Friday 27th September 1985
A Tribute To Percy Trollope
There was a special service of tribute at the Old Meeting House, Horningsham, on Wednesday 25th September 1985, for the late Percy Trollope, whose name between 1973 and the opening of the new Warminster Library [at Three Horseshoes Mall] in 1982, was synonymous with the study of Warminster history.
During those years, when a museum for Warminster was housed at the old Sexton’s Cottage behind St. Laurence’s Chapel [at High Street], it was to him that all notes and queries about the past of the town and district were directed.
As anyone who had ever cornered him in his “consulting rooms” on a Saturday morning will surely testify, if he was not always able to supply the information one sought from him, he rarely failed to answer a series of far more interesting questions one never thought to ask.
A glorious untidy mine of information was Percy Trollope’s mind, and a five minute glimpse of the workings frequently turned into a full morning’s exploration.
A farmer all his working life, he was born at Horningsham, and began his career as a pupil of Mr Pope at Rye Hill Farm, Longbridge Deverill.
In 1923 he emigrated to Canada, but after only a year (his son Clive says he couldn’t stand the weather) he came home, soon going into farming on his own account at Blackford, near Wincanton.
That same year, 1928, he married Laura Dewey, whose father was the Warminster blacksmith Albert Dewey, and (more significantly in the light of later enthusiasms) whose uncle was Harold Dewey – headmaster, scholar and town benefactor.
In 1935 Percy and his wife moved to Broomclose Farm, Longbridge Deverill, as tenants, and there with their sons, Clive and Earl, they remained until he retired in 1970.
Percy’s love of local history made him a “public figure” two years later, when a letter was published in the Warminster Journal recruiting support for a local history group. The intention then was to begin to piece together a town archive, but in Mr Trollope, the founder chairman of the History Society discovered someone who had already gathered together the nucleus of a collection. In particular, Percy had managed to salvage many of Harold Dewey’s papers, the latter having died not long before, and that precious hoard was to form the major part of the Dewey Museum’s assets when it opened in 1973.
Meanwhile, Mr Trollope’s own researches concentrated on the history of the Pope family with whom he had spent his early farming years. Percy inherited John Pope’s mother’s diaries, a painstaking record covering the years from 1873 to 1913, and the deciphering of her handwriting became almost an obsession with him. That work he is thought to have completed before his death last week at the age of 83. Still continuing was his exploration of the history of Broomclose Farm, since Percy’s retirement in the hands of his son Clive.