Extract from The Changing Face Of Warminster by Wilfred Middlebrook, published in 1971:
Yard House, once the home of the Hallidays, and now occupied by Dent, Allcroft & Co., Glovers, and E. S. Beaven (Maltings) Ltd., could tell much of the history of Warminster if walls could talk. The blocked-in windows facing the road tell a tale of revolt against window taxes, though it was at one time whispered that one of the Hallidays had them blocked off to prevent his daughter from making eyes at tradesmen in the street!
A stone in the facade of the coach house bears the date 1909, and the initials of John Edmund Halliday, which seems to rule out the window-tax theory. Perhaps they were tired of having their windows constantly coated with mud and water thrown by passing vehicles, a constant hazard that present-day tenants of our narrow East Street still suffer, or perhaps they just wanted more privacy.
Yard House may have been the site of the first Roman Catholic church to be established in Warminster. During the 1914-1918 War the house was occupied as a convent by a band of French Sisters Of St. Ursula, who erected a Catholic Church in its grounds. They returned to France in the middle of 1919.
The Halliday family was one of the oldest in Wiltshire, its connection with Warminster being traced back to the reign of Charles The Second. There is a tradition that Prince Charles slept one night in Yard House after his flight from Worcester, possibly the same tradition that credited Cromwell with sleeping here.
One of the Hallidays achieved notoriety in 1887 by his action against the Vicar and Churchwardens of the Minster Church for removing the Halliday Pew when the church was re-seated. The case was taken to the House Of Lords and the pew repaired and reinstated in 1897. A month later it was removed at dead of night, thrown over the churchyard wall, smashed to pieces and partly burned, but the obdurate Halliday had it repaired and put back, where it remained safely in the south chancel aisle until the First World War.