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 fieldThe field behind the house  known as Plackett's field and the petrol pumps  were ...

The following text was the introductory talk given by Bryan Sheppard on September 27th 2009 at the unveiling of the Blue Plaque in memory of Janet Blunt. Bryan gave the manuscript to AHA after the talk. It therefore seems fitting after the untimely death of Bryan to  print the talk on the History Association website. Janet...

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...

Jackson’s Oxford Journal was a weekly newspaper founded in 1753 by William Jackson, which continued in one form or another until after the First World War. For the first fifty-five years of its existence Jackson’s Oxford Journal was the only local newspaper serving Oxford and surrounding areas and hence Adderbury. Jackson came...

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...

Joan Frederica Mathewana Granville (known among close friends and relatives as Mathewana) was the daughter of Bernard Granville of Wellesbourne Hall, Warwickshire. She was born at Calwick Abbey Staffordshire about 1830 a direct descendant of Admiral Sir Richard Grenville, the naval hero of Elizabethan days. On August 10th 1850...

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,...

Introduction Wilfred Foreman in his definitive book, Oxfordshire Mills (Phillimore, 1983), records in excess of two hundred watermills in the county, many of which were mentioned in the Domesday Survey of 1086, suggesting that they are largely of Saxon origin. Foreman’s map shows a very high concentration of watermills in...

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...

PRIZE FIGHT PANIC: ADDERBURY IN 1837 Prize fights were enormously popular in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. The sport enjoyed the patronage of aristocrats and even of royalty, with enormous sums being gambled on the outcomes of matches. Nonetheless, local magistrates were determined to bring prize fighting...

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...

A beautiful old-fashioned English oak tree resides, in all its summer splendour, on a tiny green at the junction of Horn Hill and the Milton roads – does it have a story? Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee was celebrated nation-wide on 21st June, 1887. Adderbury marked this occasion by declaring a public holiday with a sit-down...