turn, could lead to even higher things.

Susan Crosland came into her own as she accompanied her husband abroad (paying her own way in economy with Crosland popping through bearing glasses of champagne). One of the few concessions she made to being a minister’s wife was that she stopped dyeing her hair pink. The highlight for her of Crosland’s nine months as Foreign Secretary was the Queen’s Bicentennial visit to the United States. The Croslands went over on the Royal yacht Britannia, with the Queen showing her how to stand for hours without tiring. At the embassy dinner in Washington for President Ford, she fell and broke her jaw – which was set by presidential surgeons.

During Crosland’s time as Foreign Secretary, it wasn’t just red boxes that came to Adderbury. Dignitaries visited as well, none more exalted than Dr Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State. After initial awkwardness, Crosland and Kissinger came to have quite a close relationship. Two stories are told in the village about Dr Kissinger. The first concerns food: Kissinger was apparently very fond of onion soup made from especially sweet onions grown in the Croslands’ Adderbury garden, as well as of dishes made from their rhubarb (known thereafter as “Kissinger’s Rhubarb”). The other story concerns the Adderbury Scout troop, who on one occasion had their night exercises rudely interrupted by the armed security men who were guarding Kissinger.

The Crosland’s life together in their Adderbury weekend retreat was not to last for long. On Saturday, 12^th February 1977, the day after their thirteenth wedding anniversary, Anthony Crosland suffered a major stroke. Susan Crosland’s account of events is as follows:

“When [Tony] returned from his morning walk it was long past noon. I was in the courtyard when he came striding down the lane, swinging his arms …. “Adderbury is an absolutely ravishing village. This is an ‘ultimate’ weekend,” he said.

Twenty minutes later we were having a belated mid-morning coffee, he working on Rhodesia papers. He had to refill his pen from the bottle in my desk, always grumbled about this task. “Are you sure pens used to run out this soon?” he said, returning to his chair. I was at the table in the window and had just started a letter to Sheila. “Something has happened,” he said.

Because he often mimed to entertain me, spoke in a solemn voice about things trivial, as I turned in my chair I imagined ink from the newly-filled pen had leaked onto something quite unimportant. [His secretary] said later how strange it was to see on the Rhodesia papers where the pen had stopped in mid-letter. “I can’t feel my right side,’ Tony said.””

Five days later Anthony Crosland died in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. His ashes were later scattered by Susan Crosland in the sea off Grimsby, where Crosland had been the popular and successful MP. As David Owen, then a Junior Minister at the Foreign Office, said at the time: “His lifestyle, the long hours, good food, little exercise, alcohol and cigars could not have helped.”

Susan Crosland continued to visit Adderbury at weekends for just over twenty years after her husband’s death, receiving help from villagers with the garden and with the management of the sluice gate at the Old Mill. In 1982 she published her biography of Crosland, with the Preface written from Adderbury. This has been described as the outstanding inside portrait of what it was to be a leading politician in the second half of the twentieth century and of what it was to be his devoted supporter, wife, and lover. Thereafter, according to a friend, “though Susan Crosland lived for thirty-four years after Tony died, her grief never left her. Consequently her career did not hit its former heights”. Neither collections of her celebrity interviews, nor a series of what were known at the time as “airport novels” were particularly successful. She also suffered from ill health. She sold the mill in 1998, and on 26 February 2011 she died of pneumonia at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital after a short illness. She was survived by her first husband and the two daughters from her first marriage.

Jack Donaldson, (later to become Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge), who was Minister of Arts in the Wilson and Callaghan governments, and hence a cabinet colleague of Anthony Crosland,, said the following about the marriage of Anthony and Susan Crosland at the Service of Thanksgiving for Anthony Crosland, held at Westminster Abbey on 7th March 1977:

“… the thing which perhaps no one understood or allowed for was his capacity to love. Those of us who knew him well were not surprised when he found someone with whom he could settle down and mature … No, what surprised us was the ease and simplicity with which he slipped into the roles of husband, of step-father, and of head of the family. If he had not met Susan Barnes all this might never have been revealed and he might never have fulfilled his potential. But it was a marriage of two equals and he gave to it as much as he received.”

Phil Mansell
2020

Sources:

Crosland, S. (1982): Tony Crosland. Coronet Books.
Jeffreys, K. (1999): Anthony Crosland, A New Biography. Richard Cohen Books

I am grateful to the following for providing additional material: Robert Cooke, Nicola Wilson and Tim Woodall.

Note: I haven’t been able to find any images of the Croslands or their life in Adderbury that are not subject to copyright. However, you may want to follow up one particular image, which shows them seated on a bench at the Old Mill. The address of the image is: https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/british-labour-politician-anthony-crosland-secretary-of-state-for-the-picture-id940078672?s=612×612. If you copy this address into your browser you should be able to inspect the image.

Although there had previously been alternatives to agricultural work in Adderbury, notably with plush weaving, which involved some 34 inhabitants in 1841 (see Taylor, 1964), the first activity that could be properly called “industrial” in the village came with the quarrying of ironstone in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This took place along the present-day Aynho and Oxford Roads to the east and south of the village centre respectively.

In contrast to the earlier Aynho Road quarries, those along the Oxford Road had relatively easy access to transport, and the infrastructure developed in the early days for the ironstone workings encouraged a succession of activities with new uses taking over from old over a long period of time. And, although they were not the earliest ironstone quarries in Adderbury, the pits around the Oxford Road would have made the greatest impact on the countryside, transforming it into an industrial landscape, with tramways, tunnels and steam locomotives to be seen on all sides from the main road entering Adderbury from the south.

Banbury and Cheltenham Direct Railway

The major objective of the railway was to enable the North Oxfordshire ironstone quarries to communicate directly with the South Wales iron foundries, but it took many years from the start of work in 1875 for this to be possible. Adderbury station opened on the same day as the railway as a whole: April 6^th, 1887. What remains of the station is best viewed from the entrance to the present Station Yard Industrial Estate. The main line followed the line of the present units; it was dualled to this point but resumed single track operation as it continued west beneath the Oxford Road.

The station at Adderbury was very similar in layout to the stations at King’s Sutton and Bloxham. It had two facing platforms, with the main station buildings on the north side, with only a shelter on the other side. The two platforms were connected by a “barrow crossing”. From the industrial point of view, however, the most important feature at Adderbury were the private sidings to the south of the main line. These were used in turn by every significant industrial concern in this part of Adderbury, beginning with the ironstone quarries and only ending with J. Bibby Agriculture, who continued to use them until 1969.

The BCDR company did not operate services on the line: it contracted the Great Western Railway to do so in return for a share of the receipts and, indeed, the GWR bought the railway in 1896. Ironstone traffic, local haulage (including coal for the gasworks) and passenger traffic, remained the bread and butter business of the line, although it was also unofficially known as the “ports to ports” line, served by an express which, in an eleven hour daily journey, linked the North East to the South Wales coast and provided the basis for many day excursions to Barry Island from Adderbury, particularly those funded by the village Friendly Societies.

Adderbury Ironstone Quarries

The Geological Survey for Oxfordshire was started in 1857, the resultant maps being published in 1860. These highlighted the fact that just below the surface of the fields in north Oxfordshire there lay vast quantities of ironstone – in some places this could be as much as 30,000 tons per acre. It is possible to extract the iron from ironstone, and mining companies were not slow to seek to exploit this. The Hook Norton Ironstone Partnership obtained leases to work ironstone on the south side of Adderbury Station in the late 1880s. “At Bloxham and Hook Norton there is a very rich bed of iron ore, which has been purchased by the Oxfordshire Ironstone Company, and a very large income is expected to be derived from this source over the Banbury and Cheltenham Railway”, reported the Banbury Guardian on 1st September, 1884.

The area occupied by the present Twyford Mill industrial estate provided the hub of the transport links between the quarry sites to the south and west and the railways sidings to the north.

Operations began in 1890 and the Partnership purchased a one foot eight inch gauge 0-4-0 Manning Wardle locomotive, Florence, from the Florence Colliery in Staffordshire. A tramway was built on which Florence could be used.  This ran south from a tipping dock in Adderbury Station goods yard, initially on a gradient of 1 in 17, then passed under the bridleway to Paper Mill Cottages to reach the working face next to the Oxford Road.  Company offices and locomotive shed were located at the top of the initial incline. Problems were experienced with locomotive operation and the incline was changed to cable haulage powered by a stationary steam engine. The subsequent, flatter route southwards to the quarries was horse-worked. Florence was eventually transferred to the Partnership’s quarries at Hook Norton. A further face was later opened closer to Adderbury Grounds Farm.

The Adderbury properties of the Hook Norton Ironstone Partnership, which went into liquidation in 1903, were taken over by Cochrane & Co (Woodside) Ltd. in about 1906 and were worked by them until 1922. They opened two further pits, both on the west side of the Oxford Road, Berryhill Pit, which was opened in the early 1900s and New College Pit, further to the south west. These had an even more complex route to the all-important sidings at Adderbury Station. The Berry Hill pit accessed the railway via a funicular under the Oxford Road itself, and the New College pit joined this via a tunnel. The full extent of the workings is shown in the map below, taken from Tonks (1988) (p.46).

The work was hard and the pay relatively low. An idea of the rates is taken from the nearby Astrop quarries, where four old pennies per ton for wet ore and threepence halfpenny for dry ore was paid, with twenty tons per day being the average output per man. Three pence per yard was paid for removing the earth and an extra farthing for tipping waggons. Nonetheless, mining work was popular in early twentieth-century Adderbury. There were 34 Ironstone workers listed in the 1901 census, and Cochrane & Co had 78 men at the beginning of the First World War. This was when the quarries were at their busiest, and when the shortage of iron became acute after 1916, men working in the ironstone quarries were eventually granted exemption from war service.

“By August [1917] some of the Adderbury ironstone workers had been sent home from the trenches to resume work in the ironstone quarries. Clearly there was a great need for iron and steel and as the war continued ironstone workers became exempt from call-up. The shortage of such workers in the area meant that men from other areas came to the village as lodgers. A number came from Cornwall (possibly tin miners) to work on the local ironstone.” (Davis 2014, p. 77).

Cochrane’s plants at Woodside and Adderbury were put up for sale in 1924, but hopes that the quarries might be re-opened under new ownership were dashed by the 1926 General Strike. Little remains to be seen of the mining activities of a hundred years ago except that the surface of the fields to the west of the Oxford Road in this area are much lower than we would expect from the level of the hedges and surrounding roads and tracks, indicating that the fields have been backfilled after extraction of quantities of ironstone.

In the late 1950s a proposal was made to carry out open-cast mining to a depth of about 30 feet in this part of Adderbury, south to Deddington and west to Hook Norton. After the ore had been removed the top-soil would have been replaced and the land ‘re-instated’, but with the fields lowered and hedges standing proud on sharp embankments. The open-cast mining was due to last for 30 years or so. Two public enquiries eventually led to the rejection of the proposal. The full story can be read at deddingtonhistory.uk/photos,filmsandillustrations/ironstone.

The Duffield Iron Corporation Ltd

The next enterprise to exploit the area was, appropriately enough, the Duffield Iron Corporation Ltd. This enterprise was founded in 1928 with the intention of demonstrating the practicality and commercial viability of a new process for deriving iron from iron ore, invented by F. Lindley Duffield, which claimed to be considerably cheaper than conventional methods. One of the early aims of the company was the erection of a plant to demonstrate and refine the process.  The Board stated that “soft, friable rich ore, easily ‘got’, with which Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire abound, is ideally suited for our purposes”, and the choice eventually fell on Adderbury for their factory, and this was subsequently set up in the south east of the present site.

The Corporation used a tractor to bring ore from the quarries to the west of the Oxford Road, using the existing funicular railway track. A furnace was erected and by Friday, 25^th July 1930, the Corporation was reporting that “the retort furnace was lighted for the first trial on Monday morning last and continued until Tuesday evening. Our engineers are entirely satisfied with the heat conditions.”

Reports throughout the 1930s refer to the expansion of the site and to negotiations to sell rights to the process to concerns abroad, particularly in Ireland, Italy, Australia and New Zealand. A report in December 1938 spoke of the intention to start smelting 150,000 tons of ore a year “early in the New Year”, although Tonks (1988, p.45) says only that “the plant continued to operate in a small way up to the outbreak of war”. In 1939 a delegation visited on behalf of the Iron and Steel Controller as a result of a request by the Duffield Corporation to the Ministry of Supply to recognise their work as part of the war effort. Unfortunately for the company, the report was not in their favour and the site was instead requisitioned by the Ministry, and much of the factory was dismantled.

By the time the Corporation could report again in 1945, Mr Duffield said that it had taken “17 years to show, by a series of adaptations of plant design and method, the metallurgical practicability of direct reduction of iron ore”. The other directors, however, emphasize that “it has yet to be tested on a sufficiently large scale to ascertain its value commercially” and say that research into the process had ceased. F. Lindley Duffield died in Sydney, Australia, on July 22^nd, 1949.

A group of Duffield Iron Works employees

Ministry of Aircraft/Northern Aluminium

The Duffield site was hence taken over in 1939 by the Ministry of Aircraft. The war work at Adderbury was carried out as a subfactory of the Northern Aluminium (later Alcan/Alcoa) plant at Southam Road in Banbury. Northern Aluminium Company built and operated a major recycling plant here to process aluminium from both British and German aircraft crashes. The need for aircraft put huge demands on the aluminium industry as production of aircraft rose from 2,828 units in 1938 to 15,049 in 1940 and over 26,000 by 1944.

According to Potts’ A History of Banbury, in Adderbury and at the Southam Road plant in Banbury, a strong alloy for aircraft skins was made and frames and wing spans were extruded. Thousands of wing spans were made for the famous Lancaster bomber. The workforce at Adderbury and Banbury combined rose to a peak of 2300. Women constituted half the workforce, doing work previously considered quite unsuitable. Many shot-down aircraft, German and British, were dumped at Adderbury and re-processed, at one period to the extent of 50 tons per month. Large sections were produced for the famous Bailey Bridges, and aluminium powder for flares and incendiaries and landing strips for emergency airports were also produced.

The Lancaster bomber

Some crashed planes came by rail and others were trucked to the factory in ‘Queen Marys’, which were 60ft long low loader trucks specially built for transporting aircraft. A yellow nosed, Me 109 with bullet holes across its fin, body and wing, was placed at the front gate of the factory for several weeks for all to see. Bert Lane was once Stationmaster for Adderbury; he recalled the sight of frames of wrecked aircraft, axis and allied, jammed into railway waggons on the siding.

Twyford Seeds/Bibbys

After a fire at the original Twyford Mill, on the Cherwell near Twyford Wharf, the Oxford Road site was taken over in 1946 by Twyford Seeds, which had been founded in 1936. In a move which still causes confusion today, Twyfords brought the “Twyford Mill” name with them from their original home. Twyford Seeds were one of the country’s leading plant breeding establishments, with an arable farm at Walton Grounds for seed breeding and multiplication and a pedigree seed farm at Cottisford. There was a plant breeding department in the former walled garden of Adderbury House.

Twyford Seeds was acquired in 1952 by what would eventually be known as the Feeds and Seeds division of J. Bibby & Sons Ltd. There were already strong connections between the companies, since Bibby’s had acted as selling agents for Twyford products in some areas and it was intended to merge the sales staff of the two companies. Bibbys, however, were careful to keep the use of the Twyford name for premium products, and continued to recruit scientific staff to Twyford Seeds, rather than to Bibby’s, throughout.

Bibbys established a seed mill on the site, since another reason for the acquisition was a wish to replace their original feed mill at Liverpool by a series of mills in different parts of the country. Adderbury was Bibby’s first true ‘country’ mill, and over the years was a very successful location for the firm.  A small feed plant was built on the site to manufacture pig and poultry feeds under the Bibby brand. In 1968-9 Bibby’s closed its mill in Wandsworth and re-allocated some of its tonnage to Adderbury. In 1970 Bibby’s seed cleaning plant at Colsterworth closed and its business also transferred to Adderbury. In 1973 the Adderbury mill was badly damaged by fire, but was re-equipped and brought back into production by 1974. The Headquarters of the Feeds and Seeds division of Bibbys moved to Adderbury in 1976. The Division was the largest in the company, with a workforce at the end of 1977 of 1150 nationally.

Fired Earth

Fired Earth (a literal English translation of the Italian “terracotta”) began trading in 1983 from a lean-to on the side of a farmhouse in Middle Aston. Its range of floor tiles soon expanded to wall tiles and by 1990 it had outgrown its premises and Fired Earth became the new owners of Twyford Mill Estate. According to Nicholas Kneale, the founder, “Bibby found it could fulfil its needs on a smaller site. We refurbished a large building into a showroom, warehouse and offices.”

The firm continued to grow, with paint and wallpaper, bathrooms and kitchens being added to the range. By the mid-1990s Fired Earth had 15 showrooms across the country, with the first London showroom being added in 1996. Fired Earth was taken over by Silverfleet Capital in 1998, and then sold on to Agafood Services plc, who were looking to increase their retail activities. They now have an AGA showroom within the Fired Earth building.

The Site Today

The Twyford Mill site currently houses a range of commercial, service industry, educational and light engineering ventures, with the transition in little more than a century from mineral extraction and heavy engineering closely reflecting changes in the UK economy as a whole. At the same time, the industrial park framework both here and at the neighbouring Station Yard has kept intact the outlines of the infrastructure of Adderbury’s early industries.

Phil Mansell
2020

References:

Bibby, J.B. & C.L.Bibby (1978): A Miller’s Tale. A History of J.Bibby and Sons Ltd, Liverpool. J.Bibby and Sons Ltd.
Davis, B. (2014): In It Together, Adderbury at War. Robert Boyd Publications.
Potts, W.(1958): A History of Banbury. Banbury Guardian Offices.
Taylor, A.M. (1964): Gilletts. Bankers at Banbury and Oxford. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
Tonks, E. (1988): The Ironstone Quarries of the Midlands: History, Operation and Railways. Part II. The Oxfordshire Field. Runpast Publishing, Cheltenham

From an early age I would have been familiar with the word “jubilee”, as my father was reminded of Queen Victoria’s jubilee on some occasions, often when we were out for a walk and heard the church clock playing one of its three-hourly chimes or passed one of the big oak trees either on the village green or at the Milton turn. Both had been purchased to commemorate Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887. My father did not marry until into his forties and could just remember the tea and celebrations: he would have been six years old at that time.

We always knew a lot about our Royal families; people showed great respect for them, Many homes had a picture on the wall of King George V and Queen Elizabeth. We were taught about them at school and learned to stand to attention for the National Anthem in the Guides and Brownies. Newspapers published lots of photographs of their activities and if we were lucky on the odd occasion we went to the pictures we would see them on the Pathe News. The then Princess Elizabeth was about my age and the Duchess of York the same age as my Mother, who found a picture of the whole family in a magazine and framed it to hang on our wall.

One day in 1935 our headmistress told us that we were to start to practise our may pole dances ready for the Jubilee and that there was to be a May Queen and maids of honour of which I was one. We had to wear white dresses and shoes; we were to wear a crown made from flowers and carry a broom stick with more flowers tied to the top. After the parade we were given a tea and a coronation mug; there were sports for both young and old and dancing in the evening. Every house in the village had been decorated and there were hundreds of different souvenirs in all the shops.

Forty-two years later when I had a grown-up family we were again to have a Jubilee. My mother had died the year before and I was approached by a much younger friend of hers to see if I had any of her old photographs or treasures that I would be willing to loan to an Exhibition that was to be part of the celebrations. The next time I saw her she said the rest of the committee had lost interest and would I help her with the exhibition. Neither of us had done anything like it before. People were just asked to bring anything that they could find. One old lady brought a black crinoline and bonnet. We borrowed a dressmaker’s dummy and fixed on a polystyrene head and I drew a face – which made a perfect model to show off the dress and bonnet. Time and time again we rearranged the tables to make room for more and more exhibits, as people brought one thing and then went back for something else.

We were open for three days. We had borrowed some old fire engine uniforms etc. and one gentleman who had driven our fire engine stayed the whole time to talk about the days when we had a fire brigade to anyone that showed the slightest interest.

I did not see much of the other celebrations, but I certainly caught the bug and my life changed as I began to take an interest in researching and writing about local history. I have made many friends through my work and still get a lot of pleasure from what I do.

Another twenty-five years have passed. This time our committee decided we would have a golden jubilee weekend. However, mine started on the Friday when, as a Parish Councillor, In went with one of the School Governors to the primary school to present each child with a mug. In the evening I took my albums with my collections of village photographs and documents and china memorabilia to the Chapel Schoolroom then helped to set up the Adderbury History Group’s exhibition.

I took a day off on Saturday to attend my granddaughter’s wedding, then on Sunday there was a lovely united service in the Church (well attended in spite of the football). Wearing my Parish Councillor’s hat once more I was off to the playing field for the cutting of the tape to open the newly-equipped play area, finished only just in time. I had my garden, one of seventeen small village gardens, open in the afternoon to make money for the improvements to the Institute, which raised almost £700.

Eight fifteen saw me getting a lift down to the village to set up the over-sixties stall in the street market. In spite of a heavy shower people stayed and were able to shelter under Queen Victoria’s Jubilee tree. We mopped up and sold a lot more raffle tickets, taking £132, and managed to make the draw in time to join both the senior citizens and the children in a street party outside the library. I had not seen much else that say, so went into the library to look at the entries to a photograph competition and discovered I had won first prize in the people’s section. I then waited to receive my prize, a camera, and managed to make the last hour at the History exhibition and collect my things and pack up.

The evening entertainment in the playing field was a long walk down and I was tired. However, I was able to hear all the music and spent the evening watching television and popping out from time to time to listen to the singing which came across from the park quite plain. The fireworks on the TV were over in time for me to go outside and watch our own firework display. A wonderful, unforgettable weekend, but a pity more people did not decorate their houses.

Rhoda Woodward

In 2019 Adderbury History Association was asked by Christopher Rawlins School if any older residents of the village could come into school and share their memories of the last war.  In the end only Jean Moore was able to talk to the children; her mother had run the Telephone Exchange (now Tinkle Cottage) near the Red Lion.  However, several other people who had been in Adderbury as children shared their reminiscences with me, and so did some current Adderbury residents who were in other parts of the country.  I passed some of these on to the children, and here they are in full.

Evacuees

Peter Coombs came to this part of the world as an evacuee from Kent.  He and his brother travelled in a lorry and when they reached Oxfordshire, they got increasingly anxious, as the lorry kept stopping and dropping off children, but not them.  They were left until last, and found themselves in   Sibford Ferris.

They settled happily – they enjoyed playing in the fields, and every day they crossed two fields to collect fresh milk.  The best part of their new life was the absence of bombs.  In Kent they had been under the flight path of German planes heading for London.  There had been a shelter at the end of their road, but if they didn’t have time to get to it, they just had to take refuge under the stairs.

At first Peter and his brother went to school in Sibford; later they cycled to school in Banbury, and after the war Peter’s family left Kent and settled in North Newington.

Louise Harris lived in Ledwell (near Sandford St Martin).  Her family hosted several evacuees.  Two soon went home because they were homesick.  One girl became a good friend of Louise; they kept up afterwards and when Louise got married, the former evacuee was her bridesmaid.

Peter Dance’s family, like many in Adderbury, had people staying with them during the war.  First there were two boy evacuees,who didn’t stay long.   Later the Dances hosted two women teachers; one of them kept up with Peter’s mother for some time after the war.  Later still there was an army officer and his batman.   Peter’s next door neighbour had two boy evacuees who stayed for some time, and a family friend in The Crescent hosted two girls.

Peter’s wife, Grace, lived in London, and was evacuated at the age of three to stay with an aunt in a village in Ayrshire.  When she was old enough she went to the village school and remembers the kindness of the headmaster who let her borrow some of his books.  She was notable as the only evacuee  in the village, and when she went back many years later as an adult, she was greeted with “It’s the wee vaccy!”

Schoolboys, soldiers and tanks

The Boys’ School soon had only one teacher, Mr Bradbury, as his colleague had been called up.   Peter Dance remembers that the school’s numbers were boosted when the evacuees from London came to Adderbury.  The boys from West Ham were accompanied by their teacher, Mr Farmer.

Several people recalled tanks in the village.  A number of troops were stationed in Adderbury, and so there were plenty of tanks around.  Peter Dance attended the Boy’s School (now Rawlins House) and the boys used to play football on the Green in break.  He remembers being a bit annoyed when they couldn’t play because of the tanks on the grass.  Tanks were also to be seen on the tennis courts; there were troops billetted at the Tennis Club.  Some small boys were given rides up from the tennis courts to the baker’s in Chapel Lane (not a journey that would normally require a lift!).

There were various schemes to raise funds for the troops.  Louise Harris still has the certificate which she received from the Red Cross at the end of the war for collecting a penny a week for “Soldiers, sailors and airmen”.

Bombs

Peter’s father, Phil Dance, was a Special Constable, covering  an  area including Shenington, Alkerton, the Sibfords, Epwell and Broughton. So he was one of the few people in the village to have a car (the doctor was another).  His duties included enforcing the blackout.  

In October 1940 two bombs fell near the Aynho road, in Ashmole’s Field (between Bo-Peep Farm and Nell Bridge)  They exploded and left holes, but did no harm; the aim had probably been to damage the railway line.  Peter Dance remembers his father had to walk along the  line to check that there was no damage.

No bombs fell in Adderbury, but there were air raid practices, and when the siren sounded everyone took shelter.  Peter Dance recalls that the first time the siren went off, he and his mother  sheltered under the stairs.  When his father came back, he pointed out that they had chosen a bad spot, as they were directly underneath the hot water tank!  

They had a shock one night, when a barrage balloon which had somehow come loose, hit the window of Peter’s parents’ bedroom with a loud bang and shattered it.  Peter remained asleep throughout the drama, and was furious to have missed it!

Several people mentioned seeing a glow in the sky over Aynho from the London blitz, and recognising the distinctive sound  of German planes heading for Coventry.  Some also remembered being taken to Croft Lane, to see the glow in the sky to the north, as Coventry burnt in November 1940.  

Coventry

Graham Collier was actually in Coventry.  He was eight when war broke out. The city was bombed a number of times and Graham and his friends used to collect bits of shrapnel and swap them.  They also played with the incendiary bombs which had landed, but not gone off.  One boy kept a collection of them in a shed, until they were discovered and safely disposed of!

Graham’s father was too old to be conscripted so continued working in a small company making car components.  When the war started production switched to the rear turrets of Wellington bombers.  After work he served as an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) Warden.  When there was a raid on, he was kept busy putting out fires and rescuing people.  Graham recalls that some people tried to escape danger during raids by migrating to the outskirts of Coventry and sleeping in tents.

Graham never felt frightened in wartime, although going to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden was a regular occurrence.  His  mother kept important items, like ration books and identity cards, in a tin, and Graham, as the eldest child, was responsible for taking it to the shelter, and ensuring that the documents were kept safe.  When the siren sounded, his mother would just say, “Tin!”, and Graham would know what to do.

One building destroyed in the Coventry blitz was Graham’s school.  He and his friends were delighted that there was no school to go to, and very disappointed that after only two days another school was found for them!

Graham’s wife, Iris, grew up in the same city.  Her father had been gassed in the First World War.  He never spoke of his experiences then, but on the morning after the bombing of Coventry in November 1940 he took Iris and her two brothers into Coventry to see the devastation in the flattened city.  Iris never forgot him saying to them: “Just look at that!  That’s war.  And in ten years time, they will be friends again”. 

When the war ended Graham’s mother organised the street party.  By this time Graham was an apprentice electrician.  One of his jobs was especially memorable; he helped to fix an illuminated star to shine out on the cathedral spire (which survived the bombing) for the first Christmas of peacetime.

Cornwall

Jill Boss was further away, living on the Cornish coast in Looe.  She was a baby at the start of the war, but learnt later that the family boat building business was taken over by the Admiralty.  It was kept very busy with men working in shifts for 24 hours of the day. 

Jill remembers their Anderson shelter; it frightened her because there was  no light and it smelt musty, but luckily they never had to use it.  The kitchen table had steel legs and top, to act as a shelter, if necessary.  She also remembers her Mickey Mouse gas mask; she hated it when her mother tried it on, because it fitted so tightly.

When she was older she used to walk home from school.  She remembers the day when she looked down at the beach from the cliff top and saw what she thought was one of her father’s small boats bobbing up and down at the edge of the waves.  She started to run down the zigzag path to save the boat from being washed out to sea.  But suddenly a large hand came out from a green door, and pulled her inside.  She was furious and bit it!  But it turned out that the hand belonged to a local policeman and he had saved her life – the “boat” was a German mine!  

Her most dramatic memory was of a walk with her grandmother, when they saw a German plane flying low with its tail on fire.  They took shelter as it turned in their direction and saw the pilot jump from the plane. His parachute carried him above their heads – she still remembers vividly the terrified look in the pilot’s eyes – the plane did a nose dive on to the rocks far below, and they heard a loud bang and saw a huge ball of fire.  The pilot was soon captured.

On the day war ended Jill helped her mother and grandmother paint jam jars, tie string around the tops and put a nightlight in each.  Many little flags were also ironed and hung on string.  That evening she found out why, when she saw the river at Looe full of boats, large and small covered with flags.  Her Dad’s boat had all the painted jam jars hanging below the flags.  When a gun fired, all the candles were lit and the boats made their way out of the river to the sea.  Jill and her family were aboard their boat and did a big circle in the bay.  It was a night to remember! 

Fiona Gow
June 2020

With many thanks to: Jill Boss, Graham Collier, Peter Coombs, Grace and Peter Dance and Louise Harris

And if any readers have their own memories of World War Two, I would be happy to record them.

Adderbury at war is the subject of the 2014 Adderbury History Association publication In It Together by Barry Davis, which deals with the actions and the lives of Adderbury people both in the forces and on the home front, in World War II and the Great War 1914-18 as well as earlier conflicts. Details of this publication can be found on the home page of the website.

There is a short entry in the Victoria County History Vol. IX, Bloxham Hundred, 1969, mentioning that there was a brickworks at Twyford Wharf. The next mention is contained in Vera Wood’s book The Licencees of the Inns, Taverns and Beerhouses of Adderbury & Milton Oxfordshire. She lists The ‘Old’ Red Lion, Twyford, mentioning the first known publican as Thomas Wilkins c 1832. She recorded that Wilkins was a multi-tasking publican as he was also owner of the coal wharf, brickworks and nearly sixty acres of well-watered farmland. Four years later, there was an announcement in the Banbury Guardian for 18^th October, 1836, of a sale of this farm land, public house, cottage and wharf and a brickworks and domestic buildings. It would seem for much of its history the publicans of the Red Lion at Twyford Wharf were multi-tasking men. The last recorded publican was William Henry Twynham who was mine host from 1911-1929. He died in harness with the whole operation then closing down in 1930.

The Twyford Wharf site was examined in detail in 1971 by Susanna Everett of the Oxford and City Museum. In addition to the public house, the site consisted of a wharf house, a brick kiln and a limekiln, two drying sheds and one clay pit in use as well as an old, worked-out clay pit and a brick-built cottage-cum-office.  The clay dug on site was used to produce bricks, tiles, pipes and lime. The geological map of this area shows a belt of two types of clay to the west of and shadowing the River Cherwell . The canal was dug through one sort of clay and the brickworks the other. On the other side of the road, still on the west bank of the canal, was a cottage, coal wharf and warehouse. 

Brickmaking required sulphurous coal to fire the bricks as it burnt much hotter than domestic ‘sweet coal’. Much of the coal consumed in Adderbury came from Wednesbury near Wolverhampton; conveyed by long boats working the Coventry/Oxford Canal.  The special bricks needed to construct the kilns themselves may well have come from the new brickworks opened up at Stourport on Severn on land acquired by the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal Company in 1769. The company had acquired a close of land near the River Severn, near where they were building the new inland port, connecting the Severn and the new canal, fed by the River Stour. This canal eventually joined the newly-opened Coventry to Oxford canal which passed through Twyford. This would have been a slow tortuous journey across the Midlands – but the only way a heavy load of bricks could have been transported in the nineteenth century. The railway passed nearby but there was no halt or station or facilities for unloading.

What of today? Twyford Wharf has morphed into a modern leisure facility. The brickworks is a well presented caravan park with attractive canal moorings alongside, with one of the former brick kilns acting as a toilet block. The old coal wharf is a long boat hire business – it all looks well- presented and thriving. 

Nick Allen
2020

Note:                                                                                                                                 This article has taken the view that the Twyford Brick Works arose after the building of the Oxford Canal and as a consequence of it. Others have suggested that there was a working, commercial, brickworks on this site in the eighteenth century prior to the building of the canal through Adderbury c1787. This premise was built around a field name said to be shown in the Inclosure Award of 1774 as Brick Kiln Field. The field the brickworks still stands on today is shown, on the 1735 plan of the land holdings of the 2^nd Duke of Argyll, as Brickill Hill Furlong. Might the cartographer have got the name of the field incorrectly by writing Brickiln Hill Furlong by mistake?  Another possibility is that the then farmer/landowner might have set up a small locally made kiln to bake bricks for local use and pipes for land drainage purposes.

Over the years I have done a great deal of family history and at first this was research into my own family then it progressed into other people’s families and trying to solve the ‘’brick walls’’ they had run up against. I have never believed in those because there should always be a logical way through. Naturally, the absence of documentary evidence, parish records etc., does not help, but I try to find an answer if I can. And, of course, a little bit of luck, of “being in the right place at the right time” is also a great help!

Let me give an example. With my husband Bill (who also also enjoyed genealogy and specialised in finding people who had become estranged from their families and helped many people achieve their aims) I lived in North Aston near Steeple Aston for a great number of years and I discovered that I was related to some old families there from c17 to early c20. When in the Churchyard one day I was reading some of the gravestone inscriptions; one in particular intrigued me: “Died in a mysterious way”, it said. I found that this man was my 3^rd x Great Grandfather.  A friend in the village had a newspaper cutting which showed that in 1842 George Mobbs had been robbed and murdered on his way home from a scientific lecture at Steeple Aston. His body was found on a heap of stones just off the cross roads at the Fox Inn along the Duns Tew road. His horse had cantered off home and was found, complete with tack, in his field the next day. It was said at the time that the motive was robbery but no one was found to answer for this dreadful crime. George, a farmer, left a wife and numerous children. 

My parents retired to Adderbury in 1985 and lived opposite Mr John Fox who had been a founder member of the Adderbury History Association. He asked me one day whether I would like to see some old Banbury Guardians which he had stored in his house. In one of them I was astounded to see that the murder of Mr George Mobbs had been solved by the capture of the culprit and this had taken four years to come to light. There had been a witness behind the hedge who had at last come forward to tell his story. It’s not the story so much as the fact that that particular news item had been placed in front of me to read …amazing! There was more to come: at around the same time I bid at a Holloway’s auction for a large quantity of Banbury Historical Society Journals. The first one I opened when I arrived home, out dropped a newspaper cutting with Inscriptions from North Aston and Steeple Aston Churches and notably the one written on poor George Mobbs’s grave!

I have always loved auctions and at another Holloway’s sale I put in a bid for a box of Oxfordshirre Record Society books. I had been working on a family tree from Hook Norton. I followed the fortunes of Dinah French who had married a William Jaques of Stourton near Whichford  . Dinah became a deeply religious person and as a girl had struggled to find a formal home for her beliefs. During the early 1800s  she had tried attending the Baptists in Hook Norton , ‘’The Mother Church ‘’, St Peters, Hook Norton , the Friends and finally found the Methodist Church to be the most sympathetic and where she felt the most comfortable . Dinah married William Jacques in 1813, who later went to America in search of land so that the whole family could prosper. Eventually, Dinah and children joined William. She wrote her life story, which included religious writings and her poems. It was published in Syracuse USA 1853. 

When I paid for the box of ORS books the porter put some odd books on top to make up the Lot. I didn’t know what they were as I had not viewed them – but there it was …. Dinah’s book! I couldn’t believe it! I wonder how it made its way back to England? Presumably, it was forwarded to an English relative. So sad it wasn’t passed down the family as a treasured heirloom instead of ending up in a sale room in Banbury. The Jaques family are distantly related to my mother’s family so I shall look after Dinah’s book!

Before the widespread use of home computers and extensive genealogy web sites, I used to spend some of my spare time in ‘’Banburyshire”, the upstairs research room in Banbury Library. Martin Allit was the Librarian who looked after all the Family History customers, including Brian Little, who was always researching for his weekly article in the Banbury Guardian. Martin was often on duty in that area of the Library and on one particular occasion he was at his desk on the telephone. I couldn’t help but overhear some of the conversation. Martin was getting grilled it appeared and it seemed he was expected to be undertaking research for this caller. I overheard the name “ Fardon”…..and yes! You have guessed it, I was working on the Quaker Clockmaker family of Fardon from North Newington and Deddington at that time. I intimated to Martin that I could perhaps help. He passed the receiver over to me. How odd that now I was talking to Peter, a descendant of the Fardons I was working on. So was I in the right place at the right time? 

One has to be patient, though, and Peter told me that he was descended from a female line, a Juliana Fardon . He believed Juliana to be the daughter of John Fardon, Clockmaker, 1736-1786. Her birth or baptism was not recorded in the Quaker records or anywhere that he could find. I worked with Peter for a few years and I never established that Juliana was the daughter of this John Fardon until something quite unrelated happened. I wrote to the Archivist at New College Oxford to enquire about any available papers on my father’s family in this area. She sent me printed pages from their archives. Along with some tenancy agreements and deeds was a list of similar items from Milton. My grandfather farmed at Manor Farm, Milton, until his death in 1939. However, along with some documents about the Cox family of Milton lay the Will of John Fardon, 1786! John had been married to Sarah Cox. I was very excited because perhaps this was my only chance of proving to Peter that Juliana was indeed John’s daughter! So it wasn’t long before a visit to the Archives in New College was arranged and I read through John Fardon’s Will carefully. He named his daughter Juliana! Who would have thought it possible that Juliana could be identified after all the previous research had come to nothing? The Will had been with the Cox New College records for all those years and maybe I was the first person to discover and read it. Everyone was pleased.

Here’s a final example. I have been working over half my life on an ancestor in my father’s family and over the years have collected a lot of information about him and recently quite by chance other pieces of his life are coming to light to help me complete his story. During the early 1980s I was in the old Record Office in the Council Building in Oxford. I was (and actually now I do not remember why) looking through the Wolvercote Parish register transcript. Out dropped a fairly crudely  hand drawn map of Fawler, a hamlet of Finstock. I had known that my ancestor’s mother had lived there c1830s but had no idea where she and her husband resided. However, on this map her name and cottage was clearly marked! Her name only, so I guess this sketch was drawn from someone’s memory and after she had become a widow in the 1840s. This meant I was able to go and look at the cottage and another piece of this family jigsaw was in place. Was this luck or “meant to be?”

One of my Cousins said to me a very long time ago when I was just starting out on my family history quest: ’I have a black tin box containing some family papers, would you like to have a look at them?’’ The contents really set me off with genealogy as a hobby since they allowed me to discover that my father’s family (c19th) and my mother’s ancestors (c17th) had all lived in my cousin’s house but, as you can see, in different centuries! Mother’s relations came back and still live there. 

These are some of my family history ‘surprise moments’ which helped me and others. I hope they still appear to fill those gaps in my research. The History Centre at Cowley will be one of the first places I will visit when it’s open and people are allowed to research again. But I shan’t forget what I’ve learned over the years: if you have lost something, look for something else and perhaps fate will place you in the right place at the right time to find what you are really looking for!

Jill Adams
May 2020

Note: Incidentally, John Fardon has his own story, which you can read by following the link below: http://www.deddingtonhistory.uk/clockmakers/quakerclockmakers/johnfardon 

INTRODUCTION

The Quaker Meeting House in Adderbury was built in 1675 on the estate of the Lord of the Manor of Adderbury West, Bray D’Oyly.

This guide has been prepared to help visitors to appreciate this unique building. It contains some background to life and worship in England in the seventeenth century  and an account of how Quakerism arose. Then it tells the stories of the early Adderbury Quakers before giving a guided tour of the exterior of the building and the graveyard, followed by a description of the interior. The guide finishes with a short account of the Quakers of Adderbury from the early nineteenth century up to the present.

LIFE AND WORSHIP IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND

Religion played a central role in the life of English people in the seventeenth century in ways that seem very unfamiliar to most of us, looking back from the twenty-first century.

By the time the Quaker story started in the second half of the century, by law you had to attend regularly the services of the Church of England and support its activities by paying to the Church a tithe of either your income or your produce. Religion had in large part lain behind the turbulent national politics of England in the 1600s, which had seen a divisive civil war and the deposition and execution of King Charles I. Religion, too, (particularly in terms of the opposition between Protestant and Roman Catholic beliefs) had determined, and would continue to determine, the international politics of the time.

What is also plain, however, from countless letters and journals of the time, is that at a personal level people thought and felt deeply and intensely about their own relation to God, about their  tendency to sin, and about their fitness for the eternal life in heaven which the Christian religion offered to true believers. For many this internal struggle was particularly intense because there was a belief that the Second Coming (when Christ would return to earth in judgement) could happen at any time. As the century progressed it was true for large numbers of believers that the established church did not address their urgent concerns. They began to form themselves into groups and movements that have generally been given the name of “Dissenters”, and prominent among these were the Quakers.

The founder of Quakerism (although it was not called that at that time) was George Fox, who was born in 1624, the son of a Leicestershire weaver. He experienced in full the doubts and confusions described above, and, as a young man, went from preacher to preacher, sect to sect, in search of enlightenment and comfort. As his Journal tells us, it was only when there was “nothing outwardly” left that he found the answer. Then he heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”; Fox tells us that when he heard this “my heart did leap for joy”. What Fox was proposing was that he and others could learn directly from the living Christ within, the “Inward Light”, needing no priest or minister as intermediary.

Almost immediately Fox, believing that it was God’s commandment that he should do so, embarked upon a missionary crusade, one which was to occupy the remaining forty or so years of his life. He achieved his first successes in North West England but had soon established strong centres in both London and Bristol. From the early 1650s itinerant preachers, known as “Publishers of Truth”, brought their message to the Midlands, and, as far as we know, it was John Audland and John Camm, who visited Banbury in 1654, who first made the contacts, later confirmed on a number of occasions by Fox himself, that established the Quaker connection with Adderbury.

Before we come directly to the Adderbury Quakers themselves, however, a word is necessary about the term “Quaker”. Fox’s co-religionists called themselves the ”Society of Friends” and the term “Quaker” was originally one of abuse, though it was subsequently adopted as a general term. It was in Derby in 1650 that magistrate Gervase Bennet first called Fox and his followers “Quakers”, since they called on men to “tremble at the word of God”. Fox himself was convinced that the “quakings” were the work of God. People’s hearts, he explained, “had to be shaken before the seed of God was raised out of the earth.”

THE QUAKERS OF ADDERBURY

The mission of John Audland  and John Camm to Banbury in 1654 must have been a particularly effective one, since their message engaged the attention and won the belief, not only of Edward Vivers, a leading Banbury merchant, but particularly of Bray D’Oyly, the Lord of the Manor of West Adderbury. Both men went on to form Quaker meetings of their own. The first meeting in Adderbury was in 1656 and took place at D’Oyly’s Little Manor in West Adderbury.  This still stands, though much altered, on the corner of Cross Hill Road and Colin Butler Green, a short distance from the Meeting House.

D’Oyly’s social position and leadership were very important, since the initial years of Quakerism, from the 1650s to the Act of Toleration in 1689, saw great persecution for Friends, including those of Adderbury. It is hard today to understand why this should be so. Quaker religious practices, for example, seem to us today to be the very opposite of provocative. Martin Greenwood describes these as follows:

“The Friends or Quakers … meet in silence, sometimes called the ‘listening silence’, seeking guidance from the Holy Spirit in their own hearts or through words which individual Friends may feel called upon to speak. The Quaker ‘Inward Light’ linked an individual directly with God, making the prayers and rites of the Church unnecessary. They have no creed, no sacraments, their children are not baptised, they have no consecrated buildings, they do not sing hymns and have no formal prayers.”

Yet these very beliefs brought Quakers into conflict with the established church, for, with their belief in direct guidance from God, they believed in a “priesthood of all believers” and disparaged what they called “steeplehouses” [churches] and their “hireling priests”. They saw no reason why they should attend church services or contribute to church expenses through the payment of tithes, something which infuriated both the clergy and the gentry who made up the magistracy. What is more, Quakers developed a set of attitudes and behaviours that brought them into day-to-day conflict with others. They would not use titles, addressed each other and everybody else as “thee” and “thou”, and refused to doff their hats to anyone, or take off their hats in church, courtroom or private house. All this gave grave offence in the strict social hierarchy of seventeenth-century England. Finally, they would not swear any form of oath, something which time and time again disadvantaged them when they were brought to court. And, of course, seventeenth-century Quakers were instantly recognisable, since the clothes they wore reflected their belief in simplicity, the women in plain grey dresses, white scarves and poke bonnets, and the men in broadcloth with wide-brimmed hats.

D’Oyly was seen by his peers as “a sober and discrete gentleman”, although “wrought upon by these seduced and seducing people [Quakers]”. He himself was fined and imprisoned for attending meetings during this period, but was able to avoid harsher penalties through the good offices of others. D’Oyly was first prosecuted for non-payment of tithes in 1661 and he subsequently refused to pay them right up to his death in 1695. Other Adderbury Quakers were fined and imprisoned for attending meetings either in the village or elsewhere in the county. Thomas Baylis and Christopher Barret were taken at a meeting at Banbury in 1660 and were imprisoned for two months. Members of the Adderbury families of Poultney, Treppas, Aris, and Garner were all fined for being at meetings at Milcombe, Banbury, Adderbury, and Milton between 1660 and 1674. Prosecutions for non-payment of tithes began in 1659 when Timothy Poultney was imprisoned for 15 months. Imprisonment, however, was exceptional after about 1666, but seizure of goods went on until well into the later eighteenth century. D’Oyly played a prominent part in Quaker affairs both at local and national levels. He was frequently appointed to act for the Banbury Meeting in financial matters, or to attend the assizes to look after local Friends who were in trouble with the law.

In 1675, some years before it was legal to do so, D’Oyly built Adderbury Meeting House on his own land and at his own expense.  Why was it built? Some suggest that early Meeting Houses were built out of bravado, some that a Meeting House provided simply  the opportunity to establish a Quaker burial ground, since Quakers neither sought burial in consecrated ground nor would have been permitted burial there. What is certain is that the need for a purpose-built Meeting House had become more urgent as Quakerism established itself. In about 1668 Fox laid down the organisation of Quaker life, partly as a means of keeping the movement together at a time of persecution. The same basic principles of organisation, however, have persisted to the present day. All Quaker groups at a local level were to hold, in addition to meetings for worship, a monthly business meeting, known as a Preparatory Meeting, which would prepare business for a Monthly Meetings, which concerned themselves with district matters and where each Preparatory Meeting in the area would be represented. Beyond this there were regular regional and national meetings. Importantly, Monthly Meetings were held in turn in all the localities in the district, and a purpose-built Meeting House which could cope with a periodic influx of Friends from elsewhere was a clear advantage. The opening of Adderbury Meeting House was attended by George Fox himself, who stayed with Bray D’Oyly several times, as did Margaret Fell, the organising genius behind the new structure to Quaker life, later to become Fox’s wife. Of one of these meetings, in 1673, Fox’s Journal records ‘ … and thence to Bray D’Oyly’s in Adderbury, in Oxfordshire, where, on First-day, we had a large and precious meeting’.

At Preparatory and Monthly Meetings, Friends were concerned with a wide range of topics. They might discuss, for example, ways of raising money to support either the national cause or local Friends in trouble with the law as a result of the prevailing legislation, or in financial need for other reasons. They might also make enquiries into cases where the conduct of particular Friends was felt to be unsatisfactory, or investigate the background of Friends who wished to get married, or provide reports on the standing of Friends who were intending to move from one area to another within the Quaker organisation. In 1671 George Fox introduced a significant innovation when he required that there be Women’s Meetings held at the same time as the men’s meetings. Men and women had always worshipped together, although sitting separately, but this was the first time that Quaker women were encouraged to be, in Fox’s term “serviceable in their own places and stations”. As a result, they were able to exercise responsibilities within their own religious organisation denied to any other Englishwomen of their time. A contemporary document urged women in their meetings to “administer counsel, wisdom and instruction…to enquire into the necessities of the poor and to relieve the widows and the fatherless and to visit the sick and the afflicted … to reprove the fallen, but mildly … to be teachers of good things … and to be good examples and patterns of prudence.”

With Preparatory Meetings, Monthly Meetings and any follow up that might be needed, as well as two meetings for worship on Sundays and one mid-week, the Quaker way of life must have been quite an all-embracing one. Adderbury’s Quakers were originally in the main farmers and agricultural workers, and particularly, of course, Bray D’Oyly’s estate workers.  D’Oyly was so zealous in his support of the movement that the vicar complained in 1682 that whenever houses D’Oyly owned became vacant, he filled them with Quakers from outside the parish and would have no other tenants. This would have been a valuable service to Quakers in nearby parishes such as Broughton, where they were being evicted for their beliefs. In the early eighteenth century the range of Friends’ occupations was increased when Quaker clock-making, first developed in the nearby village of Sibford, came to Adderbury.  Richard Gilkes set up his workshop in 1735 and started a tradition which was to last until the death of William Williams in 1862. The clocks made in Adderbury were both highly distinctive, with their zig-zag engraving on the clock faces, and, at least in their simplest form – the “hoop and spike clock” – affordable for the better-off inhabitants. Adderbury customers would also have experienced for the first time the Quaker habit of charging fixed prices for goods. In society as a whole, it was common for purchaser and provider to haggle over the costs of goods or services; Quakers, however, felt that it was a more honest way of working to state a price and to stick to it. Outside the practice of their trade, the clockmakers of Adderbury were throughout zealous and hard-working supporters of the Meeting House.

THE EXTERIOR OF THE MEETING HOUSE

As you turn in from Horn Hill Road and look up the path to the Meeting House on the right, what immediately strikes you is that the building before you is very unlike most other religious buildings. A survey of Quaker Meeting Houses built before 1720 puts it this way:

“No other group of buildings is quite comparable to these plain but dignified and beautiful old Meeting Houses…. Churches are, for example, built to impress… to create awe in the eyes of the beholder [and] … as monuments to the glory of God. They were designed by the best architects of the day. Meeting Houses, on the other hand, were planned for use, for the very practical purpose of shelter in inclement weather. They were in many cases erected by the cooperative labour of the most experienced members of a Meeting, and of course local materials were used, sometimes actually given by the members themselves.”

As a result, of course, a Friends Meeting House is much more like a house in appearance than a church, and it has little or no architectural pretension. It makes no effort to be other than a meeting place, unconsecrated, and sanctified only by the purpose for which it was designed and used.

The scene before today’s visitor is, however, considerably changed from the seventeenth century. Where the path now continues past the Meeting House to the Adderbury Parish Cemetery beyond, there would originally have been a wall running across north-south just beyond the Meeting House and closing off the view. And in what is now a sort of empty alcove on the left opposite the Meeting House,  a thatched cottage was built in the 1680s, intended for use by the Women’s Meeting, and a smaller cottage which was used to house poor members of the Meeting; the cottages were demolished in the 1950s. In 1954 Adderbury Parish Council took a ninety-year lease on the property, gaining the land to the west of the Meeting House for use as a graveyard and opening up the access. In return, the Parish Council assumed responsibility for the maintenance of the Meeting House. The building was re-roofed with modern slate in the 1970s, but would originally have been covered with Stonesfield stone slates, graded in size from rooftop to eaves.  Despite these changes, however, it is clear that at Adderbury, almost uniquely, we have inherited a building largely unchanged in its design since the seventeenth century.

In terms of the graveyard itself, plans show there were some forty graves sited, sometimes three and four deep, on either side of the present path. It was the Quaker habit to level the ground above graves, so that the individual plots are no longer discernible today. The very earliest graves would have had no headstones at all, since at first they were forbidden as a ‘vain and empty’ custom. From 1850, however, Yearly Meeting permitted simple gravestones citing name, age and death date, so as to mark location. The accepted design for generations has been the square-edged stone with a curved top and it is headstones of this type that we now see ranged around the edges of the graveyard. Unfortunately, some of the stone headstones are too worn to permit us to decipher the names. The exception is the headstone of Sophie Fanny Buck, the last Quaker to be buried at Adderbury. Her headstone, recording her death in 1945, can be found on the right, close to the Meeting house itself. It is also easy to read a number of headstones on the left relating to members of the family of the nineteenth-century solicitor Francis Francillon, which still maintain the shape of the other Quaker headstones, but are rather unusually made of cast metal.

Quaker records tell us that no fewer than six Quaker clockmakers are buried here at Adderbury – John Farden of Deddington, died 1786, Richard Gilkes of Adderbury, died 1787, Thomas Harris of Deddington, died 1797, Richard Tyler of Wallingford, died 1800, and Joseph and William Williams, both of Adderbury, who died in 1835 and 1862 respectively.

If we now approach the Meeting House itself, constructed of local coursed square marlstone with some ashlar dressings and wooden lintels, we notice ground floor windows on the east and west sides, with two further windows on the south side flanking the wide front door.  It is worth pausing to look at the detailing on the stone carving on the eaves to either side of the front elevation: they illustrate a point made by David Butler, who says:

“Despite the need for simplicity, early meeting houses were not crudely executed. The local craftsmen built as they were accustomed, decorating their work as they knew was needed for a reasonable degree of refinement”

Dormer windows are let into the roof, again on three sides, to provide illumination to the loft area. The date of construction, 1675, is shown in a panel on the chimney, although this feature is not original.

THE INTERIOR OF THE MEETING HOUSE

Quakers needed no altar and their worship did not include music, bible readings or a sermon, the features which give many nonconformist chapels their essential strucrure. This means that Quaker Meeting Houses can seem particularly lacking in architectural features, and this may be the visitor’s first impression of the interior of the Meeting House at Adderbury. Hubert Lidbetter’s history of Meeting Houses tends to confirm this:

“A plain whitened ceiling, plain plastered walls, likewise whitened, over plain deal panelling forming a back to a seat fixed round at least two sides of the room – that is a fair description of an early Friends Meeting House…. The panelling was almost always deal, unpolished and without mouldings … bare necessities and no more – forms or pews of simple design and more than doubtful comfort.”

As we look around it is indeed clear, as the same writer observes, that “the austerity of the Quaker way of living was mirrored not only in their dress and speech, but in their homes and places of worship, where they are enjoined ‘to choose what is simple and beautiful’”.

In the early days worshippers would meet here twice on a Sunday and once on a Wednesday. The times of afternoon meetings would be varied between summer and winter to ensure that they could take place in natural light.  Friends would come through the wide front door, the men and women would separate, each to their own side, then take their places on benches, facing a raised gallery or stand against the north wall opposite. The seats here were occupied by elders of the meeting, recorded ministers (Friends whose gifts for ministry were specially recognised by the Meeting) and occasionally visiting preachers or missionaries.

The raised gallery and the seats around the edge of the room, together with the stone flags of the floor are original features from the earliest days of the Meeting House. The free-standing pine benches in the centre of the room have come from the Meeting Houses in Banbury and Sibford. The pillars that support the gallery or loft, the flooring for the loft itself and the roof tiles and the lining of the roof were all replaced in the 1970s. Of the two watercolours on display, one, showing the interior, is a copy of the 1966 original by Mary Baker, which is held at Sibford Meeting House; the other, showing the exterior with adjacent cottages, is an original of 1831.

Tables, like the pleasant eighteenth century one now in the Meeting House, were  important in business meetings to enable the Clerk of the meeting to take minutes and draft documents for signature. The predecessor of the present table was venerable indeed, a gate-leg table which was used by George Fox at the opening of the Adderbury Meeting House in 1675. It remained in the Meeting House (together with three coffin stools) even after it was closed to regular meetings in 1914. In 1940, the Meeting House was taken over by the Rural District Council to house wartime evacuees from London. Although, then as now, there was no artificial light or running water in the building, cooking stoves were provided for these families. One day, two local women Friends visited the Meeting House to see how the evacuees were getting on. To their horror they saw someone putting a hot pan on the table and marking it. They promptly replaced it and took the original to the house of Sophie Buck in Church Lane. When Sophie Buck died in 1945, the table was included in her effects and put up for auction. Luckily two Banbury Friends were able to intervene and persuade the auctioneer that the table belonged to the Meeting House, by showing knowledge of that most traditional of things – the presence of a secret drawer, containing ink and a pad of Quaker forms! The table is now in Swarthmoor Hall in Cumbria.

The ground floor of the Meeting House (area  561 square feet) was designed to seat 102 Friends. The Meeting House would rarely have seen more than this number, but if further seating was needed, there was space for a further 60 attendees in the gallery or loft above, reached by the curving staircase on the left of the main room. The design of the loft at Adderbury is unusual, because so much of the upper area is floored in, leaving effectively only a well over the stand occupied by the elders. The reason for this is apparent from the first space we come to at the head of the stairs, since it is almost domestic in character, with, very unusually for early Meeting Houses, a fireplace. In fact, this was used for the women’s meeting. As is quite common in early Meeting Houses, the space could be rendered quite private either by mounting screens or by using a curtain or hanging to separate this area from the main Meeting House area below. In time, the space became too small for this purpose and, as we have seen, a separate building had to be provided. On one windowsill is now displayed the original exterior date plaque of 1675.

As you take in the atmosphere of this building with what the architectural historian John Summerson called its “endearing simplicity”, you may like to hear some Quaker voices of the past. First comes an account from Robert Barclay, like Bray D’Oyly a Quaker convert from the gentry, written in 1678, only three years after this Meeting House was built, of what you could expect to experience in a Quaker meeting in those very early days:

“There will be such a painful travail found in the soul, that it will even work upon the outward man, so that … the body will be greatly shaken, and many groans, sighs and tears …. Sometimes the Power of God will break forth into a whole meeting … and thereby trembling … will be upon most … which as the power of truth prevails, will from pangs and groans end with the sweet sound of thanksgiving and praise.”

Secondly, we can imagine, by contrast, a business meeting in the eighteenth century, when the evangelical years of George Fox were over. Much of the activity of Monthly Meetings at that time was taken up with the enquiries which were deemed necessary when a Friend moved away and wished to join another Monthly Meeting, or wished to get married, or on issues of general conduct. Here is a typical Minute:

“From our Monthly Meeting held at Adderbury for Banbury Division in the County of Oxford. To the Monthly Meeting of Friends to be held at Campden or elsewhere in that Division of the County of Gloucester. Dear Friends, whereas Elizabeth Franklin, a member hereof, but is now removed into the compass of yours, a certificate has been requested of this meeting on her behalf. Therefore, this may certify, after due enquiry being made, it appears she was of sober life and conversation, and free from marriage entanglements. As such, we recommend her to your tender regard ….”

Finally, since the Adderbury Meeting House is still used for Quaker worship, here is an account of a contemporary Quaker meeting for worship:

“A Quaker meeting creates a space of gathered stillness. We come together where we can listen to the promptings of truth and love in our hearts, which we understand as rising from God. Our meetings are based on silence: a silence of waiting and listening. Most meetings last for about an hour.

The silence is different from the silence of solitary meditation, as the listening and waiting in a Quaker meeting is a shared experience in which worshippers seek to experience God for themselves. The seating is usually arranged in a circle or a square to help people be aware of one another and conscious of the fact that they are worshipping together as equals. There are no priests or ministers.

The silence may be broken if someone present feels called to say something which will deepen and enrich the worship. Anyone is free to speak, pray or read aloud if they feel strongly led to do so. This breaks the silence for the moment but does not interrupt it.

In the quietness of the meeting, we can become aware of a deep and powerful spirit of love and truth, transcending our ordinary, day-to-day experiences. This sense of direct contact with the divine is at the heart of the Quaker way of worship and nourishes Quakers in the rest of their daily lives.”

ADDERBURY QUAKERS FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ONWARDS

The story of the Adderbury Quakers from the death of William Williams, the last Adderbury clockmaker, in 1862, to the end of the nineteenth century is unfortunately one of continuous decline. In this, the Adderbury meeting was partly sharing the fate of Quaker congregations nationally; as one study starkly puts it:

“While the population of England had trebled between 1715 and 1851, the number of Quaker adherents had more than halved.”

One cause of this decline in numbers related to the rules that prevented Friends from marrying outside the Quaker community, and the Quaker movement began to relax these restrictions. But in Adderbury, there was the additional problem of agricultural decline. An 1806 report says:

“Almost all the Quakers were originally in the country … but this order of things is reversing fast. They are flocking into the towns and abandoning agricultural pursuits.”

Attendances at Adderbury meetings had shrunk to an average of 12 in 1851, were down to 4 by 1909 and the Meeting House closed in 1914. One remaining Adderbury Friend, however, Sophie Fanny Buck, whose gravestone we have already seen, continued her personal worship at the Meeting House, something she did, frequently wearing traditional Quaker dress, until her death in 1945.

Paradoxically, as local and especially rural numbers declined, so the reputation of Quakerism grew on the national stage. Their honesty and fair dealing in business and trade was even more appreciated as Quaker firms such as Fry and Cadbury became of national importance, Quaker probity played an important role in banking and insurance, and the Quakers’ long-standing pacifism gained increased respect. Quakers were involved in adult education as well as in evangelical work abroad and charitable activities at home. A Quaker residential home for the elderly, East House, was maintained in Adderbury from the late 1960s until its closure in 2008.

The Adderbury Meeting House is currently (2014) used for Quaker meetings four times a year, with a special meeting once a year which takes the form of a lecture on a Quaker theme of general interest. There has been considerable debate of recent years about the best way to secure the future of Adderbury’s historic Meeting House. We hope that the present Guide will at least help to alert people to the important part of the village heritage that the Meeting House represents.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This guide has benefited from the following works on Quaker Meeting Houses generally: David M. Butler (1995), Quaker Meeting Houses, Quaker Tapestry Booklets; Hubert Lidbetter (1961), The Friends Meeting House, William Sessions Ltd., York;  Kenneth H. Southall (1974), Our Quaker Heritage: early meeting houses, Friends Home Service Committee in association  with Sessions of York.  In addition to the standard histories of Quakerism and Dissent generally, we have found the following local studies particularly useful:  Nicholas Allen (2012), “The Doylys of Adderbury and their Quaker Meeting House, Cake and Cock Horse, Spring 2012; Martin Greenwood (2013), Pilgrim’s Progress Revisited: The Nonconformists of Banburyshire 1662-2012, The Wychwood Press;  Jack V. Wood (1991), Some Rural Quakers, William Sessions Ltd., York. We are grateful to Nick Allen for encouraging us to write this guide, for supplying material and for guidance throughout its writing. We would like to thank Janice Johnson for agreeing to read the manuscript and for suggesting improvements. Any remaining errors are our own.

Phil Mansell
Fiona Gow

William Cole was brought up in Adderbury from birth to the age of sixteen, a son of the local schoolmaster. He remains of interest to us today because in his twenties he became “the most famous simpler of his age”, a simpler being a herbalist. This is quite some claim, given that William Cole was an almost exact contemporary of a herbalist much better known to us today, Nicolas Culpeper.

The claim about William’s fame comes in a volume compiled by Anthony Wood (1632- 95), called Athenae Oxoniensis [roughly, the Oxford Athens], in which he set out to provide biographies of all the writers and bishops who had received their education to date at Oxford University, documenting the lives and publications of over 1500 writers associated with the University, creating an indispensable record for historians.

This huge work went alongside other books of his which charted the history of the university, its colleges and officers, and which described the university’s buildings. Wood’s work was published in the 1680s. He has been described as “to Restoration Oxford what Pepys was to Restoration London”, although the two men were very different in character, with Wood being a cantankerous and vituperative character who fell out with everyone sooner or later.

This is what Wood has to say about William Cole:

“William Cole, son of Joh. Cole of Adderbury in Oxfordshire bach of div and sometime Fellow of New College, was born and educated in grammar learning there, entered one of the clerks of New College in 1642 and soon after was made one of the portionists commonly called post-masters of Merton Coll. By his mother’s brother John French one of the senior fellows of that house and public registrar of the University.”

Wood also mentions the older brother of William, called John after his father, who was born about 1624 and who went on to make a reputation for himself as a translator of French. The Dictionary of National Biography indeed says that William was one of at least three sons and five daughters of John Coles. John the father was a bachelor of divinity and one of the three seventeenth-century Adderbury grammar school masters who were university graduates. He is remembered for having been particularly zealous about the building and its repair. William’s mother’s maiden name was French, and since John Cole senior’s predecessor as master was also called French, the possibility exists that William’s mother was a daughter of this French. As far as we know, the Cole family lived in the school house, part of the grammar school building. The whole was described by Warden Woodward in 1659 as “nothing but a Schole, a Schoolehouse & about 6 or 7 roomes above staires … A Barne built by one Mr. Coles, a Little court before the doore etc.” The rooms above, Warden Woodward judged, “might be made good, one of them doth want fflooreing!”

We can assume that the accommodation for the master and his family was not particularly spacious, since a later schoolmaster, Mr Taylor, made an unsuccessful bid for some common land to build a house on. Nor can we imagine that the schoolmaster was particularly well paid. The same Mr Taylor asked that his wages be paid to him quarterly rather than half-yearly “the better to maintain his family”. This was refused on the grounds that Christopher Rawlins had specified both the amount and the timing of the payments to the master – namely “Twentie Nobles at the Annunciation & Twentie Nobles at Michaelmas”.

Wood says that William was “educated in grammar learning” at the School and then proceeded to New College as a clerk. These words would have had a meaning for Wood’s audience which we can’t catch nowadays. The “grammar learning” would, of course, have been had at the Boys School, founded and endowed by the vicar of Adderbury, Christopher Rawlins, in his will of 7^th August, 1589, opened in 1599 and hence only some thirty years old when William was a pupil. The purpose of the school was to teach grammar to boys who had already had some elementary education, since all scholars were expected to read, write and cast accounts to gain entry to the school. Nick Allen, in Adderbury, A Thousand Years of History, tells us about the curriculum and the rules of conduct for the school, basing his account on the archives of New College, which was from the outset responsible for the administration the of the school.

“The education given at the Boys School was comprehensive, giving the boys a good grounding in the basics… By the time a boy was 12 … he should have been [in addition] instructed in religious knowledge, Church of England liturgy, higher rules of arithmetic , the rules of simple compound numeration (fractions), writing from dictation and memory, multiplication tables and the outlines of geography. When a boy was due to leave the Boys School he would also have studied the outlines of ecclesiastical history, Latin, English grammar, composition, algebra, mapping, mental arithmetic, bookkeeping, penmanship and mensuration.

Several sets of rules for the conduct of the Boys School are still extant … A summary of one of the earliest sets, dated between 1648 and 1658, states: ‘That the hours shall be from 7 am to 11 am and from 1 pm to 4 pm. Each morning boys are required to say a prayer, a psalm and a collect, and another prayer and collect at the end of the day. Saturday afternoon to be given over for the teaching of the Catechism. Scholars are expected to attend Church on Sundays and behave in an orderly manner.”

Once William entered New College in 1642 he came under the influence of his uncle, John French, who was a senior member of Merton College and Registrar of the University. John French obtained for William a post of “Portioner” or “Post master” at Merton College, a position which apparently attracted a grant from the college. French also encouraged William to qualify as a public notary, so that William would be able to stand in for John as University Registrar. By all accounts the support of a bright youngster, especially one indebted to you, would have been welcome to John French, because elsewhere Wood says of him that, although he was a fine scholar “he was a careless man” and neglected some of his duties.

At the same time William became interested in biology and botany. This was the time when Jacob Bobart was gradually forming the first University collection of plants in the new Physic Garden, the catalogue of which was produced in 1648. When he eventually came to publish his own botanical studies William would acknowledge the help he received from “Master Bobart” and particularly from his “much honoured friend” Master William Brown of Magdalene College (1629-1678). Brown eventually had a very distinguished academic career at Magdalene, but in the 1640s was known for his keenness for field botany, ranging widely over the Oxford region and as far afield as Northamptonshire and Sussex in search of plants.

So far so good, you might think, for the young man from Adderbury. But then in 1650 things began to go disastrously wrong. First, his uncle died and was buried by his stall in Merton College Chapel. Then, if you like, the elephant came into the room. Because the 1640s were not the simplest or most auspicious time to be up at Oxford. This was the time of the first Civil War and Oxford was a royalist stronghold and the headquarters of the King’s forces, – and the dwelling place of the King and Queen and their household.

After the execution of King Charles I and the end of the first Civil War, Parliament turned its attention to Oxford and to its troublesome University in particular. Parliament set up a Commission, and the Commisssion was charged with asking all at the University two questions:

• Do you acknowledge the supremacy of Parliament over the (previously autonomous) University
• In your personal and communal worship will you follow the precepts of the Directory of Public Worship

The University tried to ignore the Commission, a strategy which worked quite well at first, but eventually Parliament would not be denied and there were wholesale expulsions, with staff replacements drafted in from other universities. New College fared particularly badly, with the Warden, forty fellows and numerous scholars expelled, William Coles included.

William acted quite swiftly, it seems. He took his degree in February 1651 and later that year withdrew from Oxford, moving to live instead downstream at Putney. Why he chose Putney is not clear – there doesn’t seem to be a New College connection, for example. But if we take William to be a royalist, a traditionalist in religion and a scholar deeply interested in botany, then we may be able to make some guesses. First, there were a number of important Royalist sympathisers who lived by the banks of the Thames to the ewst of London. The most important was Christian, Duchess of Devonshire. So active was she in the Royalist cause and so seemingly immune from prosecution as a result of her great wealth and willingness to bribe every court in the land that she soon became almost synonymous with the Royalist cause. General Monk is said to have informed her in advance of his intention to return Charles II to the throne.

The other inhabitant of the Putney/Richmond area at the time was Bishop Duppa, another staunch Royalist, a great favourite of Charles I, and tutor to the future Charles II. Duppa was deeply involved with the King in the run-up to his execution, and read the text of a publication, “Eikon Basilike” to Charles at Carisbrooke Castle. This text was later published only ten days after the King’s execution, and, written as a diary in a simple, moving and starightforward manner aims to show a “Portraiture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitude and Sufferings”. Despite official disapproval, the work was hugely popular.

Duppa’s life had been involved throughout with Oxford, the King and the Laudian Church of England. He had been a fellow of All Souls, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford 1632, Dean of Christ Church, Chaplain to Charles 1 from 1634 and tutor to his two sons, Bishop of Chichester 1638 and Bishop of Salisbury from 1641. Uniquely in Cromwellian England he held on to his bishopric throughout the 1640s and 1650s.

One of the reasons for Duppa’s survival may well be that he lived as much as possible out of the public eye. It is interesting to read the words of a letter he wrote to a friend in the early 1650s, because of the picture they give of the trials of everyday life in the Royalist camp if you didn’t have the prestige and resources of the Duchess of Devonshire. It may well be that we also hear in this an echo of what life was like at that time for other royalist sympathisers and traditionalists in religion, not least, of course, for William Coles.

‘I wrote you word in my last that I had confined my self like an anchoret within my own walls, but this being not under the religion of a vow, I was the very next day drawn out by the importunity of friends as far as Fulham; and it was well that I was not out of the compass of my circle, for the evill spirits were abroad that day, and seeking whom they should devour, seas’d upon som guilty of my faults, loyalty, and religion.

But I thank God, having considered all things, I have sett up my rest, and
whether I escape, or suffer, I hope I shall keep that evenness of mind, as to be aequally affected to either… yet I shall strive to be so much a Christian, as neither to please nor displease myself too much with whatsoever shall happen. Those few words, “Thy will be don,” settle the soul more than the loadstone can possibly operate upon the needle…’

‘I could heartily wish (if the conditions of the times might give you leave) that you fill’d a room among us, but how wide soever the lines of the circumference may be, yet meet they shall in the center. We are yet suffer’d to offer up the publick prayers and Sacrifice of the Church, though it be under private roofs, nor do I hear of any for the present either disturb’d or troubled for doing it. When the persecution goes higher, we must be content to go lower, and to serve God as the antient Christians did, in dens, and caves, and deserts. For all the world is His chapel, and from what corner of it soever, we lift up our devotions to Him, He is ready to listen to the lowest whispers of them.’

Looking at William’s move from the point of view of his biological interests, it seems probable that from his base to the west of London he took advantage of the expertise of William How, who William refers to as “Doctor How, one of the masters of the Physick Garden at Westminster”, the forerunner of the Chelsea Physick Garden, “one of the most famous botanists of my time”. William How had been born in 1620, went to Merchant Taylors’ School, graduated BA and MA from St John’s College, Oxford, then entered on the study of medicine. This he interrupted to take up arms in the king’s cause, and for his loyalty was promoted to the command of a troop of horse. On the decline of the royal fortunes he resumed his medical profession, and practised in London until his death in 1656. Howe published among other titles Phytologia Britannica (1650), which is the earliest work on botany restricted to the plants of this island, and is a very full catalogue for the time.

No doubt with How’s support and with help of How’s gardener at Westminster, William Coles himself produced the two works which led Wood later to call him the “greatest simpler of his age”. In 1656 he produced The Art of Simpling, or an Introduction to the Knowledge and Gathering of Plants, London, while in 1657 appeared Adam in Eden, or Nature’s Paradise. The full title of the second book gives a clear idea of the contents, and of why the books would prove to be popular, giving as they do a guide in English through the often confusing terminology typically used in scientific textbooks:

Adam in Eden, or, Natures paradise, the history of plants, fruits, herbs and flowers with their several names, whether Greek, Latin or English, the places where they grow, their descriptions and kinds, their times of flourishing and decreasing, as also their several signatures, anatomical appropriations, and particular physical vertues, together with necessary observations on the seasons of planting, and gathering of our English simples with directions how to preserve them in their compositions or otherwise … For the herbalists greater benefit, there is annexed a Latin and English table of the several names of simples, with another more particular table of the diseases, and their cures, treated of in this so necessary a work /by William Coles …

William’s books were immediately popular and remain so today. The Art of Simpling, for example, went through six editions in its first year, and saw eighteen further editions between then and 2000. Adam in Eden went through 20 editions between 1657 and 1962. In the face of these sorts of figures we must suppose that it was his publishing activities that supported William Coles during this period.

Unfortunately for William’s reputation as an academic and scientist, however, as soon as he turned his attention away from the practicalities of the gathering and use of herbs, and considered instead the biological and botanical theory behind the practice, William showed himself to be rather traditional and backward-looking, relying on classical and medieval theories rather than taking part in the growing rational and scientific debate that would see, for example, moves to establish the Royal Society from 1660 onwards. Indeed, William was happy to look for theological rather than scientific explanations. He believed that God created the world for man’s benefit, and that God gave plants particular attributes from which we can deduce the use to which they can be put in medicine. This is known as the Doctrine of Signatures. In the words of William himself:

“The mercy of God which is over all his workes…hath not onely stemped upon them (as upon every man) a distinct forme, but also given them particular signatures, whereby a man may read even in legible characters the use of them… Hounds Tongue hath a forme not much different from its name which will tye the tongues of houndes so that they shall not barke at you…”.

In other words, he believed that herbs resemble various parts of the body and can be used to treat ailments of that part of the body and do so deliberately as part of God’s mercy to man. Thus, walnuts were good for curing head ailments because in his opinion, “they Have the perfect Signatures of the Head”. Regarding Hypericum, he wrote, “The little holes whereof the leaves of Saint Johns wort are full, doe resemble all the pores of the skin and therefore it is profitable for all hurts and wounds that can happen thereunto.” The doctrine of signatures is ancient, going back at least to the time of Dioscurides and Galen. But it was William Coles who gave the fullest account of this in modern times.

So, as the 1650s go on, we have William Coles, a successful author of popular science, but not one of the new breed of scientist who would shortly establish the Royal Society. 1660 came, and with it the restoration of the monarchy. Bishop Duppa benefited almost immediately, becoming in that year the Bishop of Winchester, the third most important see in the country after the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York as well as Lord Almoner. And who should be appointed his Secretary in the same year? No other than the man from Adderbury, William Coles.

This is not quite the happy end you might imagine, however, since both Duppa and Coles only lived another two years, both dying in 1662. Such was the importance to the new King, Charles II, of Duppa, his old tutor and the confidant of his father, that, learning of Duppa’s final illness, the King came himself to Winchester to kneel at the feet of the bishop and ask his blessing before he died. It would be good to feel that William Coles lived at least to see this extraordinary scene and that he gained some comfort from the fact that the world as he saw it had resumed its right course after the troubles of the 1640s and 1650s.

Phil Mansell
May 2020

The first known mention of Adderbury in writing is contained in an Anglo-Saxon Charter dated c 995 – a little over 1,000 years ago.

Wynflaed, a very wealthy woman with possible royal connections, lived in Berkshire; she owned many properties and manors with thousands of acres of land in the South and South-West of England. Sometime around the year AD 995, she wished to make provision for Edward, her grandson’s, future. She would have used the services of a scribe or a clerk in holy orders to write her statement of intent or charter as official documents were known.

Her instructions to her son Edmund stated: ‘And if it is God’s will that Edward be old enough in his father’s lifetime to hold land then I ask Edmund to relinquish to him one of two estates, either Coleshill or Adderbury’ (Coleshill is in Berkshire). Later on in her charter she wishes her son Edmund, on his death, to ensure that he passes on to Edward both estates.

This, then, is the first known written mention of the name Adderbury. This charter is written in Early English (Anglo-Saxon): the name Adderbury actually appears on the charter as ‘EADBURGGEBYRIG’ Eadburgge’s – byrig. The suffix ‘byrig’ was the Saxon term for a fortified settlement. The Saxon nobility had the right, by birth, to fortify their properties and settlements. These fortifications could be just a ditch, strong paling or something more elaborate. One needs to remember that wild animals such as wolves and wild boar and gangs of landless men proliferated in Saxon and Norman England; so some form of defence for a settlement was a necessity. This Saxon suffix has morphed into the modern ‘bury’ and, as we all know, there are many places in England whose names are rounded-off with a ‘bury’.

Incidentally, there were in the 8th and 9th centuries any number of royal/noble women who all sported the name Edburgga. Bicester’s parish church to this day is dedicated to a St Edburg. The daughter of King Offa of Mercia was named Edburga.

Nick Allen
2020

John Hone was born in Adderbury in 1844 and lived with his parents, William and Mary Ann, plus five siblings in Parsons Street. William, his father, was a plush weaver, a skilled occupation. Nevertheless, their family circumstances were very humble. It is possible that John might have had some education at the Boys Grammar School on The Green.

By 1856 John, at just 12 years of age, was working as a carrier, a job usually performed by men. John started the hard way by carrying a basket and walking to Banbury to purchase goods for local residents that they were unable to buy in the village. Long before the advent of the railway and omnibuses (as they were known) the only way an ordinary villager could obtain goods from the outside world was via a village carrier. They took surplus produce to be sold in town, even livestock, collected items of clothing, material and bits and pieces for sewing and picked up prescriptions, charging a small fee for their efforts.

Carriers usually had a horse and cart or a trap that could transport someone who might have a hospital appointment. They would be busiest on market days. Banbury had two markets– on a Thursday and a Saturday. The Market Place and Horsefair was where the carriers usually congregated – there is a report of one market day in the mid-1800s when there were 300 carriers’ carts parked in Banbury. They brought a great deal of business to the town. Adderbury had at least two or three carriers operating at any one time.

Hone’s business prospered such that he was able to purchase a donkey to carry him and a pannier to Market, then later a cart to go with the donkey. Eventually, he was able to sport a horse and cart to do his business. By about 1880 when he was in his mid-thirties, he married and raised two children, Elizabeth and Horace. By 1891 the Hones had moved to West Adderbury, to live at The Leys just off Tanners Lane (or White Hart Lane as it would have been known as then). Hone was working as a butcher at that point and doing well enough for Elizabeth to have acquired an education to be a school teacher.

The Hones were Wesleyan Methodists and their little chapel at the bottom of Chapel Lane was only able to house 22 congregants. At that time the congregation was growing rapidly so in October 1882 the elders made the decision to build a new and much larger building, a church. Hone by then was able to purchase for £235 the group of five cottages that were sited on the corner of the High Street and Chapel Lane. He had them demolished then he offered the site to the Methodists to build their new church on. Ten years later, on 25th October 1892, the foundation stones were laid. Towards the end of that day the chairman read out the financial statement and said that they had already collected £624.3s.3d towards the £800 needed; by the time the church was built all £800 had been collected. At the opening of the new church on 2nd May, 1893 the chairman remarked that it was rare thing for a church to be fully paid for by the time it was built. To round off that day, the chairman and Hone gave sufficient money to buy a new harmonium.

John’s uncle, Henry Hone, who also lived in the village, had been working as a butcher, but changed horses in 1890 to take over, with his wife Sarah Ann, the running of the Red Lion on The Green. This they did for four years. It is possible that John took over the butchery business for this period. In the 1901 census John Hone is shown as a retired carrier at only 56 years of age. He died in 1915.

The Methodist Church’s schoolroom has been the home to Adderbury History Association for nearly thirty-six years – I wonder how many of the eagle-eyed members have spotted a row of small, square, white foundation stones set into the front wall, about fifteen inches above ground level They have the following names carved into them: Garrett, Hone, Morris, Edmunds, Mewburn, Rowell, Horace and Elizabeth Hone and Kirby: the names of the benefactors and generous donors.

Nick Allen
2020

The Garage

I suppose I must have been about three years old when we moved to a cottage on the main road a few yards opposite was what was known as Tommy Thacker’s Garage and it is one of my earliest memories. The House was at one time thatched. I used to watch the swallows as they disappeared into their nests under the eaves to feed their young. They came back about the same time every year.

Thomas William Thacker, born 1886 was the son of Thomas Thacker farrier and blacksmith and his wife Fanny. According to the 1901 census at the age of 15 he was living with his parents, sister Minnie aged 11, brother Rowland. aged 8, and sister Kathleen aged 3. All the family were living at Bodicote although they seem to have originated from Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire. In January or February 1911 aged 24 he married, Edith Maude Clarke daughter of Joseph Clarke from Emscote Warwickshire. She was age 34.

On the 1911 census Tommy was listed as a cabinet maker working at Stone’s box factory in Banbury and living at Frog lane Bodicote. Their only son William was born in December 1911. For what must have been a few years Tom had a cycle repair shop in the yard at the back of the Red Lion. It is not known if it was a full or part time business and it seems to have closed during the first world war. It is not certain if he was in the army in WW1. There are two listings of a Thomas William Thacker serving in the R.A.S.C. but neither may be him. He probably set up the garage business in the early 1920s and it about 40years.

I seem to remember Mrs. Thacker as a short slightly stocky lady. She always wore her hair in a bun with a flowered overall over an assortment of cardigans according to the weather. She was a very hardy person and every morning, about eight or earlier, we would hear the clonk of metal as she unlocked the doors of the petrol pumps. Petrol was dispensed by winding a handle. When a gallon had been pumped through, then the handle was wound back ready for the next gallon. It was possible to move a clip if only half a gallon was required. A dial face showed a count of the sales. The hose would swing out over the car much as they still do today.

I never recall either of them leaving the premises or joining in any village affairs, except maybe for Mrs. Thacker popping the few yards down to the Co-op. At that time there was a milkman, baker, butcher and fish man who came round from door to door. I remember she would talk to my Mother whenever we were passing. They were very proud of their son who, after University went abroad collecting antiquities from Egypt and the far east. Later he was appointed as a professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages. Many of his finds are displayed in a special room called Thacker’s room in the Oriental Museum belonging to Durham University. There he became a teacher creating a school of study and a research centre for the study and teaching of not only the language and literature of these countries but their culture. In March 1939 Bill married Kathleen Hawthorn. They had one son and lived at 28 Church Street Durham. Bill died in April 1984.

I seem to remember Tom as a tall well spoken man. He had a small moustache and a stiff leg which I think was due to rheumatism. At one time the family adopted a stray black dog and Tommy walked it down Long Wall twice a day and he said the walking helped his bad leg. Each morning he would be seen rolling back the large door that housed his workshop. There were several small windows along the top of the door. Inside was his work bench, tools and a miniature hardware store, spare tyres and inner tubes for bicycles, puncture outfits, small tins of oil and black enamel for domestic use, sticky tapes, screws, bolts (on which he could make and cut a thread and find a nut to fit) and nails. In fact he kept anything that would save a trip into Banbury.

Out in the yard there was a building where he kept large drums of paraffin which he sold by the gallon and at some time he set up a machine to charge car batteries and accumulators which were needed to power early wirelesses. Large bottles of acid were needed for this purpose and one had to be very careful when carrying the accumulators home. Spills could burn skin or holes in clothing; most had a carrying handle. There was a black and a red cap on the top to loosen to attach the connectors for charging.

All the repairs for cars and cycles were done on the footpath at the front of the building. He had what was known as a sledge made from slats of polished wood with a leather headrest and mounted on wheels. It must have been painful for Tom at times with his stiff leg to lie on it and lever himself underneath the cars.

During the WW2 one of the petrol pumps was taken over by the army. With just the handle to work the pump it took quite some time to fill up the big army lorries and bren gun carriers. One day we saw some of the highland division lorries filling up. They were on their way to the second front. The soldiers were all sitting under our garden wall waiting and we took them cups of tea.

Cars were a magnet for all the young lads and they could be seen peering under the bonnets when one was being attended to. Tom often chose one to help him on Saturdays and school holidays. The last one I remember was Bernard Locke the policeman’s son. A low wall divided the yard from the footpath in front of the pumps and was a regular meeting place for a group of young chaps on Sunday afternoons when the garage was closed. I never heard of them doing any damage they just used to sit and smoke their woodbines.

Although I cannot say we had a personal relationship with the Thacker’s my mum and dad used to talk to them a lot.

Tom once gave my small son a wooden replica of a lawnmower painted green and red, perfect in detail except I do not think the curved blades would have actually cut grass. My son loved it he called it his mowlawner. He was also very interested in clocks and had a collection of coins which sadly were stolen when there was a break in during the early 1950’s, something I believe he found hard to get over

Not long after we were married they gave us two big comfortable easy chairs. As we moved away we still heard their news from my parents. Edith died on December 18^th 1961 aged 85. I do not think Tom did much afterwards and eventually went to live with his sister. A near neighbour used to bring him back from time to time. Tom died on February 14^th 1973. He and Edith are remembered with a grave stone in Adderbury Cemetery.

Rhoda Woodward

Late in 1950 John Burgess Wilson, who was later to find fame as the prolific writer Anthony Burgess, moved to 4, Water Lane, Adderbury with his wife Lynne. He had accepted a post as a junior English master at Banbury Grammar School, and a loan from Lynne’s father had enabled the couple to get a mortgage on the cottage. Although Burgess would write thirty-three novels and more than twenty-five works of non-fiction in his life, including two volumes of autobiography and three volumes of essays, in his Adderbury days as John Wilson he was only at the very beginning of his writing career.

There are many problems to writing about Anthony Burgess: there are two biographies which take very different approaches to their subject and an autobiography which sometimes prefers a good story to the strict truth. But there is one thing on which everybody seems to agree, and that is that Wilson was a very good teacher. He was required to teach English Language in the lower forms and English Literature higher up the school. Audrey Smith, in those days Audrey Froggatt, was both a neighbour of Wilson’s in Adderbury and his pupil at the Grammar School: she was in the second form in 1950; in the third form Wilson was her English teacher and in the fourth form he was her Form Master. She says he was a very modern teacher, very relaxed, who never sat behind his desk. He never had any difficulty in getting people to listen; he was softly spoken with a beautiful voice. He was willing to diversify his lessons: he didn’t just teach English grammar, he introduced the class to Esperanto and to the Cyrillic alphabet. He had his pupils read Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”), George Orwell (“1984”) and Evelyn Waugh in class and then discussed the books with them. In school he wore a tatty gown; outside he had a rather hippy style and wore corduroys and baggy sweaters. He was always rather scruffy.

Other opinions from higher up the school have been collected by Andrew Biswell, his biographer (The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, Picador 2005) and confirm that, as a school teacher Burgess was almost universally well liked:

“… Jackie Adkins remembers ‘ He was my teacher and I thought he was great. He used to wear outrageous clothes – gaudy waistcoats and a terrible ginger suit. His fingers were stained with nicotine.’ Another pupil at the school, Susie Kerridge, found his enthusiasm for literature infectious … and she attributes her pleasure in reading to Burgess’s inspiring presence in the classroom …. Sonia Blinkhorn, who studies under Burgess in the sixth form, says: ‘We regarded him as extremely clever. He eWe regarded him as extremely clever. He exerted control because he was unpredictable. He gave us an awareness of the joy of learning and made us feel good about English literature.’ She remembers his lessons on the metaphysical poets as a ‘huge adventure’”.

Wilson’s efforts in the classroom were supported by his enthusiasm both for grammar school education generally and for the particular staff at Banbury, which he described in his autobiography as “good … a staff with brilliant side-talents which produced brilliant children”. Wilson was opposed to the growth of secondary modern schools. He felt that grammar schools were “the backbone of bourgeois culture and gave the community its plays, concerts, even operas, as well as its better citizens.”

Although he did do some journalism for the Banbury Guardian, Wilson’s contribution to the cultural life of Adderbury and Banburyshire was much more as a producer of plays and as a musician than as a writer. He claimed, however, in his autobiography to have written a novel in 1953 in the “box-like study-second-bedroom” of his Adderbury cottage. This was based on his wartime experiences in Gibraltar and would eventually be published in 1965 as “A Vision of Battlements”. In 1950 he formed a group, the Adderbury Players, (“few of them living in Adderbury” according to Wilson himself) and put on, among other plays, O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock”, T.S.Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes”, Christopher Fry’s “A Phoenix Too Frequent”, and Aldous Huxley’s “The Giaconda Smile”. The productions took place in The Institute, Adderbury, although there was sometimes a tour to neighbouring villages. As a musician, Wilson composed instrumental and vocal pieces for talented pupils at the grammar school, a Partita for the school string orchestra, incidental music for a school production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and worked on the libretto for an intended opera. But it was during his time in Adderbury that he reports himself to have given up on the idea of becoming a professional composer.

Wilson seems to have been very ambivalent about life in Adderbury. On the one hand, he could write in his autobiography that:

“There were times, especially in spring when the may appeared, when the life of an Oxfordshire village with … seven pubs was idyllic enough. Long country walks with a dog. Cider in the midst of a Midlands dialect. Little money, but money was not everything.”

On the other hand, it is clear that the bohemian lifestyle that Wilson and his wife went in for was alien to the village. His wife in particular was felt to be scandalous in her drinking and her behaviour generally – “and even after half a century her behaviour is still the subject of village gossip” according to Andrew Biswell. Audrey Smith calls Lynne Wilson “a nice friendly Welsh lady with a Siamese cat”, but even she has to admit that when Lynne and John would come round to their house occasionally for a social evening, while John Wilson would play the piano so that everyone could sing carols, Lynne would scandalise the company by drinking a whole bottle of port and insisting on singing “On Ilkley Moor bah t’at” all the way through although no one else knew it. This background disapproval presumably combined with the feeling that, as Wilson expressed it in his autobiography:

“The danger of becoming settled at a provincial grammar school lay in habituation to the satisfaction of local achievements – well-produced plays which London never heard about, speech and drama festivals that London actors condescended to judge … I seemed likely to stay on at Banbury Grammar School until I was sixty-five, with lowered artistic sights, poor, vaguely discontented … bullying myself into believing I was happy.”

Wilson began to apply for jobs elsewhere, and eventually, under rather strange circumstances, was offered and accepted a post in Malaya, to teach English at a school sometimes known as “the Eton of Asia” at a much increased salary.

When Wilson and his wife set sail from Southampton on 5^th August 1954, having disposed of their cottage and sold most of their possessions, it should have been the end of his connection with this part of the world. But in 1960, having returned from abroad and now writing under the name of Anthony Burgess, Wilson published a novel, “The Worm and the Ring”, which narrated events at a school which was clearly related to his time at Banbury Grammar School. There were parallels with characters at the real school and one, the school secretary Gwendoline Bustin, considered herself libelled by the book. She was shown as pursuing the headmaster and characterised as “the sort of woman who should have got married ages ago … just pitiable … suppressing an old maid’s excitement” and as “definitely unbalanced, the sort who might shout out dirty words under an anaesthetic”. She went to law and Wilson’s publisher withdrew the novel and pulped the unsold remainder. While there was a great deal of sympathy and support for Wilson (“We felt Gwendoline Buston had got her come-uppance”, Audrey Smith remembers), the local and national scandal that resulted brought Wilson’s connection with Adderbury and Banburyshire to a definite and far from pleasant end.

Phil Mansell

SAD AFFAIRS:

A Century of Stories about the Oxford Canal at Adderbury, taken from Jackson’s Oxford Journal

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Sat Nov 26^th 1808, Issue 2900

A few days since an inquisition was taken at Adderbury, before Mr Gough, one of the coroners of this county, on view of the body of Henry George, who was drowned in the navigation at Nell Bridge; and it appears, from the account given by his companion, that suddenly stopping his horse, as the boat entered the lock, the night being very dark, he got too near the edge of the bank, which gave way and he fell into the water. Jurors’ verdict, accidental death.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, October 16^th, 1824

At Adderbury, on view of the body of William Wilkins, a child about two years old, who being left in the coal yard, near the canal, fell into it and was drowned. Verdict: accidental death

Jackson’s Oxford Journal June 9^th 1827

On Tuesday last Mary Wise, a single woman, between 30 and 40 years of age, left her home for the purpose of going to Boddicot [sic], and was afterwards found drowned in the Oxford Canal. A bonnet on the hedge and pattens near the spot attracted the notice of two boys who gave information to some labourers, and after some time her body was found near a brick bridge in the parish of Boddicot. An inquest was held before Mr Gough and a verdict of insanity was returned by the jury

Jackson’s Oxford Journal April 3^rd 1841

An inquest was holden at the Three Pigeons at Neithrop, on Monday last, before J. Churchill Esq., one of the county coroners, on the body of Martha Elliot, aged 50, wife of Alexander Elliot of Adderbury. It appeared that the unfortunate woman, who had been in a desponding way for 18 months, left her home about two o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday last, and before 6 o’clock was found drowned in that part of the Oxford Canal which runs through Hardwick Farm, upwards of four miles from her home; but there being no evidence to show how she came in the water, the jury returned a verdict of found drowned.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal 27^th March 11th  1848

FATAL DISASTER AT THE CANAL BRIDGE BETWEEN ADDERBURY AND AYNHOE

On Tuesday last an inquest was held at Nell Bridge Wharf in the parish of Adderbury, before J Churchill Esq, one of the coroners for Oxfordshire, on view of the body of Elizabeth Townsend of Adderbury, aged 78, who was killed on the previous Saturday when walking on the turnpike road between Adderbury and Aynhoe, and near the canal bridge. From the depositions it appeared the deceased, who was staying with her son, Richard Townsend of Nell Bridge, canal foreman, was out for a walk on Saturday afternoon by the side of the road and near to the canal. Joseph Fisher, boatman for Mr Robert Farmer of Oxford was on his way from Banbury to Heyford with the Tantivy laden with coal. On arriving at the canal bridge he, instead of unfastening the boat rope as he is required by the laws of the Canal Company, allowed the horse to ascend the turnpike road, and go down into the towing-path again, with the boat cord attached. The cord was consequently across the road, and was prevented from lying flat on the ground by the parapets of the bridge. At the time, John Auger, servant to the Rev John Ballard, staying at Woodeaton, came up on horseback.

Fisher told him to stay while he unfastened the rope, and Auger pulled up. At this instant Thomas Huxford, servant to E Ethelstone Esq, staying at the Crown Hotel Bicester, who was on his way home from Chipping Warden on a hack which his master had ridden to cover, came along at a furious rate, the horse having bolted with him and become unmanageable. Fisher and Auger both called to him to stop, but he could not manage the horse, and he went over the bridge; the force of the horse against the rope broke it in two, and that portion of it attached to the mast flew off from the force into the road, striking the deceased on the neck and face, and so injuring her as to cause her death before the arrival of John Griffin Esq, surgeon of Adderbury, who was quickly on the spot. Mr G described the injuries, which were sufficient to cause death. It appeared that Huxford did not see the rope nor the unfortunate woman till after the disaster, and that he stopped his horse as soon as he could; that he went back and stayed some time, and that he voluntarily attended the inquest. He expressed great regret at the occurrence, as did the boatman, who was in attendance.

The Jury, of which Mr James Garner was foreman, after a consultation, returned a verdict of “Accidental death”. Fisher was censured and was given to understand that he would be proceeded against, under the Act of Parliament, for having allowed the rope to be across the road. It appears that many boatmen act thus negligently and endanger the lives of persons passing along the road. We understood, while at the inquest, that no less than three ropes were thus allowed to be across the road while the inquiry was going on.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Sat May 12^th 1900, Issue 7678

LOCK-KEEPER FOUND IN THE CANAL

A somewhat singular fatality occurred on Saturday morning, the unfortunate individual being John Stilgoe, the well-known keeper of Grant’s Lock, near Twyford, on the Oxford Canal. The deceased left his home about half-past six for Banbury and left the lock here on the return journey shortly before seven o’clock, with one of the company’s iron boats, which he was towing by means of a line. All went well apparently until he was within half a mile of his home, when it is supposed he had a fit or some other seizure and either fell into the canal or  on the towing path and was pulled into the water by the progress of the boat. …. Verdict “Death from Natural Causes”

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Saturday, October 6^th 1900, Issue 7699

SAD AFFAIR NEAR TWYFORD

A pathetic story was revealed at an inquest held at the Red Lion Inn, Twyford, on Saturday, by Mr George Coggins, the Coroner, who had to enquire into the death of James Lewis, a young man of twenty-four, and Alice Tuffrey, a married woman, the wife of a Reservist, whose husband, after serving in South Africa, had been sent to China. Mrs Tuffrey was a native of Aynho, and her husband had been in the employ of Messrs. Foster and Dicksee, the well-known builders of Rugby. They had only been married eight months when her husband was called out, and their home broken up. Mrs. Tuffrey came home to her mother at Aynho for a time, and afterwards went back to service. The fact of her husband being ordered to China, after serving in South Africa appears to have affected her health, and she had to leave her situation in London. For the sake of change she went on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, who live at Sandell farm, near Grant’s Lock on the Oxford Canal. A son of Mr Lewis’ from Woolwich was also living with his father at the time, and on Wednesday night he suggested to Mrs. Tuffrey that they might take a walk as far as the Red Lion in Twyford. Mrs. Tuffrey assented, and they walked over the fields to the inn, where, in the porch, they had some refreshment and some conversation with Mrs. Twynham, the landlady, Lewis remarking to her that it showed courage to come from Sandell farm in such a rough night. They left at ten o’clock, and instead of going over the fields to the farm, they went by the towing path of the canal; but they never reached their destination, for they were found in the canal the following morning – the woman in Grant’s Lock and the man just outside it. At the lock there is a footpath which leads to Sandell’s farm, and it is conjectured that in the darkness of the night they had fallen into the lock from the side of the canal or from the footboard on the lock-gate which is used for crossing the canal. The lock-keeper heard no noise of any kind during the night. In the course of Thursday morning while a boat was in the lock, the lock-keeper found he could not close the lock gate, and he discovered the body of the woman jammed between the wall of the lock and the gate. He afterwards found the body of the man a yard-and-a-half from the lock gate, and it had no doubt been washed out of the lock while the boats were passing through. The place is an exceedingly dangerous one on a dark and rough night such as Wednesday night was, and the probability is that the unfortunate people took the towing path in preference to walking through the wet grass to the farm. There were no signs of any struggle on the side of the canal. Mrs. Tuffrey was to have returned home to Aynho that very night, but the state of the weather prevented her, and Lewis was to have returned to Woolwich on Saturday. A watch found on Lewis had stopped at half-past ten.

Compiled by Phil Mansell
April 2020

For just over two hundred years the lakes have lain quietly hidden behind the grounds of Adderbury House.

Of course, we all knew that they were there. My father would tell me about the skating parties held by the Miss Cawleys. All the village would be welcome, lanterns were hung in the trees, bowls of hot soup and refreshments served. A lot of the village functions were held in the field. The hounds met, Jubilee celebrations for King George the Fifth, the Coronation of George the Sixth, fetes and flower shows. On these occasions we were taken across to look at the lakes, and told not to climb the fence or to go any closer in case we fell in. Sometimes we would hear someone say that the swans had arrived on the lakes and that that was a sign of bad weather, but they belonged to the big people who worked there and that was as far as it went with regards to the rest of the village.

In 1983 I read in the Banbury Guardian that the lakes were to be restored by the Manpower Services Commission. I had not been a member of the Parish Council for long and was thrilled to learn that we were to be invited to meet with representatives from the Oxfordshire County Council to discuss the plans for the project.

It was a clear bright morning in January. There had been an overnight frost. The wall alongside the lakes had collapsed in one place and this is where we made our entrance, having first inspected the spring in Long Wall that feeds the lakes. We fought and scrambled our way through elder bushes, brambles, decayed undergrowth and fallen trees, clinging on to branches to save ourselves from slipping down the sloping banks into the somewhat murky water as the frost was coming out of the ground making it very slippery.

Suddenly we came to a clearing and I was able to see the whole of the top lake. I had not realised it was so big. Many times I have been there since but I shall never forget that first view. The beauty of the sun shining on the water and the tangle of faded herbage and trees, still white with frost. There was even a pair of ducks over on the far side.

Farther along we discovered another smaller lake badly silted up and overgrown, fed by a waterfall from the first lake. We were told this would be dredged and the sluice repaired. We made another visit a month later. There were huge drifts of snowdrops. We saw a pair of fingfishers. It was St Valentine’s Day. Work started and for the rest of the year the whole place looked like a battlefield. Machinery was brought in, the dredging was completed, paths made, old wood burnt, the summer house and boat house restored, and two wooden bridges built.

By the following spring the snowdrops had bloomed. Not many daffodils had survived, but there was still a large patch of ransoms, which are not seen much in these parts. The bare ground so churned up the year before was soon covered with wild flowers. The white anenomies had not been disturbed and soon there was an abundance of colour. There were two wooden stages built for disabled fishing, the lakes having been restocked with several kinds of fish. The ducks and moorhens produced babies which dashed about on the water like small clockwork toys.

Now people were coming to the lakes to walk round, sit in the summer houses and on the new benches and, of course, to feed the sucks. There was a grand opening in July 1985 and at last we could feel it was really ours to enjoy. No matter how many times I visit, there is always something different: the moorhens, a pair of goldfinches, a grey wagtail or a kingfisher. One unforgettable evening last summer a large damselfly accompanies me half way round the lower lake, twisting and turning to show off its lovely colours. I have watched a water vole having his lunch and fed the roach as they sunbathed on top of the water on a warm day. The trees change their colours with the seasons and the light and shade.

There are not many who do not appreciate our lakes just for what they are. But I am sure that to some of us old “Adderburys” the main attraction is that at one time it was private and belonged to the gentry, but now is something we can all enjoy.

Rhoda Woodward

This article was composed in May 2005 as part of a BBC survey of women’s voluntary groups in World War 2 edited by Ian Billingsley.

In 1942, I was working in a factory making surgical corsets. I didn’t like it there very much, but in the war years you could not leave your place of employment without special permission. So I was more than pleased when I was 18 years old, and had to go and register for War Work. While I was being interviewed, I had said, that before working in the factory I had served teas in my mother’s small tea shop, which had since closed. My fate was sealed.

I was given the relevant forms and literature to join the N.A.A.F.I. Having passed my medical, I then had to get a passport photograph for a special identity card, that would allow me to gain entrance to military camps.
My first posting was to a Royal Air Force camp about eight miles from home. I arrived on my bicycle at about ten o’clock, and was then issued with a cap, overalls, sheets and blankets and told to make my bed. I was rather dubious when I found that it had lost a leg. It was propped up with a biscuit tin, but tins were tins in those days and it did the job.
I reported to the kitchen, a small Nissen hut, on the side of a larger one, which turned out to be the W.A.A.F. canteen. Morning break had just finished and it was now the staff coffee break. It was a very large kitchen with four large sinks, two on each side. In the centre was the biggest kitchen range I had ever seen. There were also, two large scrubbed top tables, and a smaller one with an aluminium top. This was called the beverage table. It was used for making tea and coffee etc. It was one of my many jobs to keep that table top highly polished with whitening.
I was just finishing my coffee and getting to know Nellie, the other assistant and the cook, when this voice seemed to come from nowhere saying,
“All R.A.F. personnel will assemble in the W.A.A.F. canteen, at 1930hrs. The bar will remain closed.”
This was my first experience of the Tannoy. It was something I would soon to get used too, as in all military camps, we were never too far away from a speaker. They were even installed in the bathrooms. Our manageress laughed.
“You will have an easy night tonight.” she said.
Nellie looked up and answered.
“Yes.We’ll have to keep the kettle boiling, just in case we have any bodies.” I kept quiet, not liking to ask what was going on.
I soon found out what they were talking about. A couple of young airmen were brought into the kitchen. They had passed out during what I thought in my innocence, was a first aid lecture. I was then informed that it had been a men only lecture on Venereal Disease.
At the lunch-time break, I was shown how to weigh the tea and coffee into white cloth bags, ready for putting into the tea urn and coffee pans. I began to adapt and was soon out on the bar serving. In the mornings, I had to be up at 0700hrs, to rake out the flu’s, clear the ashes and get the fire lit. The kettle had to be boiling on the big old range, so the girls could have a morning cuppa at 0730hrs
The cook would have breakfast ready for 0800hrs. Then there was the bar and our billet to clean. The cook had to get about 200 cakes ready for morning break. Everything was done on those ranges. There was always a constant supply of hot water for the tea urns and large pans of coffee. The only electricity we used, was for the lights.
After morning break, there would be more cleaning to do in readiness, for the lunch break. During this time, the cook would be making pies and puddings for the evening suppers.
One of my jobs, was to make sure that the big yellow boiler was kept stoked up with coke.
“Watch the dial.” I was often warned. “Watch the dial.”
Nobody told me why, until one night I found out for myself. It began rumbling like thunder and spat all the hot water, out onto the roof. It didn’t stop until it had completely emptied and filled with cold water again. As you can imagine, I wasn’t very popular that night. It was nearly closing time and we still had all the washing up to do.
We used to serve about 200 suppers a night. Each one having to be carried from the kitchen through to the bar. We also sold beer. It came in quart bottles and there was a special way to tip the glasses, so that each one, held a full pint. You could soon hear the loud complaints, if someone had a short measure.
Sweets, soap and cigarettes were all rationed. We had to collect special coupons. We were sent an assortment of brands which were quite unheard of: Robins, Walters and Sunripe are three that I remember. I think that the ration may have been 40 each, twenty of the more popular brands like Players, Craven A, or Senior Service and twenty of whatever else we had. Most of the girls would just take the well known brands, so we used to keep the rest in a box for the lads.
We got into trouble one day when the supervisor was paying us a visit, as she’d heard one of the airmen asking for cigs off ration. I told her, that we had already collected the coupons. She knew what was going on, and told us to make sure that we sold them to the W.A.A.F.’s. first. Then the lads could have them.
Occasionally we got a consignment of cosmetics. The girls always had first choice, but after a week, they would be available to the airmen, to buy for their wives.
It was always very hard work. Some of the larger N.A.A.F.I.’s had more staff, but the girls often got posted or left. We really needed our three hours off in the afternoon; although we had to take turns in starting back half an hour early to get tea. We had one day off a week and one weekend a month.
There were no modern aids or washing up liquid. We just used to use soda or dry powders like ‘Freedom’, ‘Vim soap’ and scrubbing brushes, but as the saying was then “There’s a ruddy war on”, so we just had to get on with it. Most of us hadn’t got mod cons at home anyway, so we really appreciated having the luxury of a bathroom and hot water; at least most of the time. We did have some hard winters though, when the pipes froze and burst during the thaw. We really were flooded out.
Of course we got to know quite a few of the W.A.A.F.’s and airmen, as they spent their evenings in the canteen. A couple of the camps I was stationed at, had a piano and one or two good pianists. Once a week we would have a camp dance, when we’d serve refreshments until 2130hrs. We were convinced, that we would be too tired to go to the dance afterwards but we went just the same. The manageress would usually let our dancing partner’s come and help with the last of the washing up, while we got ourselves dressed and ready.
We were lucky, we were allowed to wear Civvies. Our hair had to be kept above our collars on duty. We used to make a head band out of the top of an old stocking and roll our hair round the band. This style was known as the ‘Victory Roll’. Afterwards, when brushed out, our hair turned under into a pageboy style quite easily.
These evenings, were very romantic affairs, with aircraft lights in the corners of the room, that shone onto a large mirrored ball in the centre of the ceiling. The coloured reflection used to flicker amongst, us as we danced to the R.A.F. Band.
Although we were not in an area suffering the air raids, we watched a lot of the devastation they were causing, on the Pathe News at the local pictures house. We heard of boys we had grown up with being wounded, killed or taken prisoner.
At one camp, there was a lot of Polish personal. Often, the new arrivals, had come straight from the Concentration Camps where they had suffered terrible injuries from the torture. Many of them didn’t have any hair. It was surprising though, how after a few weeks they looked years younger and were wanting all the best makes of shampoo and even hair nets. Their one burning ambition was to train as air crew in order to return to the fighting. Some were just boys when they were taken prisoner from their school. Probably because of their parents politics.
We hardly saw the air crews, it was mainly at the dances. It was a strange feeling seeing these young lads enjoying themselves, knowing that maybe they would soon be flying off and getting killed within a short time. We used to lay awake in bed listening to the planes taking off or going over from other bases. I can still see so clearly in my mind, how I sat up one night with the manageress, listening to them flying overhead for the D.Day landings.
During those times there were laughter and tears. We seemed to live for the post as we waited for letters from home, bringing news of brothers, boyfriends and husbands. I can also remember how we all felt one morning, when one of our staff received the sad news that her brother had been killed.
At last, it all ended. We all gathered on the airfield, Officers, Airmen and W.A.A.F.’s for an open air service, and as the camps closed, we all went back to a very much changed, ‘Civvie Street’. Things would never be quite the same again.

Rhoda Woodward.

 

“Several years ago, the magnificent mansion at Adderbury, which had been the abode, successively, of the Earls of Rochester, the Duke of Argyle and the Duke of Buccleuch, was reduced to the dimensions of a commodious modern mansion, which is now the residence of W.H.Chamberlin, Esq.”

Alfred Beesley, History of Banbury, p.488

 

In the early nineteenth century Adderbury House and its estate reverted to the ownership of the Bishop of Winchester. It was at this point that William Hunt Chamberlin (1777-1851), a land agent and property expert, who at that time lived in Cropredy, enters the picture, although there is not enough evidence at present to be sure about the extent or timing of his involvement.

We do have a survey of 1808 which suggests that Chamberlin was the owner of Adderbury House at that time. If this is true, then it is probable that it was he who decided to “reduce” Adderbury House in size, to make it easier to let and to give it the proportions that Chamberlin would himself want when he eventually retired to Adderbury. In any case, the two wings of the house were demolished, and the costs covered by selling the building materials and contents at an auction held in February 1808. Once this had been done, Chamberlin leased the house to John Field, only taking up residence himself twenty or so years later.

When he did retire to Adderbury in the late 1820s, William Hunt Chamberlin was a new experience for the village – the owner of a large house and park who was not either an aristocrat or a military man or on the staff of a large estate. He was, in fact, an independent professional, a surveyor, one of those who had made possible behind the scenes, for example, the widespread enclosures of recent times. He knew all about land, its value and how it could be transferred, and made a number of shrewd purchases on his own account throughout his career. His friends were fellow professionals, lawyers and successful go-ahead farmers, and he soon settled into a bachelor semi-retirement in Adderbury, with his friends, his pictures, his maps, his household of male and female servants – and, eventually, his new garden.

At this time, tastes in garden design were moving on from the eighteenth century preference for natural-looking parkland around great houses. Under the influence particularly of the designer John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) gardeners were encouraged to treat gardens as distinct from “nature”. They were encouraged to lay out ornamental gardens immediately surrounding their houses, using the brighter colours newly available in bedding plants, as well as seeking to create spaces throughout their gardens where the exotic plants and trees nurseries could now supply would be displayed to advantage. The new style was called the “gardenesque” style and was promoted by Loudon in “The Gardener’s Magazine”, first published in 1826, as well as in the numerous editions of his Encyclopedia of Gardening, first edition 1822.

William Hunt Chamberlin described himself in the 1841 census as a farmer, with thirty acres. His land was bounded on the west by the Oxford Road, extended as far south as the River Swere, and east roughly to the present edge of the village. His first act was very much in the spirit of the gardenesque style. Around his house he established flower gardens and an orchard, stretching in a rectangle from south of the house to the area now covered by Lake House. Next he created an irregular loop of wrought iron fencing to separate his garden off from his farmland. The fencing led down from the present-day Lake Walk, where it is still in place, then swooped southwards, then east and north again to circle both lakes. We still have the iron fence on the eastern side of the lakes. To the north the iron fence met up with Long Wall, which then completed the loop back up to Lake Walk.

Within this perimeter Mr Chamberlin established a number of garden features, all related to his leisuretime activities and those of his friends. Leading down from the formal gardens, the winding woodland path would have provided shade even on the hottest day, and led past the icehouse which, by this date, might have functioned in Mr Chamberlin’s mind simply as a fashionable ruin. Where the path then met the top lake you could either go left to a viewing point from which you could see right down the lake, or continue right along the esplanade that Mr Chamberlin had established on the western side by strengthening the banks, where he and his friends could saunter side by side along the lake, shaded by the trees that he planted alongside. One of these, the very large plane tree, survives to this day.

At the southern end of the upper lake, Mr Chamberlin built himself a boathouse (today’s boathouse is a much later replacement) and dismantled the rather elaborate eighteenth-century arrangement for connecting the upper lake from what lay below (involving, it’s said, a pump and a lion’s mouth spouting water) with a much more natural-seeming waterfall. This gentle cascade watered Mr Chamberlin’s greatest innovation – a bog garden where we currently have a second, lower lake.

This garden had a meandering path through it and would have been an area where Mr Chamberlin could display some of the exotic plants that were increasingly becoming available to the nineteenth-century gardener as a result of the efforts of plant-hunters across the world. We might get an idea of what the appearance and atmosphere of this was by thinking of the Bog Garden at Upton House – recognising, of course, that this was a 1930s creation (by Kitty Lloyd-Jones). Clumps of bamboos are all that remain today of this exotic garden.

As we turn north along the far side of the lower lake, we come across a number of the buildings that Mr Chamberlain erected in his new garden. They confirm that his gardening was not on a grand scale. They are simple, rustic stone structures, although well-enough finished, made from ironstone which may even have been quarried on Mr. Chamberlin’s estate: a summerhouse, from which a group of friends could look out onto the bog garden, or a sort of sentry box structure where one man alone could sit in shelter and look south down the bog garden to the countryside and riverbank below. We must remember that Mr Chamberlin had just three outside men for the farm and the garden and only one of these, Edward Andrews, describes himself in the 1851 census as a gardener rather than as an agricultural labourer. As well as the pleasure garden and the 30 acres of pasture with its stock, these three would also have had to run the walled garden (nowadays the Parish Council allotments), which would have supplied fruit, vegetables and flowers for the house.

Near to the summerhouse is a curious small stone structure, which could be a seat, or possibly a cap to a spring. It has a date, 1848, carved above it. While we have no means of knowing the significance of this date, it would be nice to feel that it was at this date, some twenty years after he had started to construct his new garden, that Mr Chamberlin felt his work was finished. He died three years later.

 

Phil Mansell
September 2017

The Twyford Tea Gardens (house and grounds) were developed as part of the Twyford Garden Estate. This was an attempt to develop a rural Garden Suburb outside Banbury. The Garden Suburbs and Cities movement became popular in the early 20th century and the wording Twyford Garden City is used in one of the local newspapers of that period. Continue reading →

 

The present day Greenhill complex stands on the former site of Greenhill House which later became the Leonard Cheshire Care Home. Greenhill House was built in 1906 for Lewis Stone the son of Henry Stone. Continue reading →

This year 2014 will see the 40^th Anniversary of the modern day revival of dancing within the village of Adderbury, Oxfordshire. It would seem a good time to put the whole existence of the Tradition of Dancing – and particularly the role taken by women – into some sort of context, both historically and currently, and to fill in some gaps.

The history of the dancing in the village is very well documented by the major collectors of the tradition, Cecil Sharp and Janet Heatley Blunt, and by subsequent village-based teams. Overall, it is interesting to look at what has happened over the time since 1880, the date which seems to mark the end of dancing by the original traditional team. Because of the time in history, there was probably very little, if any, female influence on that 1880 team. Women’s place in society at that time was pretty domestic and they were largely dominated by a strict male orientated way of life. Women were still included with a man’s  “chattels”. By the turn of the 20^th century things were changing, and some women, mainly from the higher classes, were beginning to have a greater say in how they led their lives.

In Morris Dance terms, 1908 is a very early date for any sort of revival of dance within the villages. There were still traditional teams dancing, notably Headington Quarry, Abingdon and Bampton, but very little was happening elsewhere. Cecil Sharp did not publish the first edition of his Morris Book Part 1 until 1907, and although he met the Headington Morris in 1899, he really didn’t start collecting seriously until 1906 after some prompting by Miss Mary Neal and her Esperance Dancers, to whom Sharp dedicated this first edition. In the annals of The Morris in Adderbury we first see interest in reviving the dance in the year 1908, at the celebration of Empire Day, and there are photos to prove this. A committee was formed in April of that year, and it was decided to include Morris and Country Dancing in the day’s events.

After much research and help from friends at The Adderbury History Association, particularly Barry Davis and the late Vera Wood, we can now say who taught that Empire Day boys’ team how to dance.

The following newspaper cutting is from the Banbury Guardian dated 28^th May 1908.

This cutting shows that Morris was taught by Miss Frances Etrenne Hoskyns, who was one of the daughters of Sir and Mrs. Leigh Hoskyns of Cotefield House, which can still be found on the main road to Banbury between Adderbury and Bodicote. Miss Hoskyns was helped with teaching by Mr. & Mrs. Walker (school headmaster and wife). The Walkers taught Maypole dances to the boys and the girls, and I also believe the children were at the school and teaching happened during the school day. Frances Etrenne Hoskyns was 21 years old at the time, and I assume that she used Sharp’s 1907 Morris Book as her only reference. I also believe that this is where details of the boys’ kit was also found and it also provides the reason for the inclusion of the Hobby Horse. I have asked the Library at the head quarters of The EFDSS if they have any early records of Miss Hoskyns and The Walkers, and they have none – even in old members lists.

 

Click on article to enlarge

It transpires that some of the boys taught by Miss Hoskyns went to war in 1914; they did not return, with the exception of Charlie Coleman. This story is featured in Tim Plester’s wonderful film The Way of The Morris.

Empire Day – Adderbury 1908 at The Vicarage Gates.

Mr. Walker, the Headmaster, is in white boater hat next to the Hobby Horse on the right side of photo. Charlie Coleman is front second on right.

We are not really sure when collector Janet Heatley Blunt first took an interest in the village traditions.

Born 1859 in India, she moved to Le Halle Place, Adderbury with her father in 1896. He died in 1900, and from that time until her death in 1950 she took on the role of Lady of The Manor. From her manuscripts we can see she started collecting songs as early as 1907, but she did not start collecting Morris dances until 1914. In 1913 she was certainly involved with the next phase of village dancing, when she helped arrange for the teaching of Morris to boys and social dance to the boys and girls of the village. Searches of the Parish Magazine on my behalf by the late Vera Wood, show that this teaching actually began in February 1913. The teaching at that time was actually undertaken by Miss Daisy Caroline Daking of TheOxford School of Folk Dancing, founded by Cecil Sharp.

Adderbury Parish Magazine – Feb. 1913 written by the Rev, Gepp – A revival of the old English national and country dances is taking place in many parts of England, thanks to Mr. Cecil Sharp, who has sought with un-wearied enthusiasm to recover not only our almost forgotten treasures of traditional songs, but also the ancient Morris dances, and other dance steps and tunes, from the memories of those who could still recall them, and also from an old manual of English Country Dancing, called “Playford’s Dancing Master,” published three or four centuries ago. Adderbury has now a chance to learn these gay and delightful dances, for Mrs. Gepp, assisted by Miss Blunt, has arranged for a course of lessons in various dances to be given by Miss Daking, from the Oxford School of Folk Dancing, founded by Mr. Cecil Sharp. Women and girls 4.0 pm to 5.0pm and 5.30pm. – 6.30pm. 2 shillings for the course. For Men and lads, from 8.0pm – 9.0pm. 2 shillings for the same class. The men will learn, besides Morris, some of the ancient “Sword Dances” from the North of England, and also some of the Country Dances, in which the women’s class will occasionally join.

In a letter dated 28^th February 1913 sent to Clive Carey, Miss Blunt talks about the onset of the classes in the village. –  “My other old acquaintance here, an old man named James Locke (who used to Morris Dance) & who gave me the verse of a song, words only, & also hummed a bit of Morris tune, has never been able or inclined to tell me any Morris – There were several Morris dancers in this village – but only one or two who survive. A dear old man from Bledington who has been staying near here with a daughter, showed 2 Morris Jigs last week to our Boys Morris class (under Miss Daking). He danced The Princess Royal and Bacca Pipes Jig, both of which Mr. Sharp had noted down from him some years ago, when his agility was a little more equal to his memory and enthusiasm than it is now, for he (Mr. Gibbs) has been very ill since Xmas; and I really feared the effort would be too much for him. He is quite deaf, so danced without music – and in excellent time.”

Regarding these 1913 classes in Morris, at that time it was the policy of the English Dance Society, formed in 1911, to teach Morris in levels; they would teach Headington first and only progress to more difficult dances later.

It would seem that Miss Blunt did not know William Walton, the last leader of the Traditional village team, until 1914 at the earliest. If she knew Walton at the time of her letter to Carey shown above, I am sure she would have mentioned him there. We do know that Blunt started to collect songs and dances from Walton during 1914, and continued to do so until 1919. She was also responsible for introducing Walton to Cecil Sharp, and arranging for Walton to meet Sharp in Hampstead Heath in 1919. It was at those meetings (also with Maude Karples) that Sharp collected from Walton and later published The Adderbury Dances in his Morris Book Part 2 in 1919. Walton died aged 83 in 1919 not long after meeting Sharp. As stated earlier, Janet Blunt collected the dances from Adderbury over a number of years, but first, in 1914, she started collecting dances from Mr. Fred Webb who was living in the neighbouring village of Bloxham, but he was actually an old dancer at Longborough. When actually collecting in Adderbury from Walton during those earlier years, Blunt did get the assistance of several friends from the Oxford area, including Miss Phyllis Marshall, Miss Daking and Mrs. May Elliott Hobbs. There is also a minor reference to “Miss Kennedy”, and I am not sure who that was.

There is a very good article about Phyllis Marshall written by Geoff Woolfe available on the Musical Tradition web site at http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/phyllism.htm
There is also included in this a small piece about Daisy Daking and her involvement. Without the efforts of Miss Blunt and her cohorts, there would be very little information about the village song and dance traditions, and we should all be grateful for their contributions.

However, if it were not for the efforts of another woman after Miss Blunt’s death in 1950, even this contribution would have been lost. Winnie Wyatt and her husband Fred worked for Miss Blunt for many years, and when Winnie saw that the Blunt family did not understand the importance of her written collection, she persuaded them not to throw it all on the fire, but have it sent to the EFDSS, where it remained largely ignored until the 1970’s. In 1974 the revival team, of which I was a member, used Blunt’s manuscripts, along with Sharp’s original information held at Clare College, Cambridge, to re-create the dances from the village.

Winnie and Fred Wyatt in the centre

Bryan Sheppard and I, when we started deciding what to do in each dance, could not read music (Bryan could play Recorder), and in those early days of the revival the task of learning the tunes in the manuscripts fell on my first wife Annie Radford (English Concertina), who subsequently taught the tunes to the other musicians and played for the team in the first year.

One of the reasons that the team split into The Adderbury Morris Men (AMM) and Adderbury Village Morris Men (AVMM) in late 1975 was the question of having female musicians on the team. At the first AGM, because Annie was phasing herself out of playing and Sheena Powell (Fiddle) was thinking about taking her place, Bryan tabled a motion that the team should not have female musicians. This motion was defeated; AMM has continued to have female musicians as part of the group, and so it continues today. The AVMM have gone their own way. There was also a long period when Verna Wass was the Bagman of AMM, and she still is involved today as one of the team musicians (Fiddle).

The latest female phenomenon in the village is the emergence of “Sharp and Blunt,” a team of female dancers. This team has added significantly to the village dancing, bringing a renewed enthusiasm and another dimension to the rich heritage of the village.

Sharp & Blunt Morris of Adderbury

This team are all local with some members being wives of The AMM, and they dance their own versions of the village dances originally taught them by members of AMM, plus some of their own making in the style. One of their musicians is the former, but still occasional, AMM musician Sheena Powell Mccormack  (second in front left).

Long may Adderbury be a centre for all things Morris, where women as well as men can find a place among its three vibrant teams and continue the tradition.

Tim Radford. – February 2014, Woods Hole, MA. USA

Thomas Hayward, born in 1781 and a basketmaker by trade, came from a musical family. He himself was a member of and trained the Adderbury church choir in the late 1830s and 1840s. This was a time when country choirs provided the main musical interest in Church of England services, singing a mixture of metrical psalms (the precursors of our modern “hymns”), anthems and other pieces, all delivered in what to our ears would sound like a very “folksy” style. Academics call this sort of church music “country psalmody”, while others refer to it as “West Gallery music” to reflect the fact that many choirs, as at Adderbury, sang from a gallery built at the west end of the church. When the choir started singing, the rest of the congregation would need to turn round to “face the music”.

Most of this music is forgotten today, but one West Gallery tune at least has come down to us. This is “On Ilkla Moor baht ’at”! The words were those of the carol “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night” and the vigorous singing style we usually use for the modern words, and the ways in which the different parts overlap and echo each other would have been just what you would have heard in Thomas Hayward’s day.

In the early nineteenth century the church choir was made up of mixed voices, men, women and boys, supported by a small village orchestra – Violins, Bass Viol, Flutes, Clarinet and ‘The Old Sarpint’ (serpent), which took the bass part. The instrumentalists often sat in with the singers, helping them find and keep the note.

Thomas Hayward was unusual in that, as well leading the singers and instrumentalists, he also composed works, both for his choir and the village waits. We know about him because of Janet Blunt (1859-1950), who lived at Le Halle Place in West Adderbury and who collected folk songs from village singers as well as Morris dance tunes and routines. One of Miss Blunt’s main informants was William “Binx” Walton (1836-1919). Walton had joined the village choir in 1846 at the age of 10 as a boy treble under Thomas Hayward, and, as his voice matured, learned the tenor and bass parts as well and so was able to give her a complete account of what was sung. Walton told Miss Blunt that Thomas Haywood had been landlord of the Coach and Horses, but from the licensing records, this seems not to have been true, although he may well have helped the widowed Kezia Hayward to run the pub from 1835 onwards.

Thomas Hayward certainly wrote the music to the carol known as “Adderbury Church” with words by Charles Wesley. William Walton thought he had also composed the carol, “As Shepherds Watched their Fleecy Care” and “The Old, Hark! Hark!”, as it was known locally from the first line, “Hark! Hark What news the angels bring!”. Miss Blunt’s notebooks, including her version of Hayward’s “Adderbury Church”, are now held by the English Folk Song and Dance Society and can be seen on their website. Oxford choirleader Dave Townsend has recently published a collection of Oxfordshire Carols, which includes a modern performing version of “Adderbury Church” (Serpent Press, 2013).

Phil Mansell, 2014

The bridle path off the Oxford Road at the end of Berry Hill Road is still known as Paper Mill Lane from the days when it led to a mill making watermarked paper for bank notes. A mill existed here as long ago as 1086 when it is recorded in the Domesday Book , which mentions that in the parish of Dadintone (Deddington) there were three flour mills. Although, according to the Ordnance Survey map, the mill site is just inside Deddington parish, it has always been associated with Adderbury. All that remains on the site today are Paper Mill Cottages.

The first paper was made in England probably in the 1490s, when Thomas Tate’s watermark is found overprinted with Caxton’s mark. Although it is known that countless small mills began producing paper from time to time, there is little information on them. However, the 1983 edition of the Victoria History of Oxfordshire records that in 1660 Christopher Doyley of Adderbury asked leave of John Cartwright to convert the Old Mill into a paper mill. Michael Hutton of Hampton Gay made a similar proposal in 1684 and workmen were then engaged to make the conversion.

Good quality writing and bank note paper were made at the mill until 1873 according to one authority. A mineral spring produced water for pulping and this enhanced its suitability for bank note paper. Records show that John Emberlin (1791) carried on his business of papermaking here and Sophia Emberlin (1846) was probably the last of the papermakers of that name. Subsequently a Mr Hobday occupied the mill, and then in the 1870s Zachariah Walden Stilgoe of Adderbury Grounds purchased it and converted it into a corn mill, for which purpose it remained in use until 1962. Apart from minor repairs the mill wheel, 15 feet in diameter, is still in its original state.

The only other relic of the mill’s papermaking days is the double foolscap laid-mould for the watermark. Dusty, worn and partly disfigured, the watermarks were discovered when an old type meat safe was removed from one of the farm buildings. They had been used as two sides of the safe!

The reason for the introduction of watermarks is not well established. It is possible they served as a trade mark, showed the location of the mill, the owner’s name or indicated the size or quality of the sheet or date of manufacture. The laid hand mould was a rectangular frame on which a delicate mesh of wires was sewn forming a sieve through which water could drain, leaving the paper pulp on the surface of the mould.

 

June Stilgoe, writing in Contact in April 1983