The edited transcript of a tape-recorded interview Danny Howell made with Helen Leaney, at her home, 7 Corner Ground, Warminster, Wiltshire, on the afternoon of 15th May 1998. This transcript was first published in Danny Howell’s book Wylye Valley Folk Volume One (Bedeguar Books, July 1999).
Helen Leaney said:
“My grandparents, on dad’s side of the family, came from Sturminster Newton way. They moved to Mells in Somerset, where grandfather worked as a farm labourer for a farmer called Robert Cox. When Cox moved from Mells to take over Bishopstrow Farm, my grandfather moved with him and that’s how the family came to Bishopstrow. My grandfather was Walter Moore. He worked for Robert Cox at Bishopstrow Farm until Cox died. Robert Cox lived in Bishopstrow Farmhouse and he is buried at Bishopstrow Churchyard, just inside the gate. [The inscription on his gravestone reads ‘In Loving Memory of John Robert Cox who fell asleep 25:Dec:1899 Aged 56 Years’]. My grandmother used to go up to Bishopstrow Farmhouse to do a bit of cleaning for the Cox family. My grandfather must have worked for him for quite a time, for some years, because Mr. Cox left him a pension of about two shillings a week. That was a lot of money in those days. Although he was a miserable man my grandfather was a good worker if nothing else. Mr. Cox must have thought something of him to ask him to move to Bishopstrow with him and to leave him a pension. I don’t know how the pension was paid but grandfather got it until he died. Grandfather used to talk about Mr. Cox quite a lot.”
“Grandfather worked for Cox’s successor, Mr. Farmer, and eventually for the Gauntlett family at Bishopstrow Farm. I can remember him saying about working for Farmer but when I was a child I was never sure if he meant a farmer or someone called Farmer. [Samuel William Farmer was in partnership with Messrs. F. Stratton & Co. at Bishopstrow Farm after Robert Cox died]. I don’t think my grandfather worked for the Gauntletts for long though because by then he would have reached retirement age. I don’t know what year he was born but he would have been getting on in years by then. That’s when he took on the job of being sexton at Bishopstrow Church and that was a full time job, so he couldn’t have been working on the farm then. It was a full time job because he had to dig the graves, cut the grass in the churchyard, and wind the clock. He used to do all that. I don’t remember much ever being said about grandfather working for the Gauntletts but I do remember grandfather being associated with Robert Cox and Mr. Farmer. I can’t tell you much about Mr. Cox or Mr. Farmer though because that was before my time but I can tell you about the Gauntletts.”
“The Gauntlett family had four farms. They had North Farm and Middleton Farm at Norton Bavant, and Bishopstrow Farm and The Dairy at Bishopstrow. Gauntletts had acres and acres of arable land. This is before the Army took a lot of it over. I think the Army had some because they used to have summer camps up there before the War. Yes, Gauntletts had a lot of land and they grew a terrific amount of wheat. Gauntletts had a lot of cows too. They were really big farmers. Consequently they had a big staff.”
“Grandfather had quite a walk to work. He used to go down Church Lane and take the path round the side of Bishopstrow Churchyard. He would follow the path to Bishopstrow Mill and then go up the lane, Mill Lane, to the main road. He’d cross the road and make his way up to North Farm behind Scratchbury Hill. That was quite a walk before starting work. And, of course, he had to walk home in the evening.”
“George Gauntlett was a man with a walrussy moustache. He and his wife lived at Middleton Farm. I don’t remember Mrs. Gauntlett. They had a daughter called Joan. She lived at home with her mother and father. She was a very peculiar woman. Her language was worse than any man’s. She used to go shopping in Warminster at the weekend and I can remember seeing her in town. She was a real mannish sort of a woman.”
“George Gauntlett had three sons but two died. One died of pneumonia after having the measles when he was a baby, and the other, who was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, also caught the measles and bronchitis and died of pneumonia. They are buried in the churchyard at Norton Bavant.”
“George Gauntlett’s other son, Mark Gauntlett, lived at Bishopstrow Farm. He was a little short man and he was quite tubby. He wasn’t the sort of man you looked twice at. He was an untidy looking sort of man. You didn’t think of him as handsome but he married a nice looking woman. Her name was Muriel [Smith] and I can remember her very well. She was a very smart woman. It was the talk of Bishopstrow village when she married Mark Gauntlett. Everybody said ‘Fancy her marrying him!’ It was spoke about. People said things like ‘Whatever does she see in Mark Gauntlett?’ People reckoned she married him for his money. People presumed that the Gauntletts were getting money from the Army for the use of their ground. Mark and Muriel tried, to begin with, to keep their marriage all very hush-hush. They were married before the news came out. She was living at Bishopstrow Farmhouse and everybody thought it was dreadful that those two were living together not married but they were in fact already wed. Then, as I say, the news leaked out. People in Bishopstrow found out after the event.”
“Later on Mark’s wife became ill and she went away abroad to recuperate. Unfortunately she died on the boat coming home. Mark was never the same after that. He was a bit odd. He wasn’t a very good farmer. He was a lazybones. He used to lay in bed in the mornings until half past twelve.”
“The Gauntlett family didn’t participate in events at Bishopstrow. I think they preferred to go to Norton Bavant and Heytesbury. I never saw them in Bishopstrow. They certainly never attended church at Bishopstrow. I’m sure they went to the Church at Norton Bavant. Well, North Farm and Middleton were in Norton Bavant parish. Their graves are at Norton Bavant.”
“The people in Bishopstrow had great respect for George Gauntlett. I don’t think they had any respect for Mark. The older people in Bishopstrow had worked for George. They were his old retainers. They doffed their hats to him and did things like that. Same as they did to Squire Temple.”
“My grandfather was one of several chaps who worked for the Gauntlett family. As I said earlier, Gauntletts had a very big staff. My grandfather, after he retired, often used to remark about it. A lot of people in Bishopstrow worked for the Gauntlett family. Do you know Harold Parham who lives in Bishopstrow now? His father was a shepherd for the Gauntletts. At lambing time he would spend a week away from home with the sheep.”
“Someone else who worked for the Gauntletts was Tom Hiscock. His nickname was Topper. I don’t know where the Topper nickname came from. Topper Hiscock used to drive one of Gauntlett’s traction engines. They had two of those and they were big black things. They were used for ploughing and cultivating the fields. I can ‘see’ Topper Hiscock in my mind’s eye now. He was a lovely little man. He lived at Church Lane. It’s one house now. It’s on the left-hand side as you go round to the Weirs. It’s called Glebe Cottage. That was two or three cottages there. Topper lived with his wife and family in the farther one, the one nearest the village.”
“The Northeasts also worked for Gauntletts but they didn’t live in Bishopstrow. The Northeasts lived at Norton Bavant. There were quite a few of them. Their relatives live in Warminster now. And Mr. Mitchell, who lived at No.44 Bishopstrow, was another person who worked on the farm for the Gauntlett family. Mr. Mitchell’s neighbour, Mr. Snelgrove, who lived at No.43, was a shepherd for Gauntlett.”
“George Everley, when he lived at Bishopstrow, worked for Gauntlett. He was a thatcher and so was his father, Jacob, before him. They thatched the corn ricks and buildings on Gauntlett’s farms. They lived in one of the cottages at Dairy Lane [now officially signposted Pitmead Lane], Bishopstrow, where Mr. Cullen, the dentist, later lived. George Everley was my father’s greatest friend. They were great pals. George went to Canada goldmining in his youth. He hadn’t married then but he had a girlfriend. He was going to send back to England for her when he had settled in Canada. She was going to go out there to join him. George Everley wrote to my dad and asked him to take her out to Canada. In the meantime my mother had arrived on the scene and my father didn’t take George’s girlfriend out to Canada. She went on her own.”
“George’s girlfriend was Alice Tucker. She was short and she was a very nice lady. I don’t know where she came from. I don’t think she was local. She must have come this way to work. I’ve got a feeling her family came from Southampton or Hampshire way. She married George and became Mrs. Everley. They had four children born in Canada. Then they all came back again. The two youngest were still school-age when they came back. The two eldest ones, I think, were still school-age too. That’s why they came back. They wanted them to have an English education. Mr. and Mrs. Everley saved enough money to come back to Bishopstrow.”
“Do you remember Mrs. Betty Marmont that used to live at [No.63] The Dene? George and Alice were her mother and father. Bet was the youngest one. She was about my age. She had two sisters and a brother. May, her eldest sister, married Ted Stride and they lived at Copheap Lane. They still live there now. The other sister Alice now lives in Frome. I don’t know what her married name is. The brother, George, now lives in Worcester. He’s retired now but he worked in the gloving trade. I suppose that’s why he went to Worcester.”
“It was an adventurous thing in those days to go to Canada. I think perhaps George Everley had relations that had gone there and he went to join them. I can’t remember exactly. I know he came back with some gold. I remember him showing me a gold nugget he had. I can recall seeing that.”
“George Everley was a very nice man. He went to work for the Gauntletts as well, as a thatcher. I don’t think he had done that before. He was too young before. He learnt the trade from his father. They lived in the old house at Dairy Lane. They came back and all lived in that house together. We called it Dairy Lane but it’s now known as Pitmead Lane. They thatched the ricks. You don’t see it now. He couldn’t have done that all year round. The rest of the time he helped on the land. Mr Everley helped on the farm when he wasn’t thatching. At haymaking time he used to help with that. [George Everley died on 12th May 1963 and his wife Alice died on 20th June 1968].”
“I remember when Bishopstrow Church spire was struck by lightning [on Friday 14th June 1930]. I remember that quite well. It was terrific. It was overhead. My sister Phyllis was with Betty Everley. They were taking tea up to their fathers in the fields when the church was struck. Little did they know it was happening. They were all up Bishopstrow Farm Lane when the church was struck. They didn’t realise it was so near. Consequently they weren’t frightened at the time. Bishopstrow Church has been struck by lightning more than once. It had been struck before that time in 1930. My old aunt at Frome died about four years ago. She was 99. She gave me some photos of when Bishopstrow Church was struck in the first place.”
“North Farm was a lonely place but people lived there. The Bourroughs family, a father and three sons, worked for George Gauntlett up at North Farm. The Bourroughs’ lived there. North Farm was rather an isolated place, on the edge of the Plain, hidden away behind Scratchbury Hill and away from the villages of Norton Bavant and Bishopstrow. The Bourroughs’ were in a world of their own up at North Farm. They acted like it too. I wouldn’t say they were slow on the uptake but they weren’t with it. They were real country people. They were very honest and very hard working people. I remember them very well. I think only one of them married. He married a Maslen who lived in Bishopstrow and they went to live in one of the thatched cottages under the front of Scratchbury Hill. I suppose that was one of the tied cottages for North Farm. That was a bit nearer civilisation.”
“The Bourroughs’ used to keep several hives of bees at North Farm. The honey was beautiful. It was heather honey off the down. We used to buy it. It cost about a shilling a pot. The Bourroughs’ used to bring the honey down to Bishopstrow to sell it. They didn’t advertise the fact. The message was passed by word of mouth. You heard about it on the grapevine. More often than not, Jesse Bourroughs would bring it down. He’d deliver it, and then he used to have a pint in the Yew Tree at Boreham, before going back home to North Farm. Alternatively, if anybody in Bishopstrow wanted some honey they mentioned it to the Everley family, and Mr. Everley, who worked on the farm with the Bourroughs’, would bring it back to Bishopstrow in the evening when he came home from work.”
“I particularly remember Jesse Bourroughs. He used to come down to Bishopstrow and spend a lot of time with the Everley family. There was a men’s club in Bishopstrow then, which Mr. Everley was the secretary of. Jesse used to go in the club to play darts and billiards and things. It was a thriving men’s club. That was left to the village by the Reverend [George Henry Sanders] Atwood, who was the parson at Bishopstrow Church at the time. The Atwoods were wealthy people. Reverend Atwood left the club to the men of the village. He paid for it. That club has been there for years and years. It’s been there ever since I can remember.”
“My dad used to spend a lot of time in the men’s club playing billiards. He would go there every night. He used to love it in there but my mum used to get cross. She used to say to him ‘Why don’t you take your bed round there?’ Mr. Gerald Kaye, who lived at Yew Tree Cottages on the Heytesbury Road, got the billiard table for the club. Mr. Kaye was George Gauntlett’s accountant. He did the books for the farms and saw to the finance. He lived at Yew Tree Cottages all the time I knew him. He was a nice man. He was tall and smart and he had a moustache. He was real military-looking. I think he was a bachelor. I can’t remember a Mrs. Kaye.”
“As I mentioned before, the Gauntlett family also had the farm at the end of Dairy Lane. It was called Bishopstrow Dairy. I haven’t been down there for years but I’m told it’s all changed now. The house was thatched. There were quite a lot of farm buildings by the house and they were thatched as well. There used to be like a three-cornered courtyard there, next to the house, towards Watery Lane. It was a big yard and it went right out to the lane. The animals were kept in there. I remember going down there as a child and looking over the wall at the cows. It was a mixture of cows, Heinz varieties, but they were mostly brown and white ones. The fields went beyond Watery Lane and across the road on the right-hand side. I can remember seeing the cows being taken across the road. George Gauntlett had a manager at Bishopstrow Dairy. The manager lived there with his wife. Their name was Butler. There were some Pucketts lived there at one time. I don’t remember much about Mr. and Mrs. Butler, except we used to go down there to buy milk and eggs and cream from them.”
“My grandfather, Walter Moore, was a little short man. He was a miserable little man. I shouldn’t say that because he was my grandfather but he was miserable though. He was a bit cantankerous. He was one of those sorts. He was religious in his own way but he had a peculiar way of expressing it. My vivid memories of him, when I was a child, was when he was the sexton at Bishopstrow Church. I wasn’t very big and when I went to church he used to produce a dirty old peppermint out of his waistcoat pocket for me to eat during the service. I can remember that. He was the sexton at Bishopstrow Church for many years, for quite a long time. He must have been the sexton for 30 years or so, up until the Second World War. He was an old man then. Through being the sexton grandfather knew a lot of people but he never had too much to say about them.”
“Bert Parham wound the clock at Bishopstrow Church when my grandfather finished as sexton. John Francis took on the winding from Bert Parham. John wound the clock for several years, and after him, Alex Barber, who lived at 19 Bishopstrow, wound the clock for a while and then John Francis went back to doing it again. I don’t remember Alex Barber’s father because he died when he was a young man but he had several children. There were six or seven of them altogether. John Barber was the last one there, and the youngest one was a mongol child. The Barbers had hives in their garden and they sold honey. They used to have a sign on their house, facing Sutton Veny way, which said ‘Honey For Sale.’ Their honey wasn’t as good as the Bourroughs’ though, because the Bourroughs’ honey was lovely heather and clover honey.”
“My grandfather Walter Moore outlived my father. Walter Moore lived until he was 87. He gave up his house, because his wife had died, and he went to live with his eldest daughter, Mrs. Mary Millard, at West Bradley, near Glastonbury. He died at Glastonbury but they brought him back to Bishopstrow to bury him. He had been the sexton at Bishopstrow Church for I don’t know how many years, a long time. So he had connections with the Church and he wanted to be brought back there to be buried.”
“Walter’s wife, my grandmother, is also buried at Bishopstrow. Her name was Harriet Lane and she came from Sturminster Newton. She was a little short lady and she was very nice. She was quite nice looking, very quiet, and she was very religious. She was more religious than her husband. She had been brought up in a chapel household. Her father was a chapel parson. Walter and Harriet lived at 42 Bishopstrow, the first house up the steps. Of course it is all altered now. There’s a gap between No.42 and the house, No.41, in the next rank, where the Francis family lived. There was a well between my grandparents and Mr. and Mrs. Francis’s. When we were children we were told not to go near that well.”
“As I say, Mr. and Mrs. Francis were at No.41. George Roberts was at No.40. He worked in service as a butler. Mrs. Noyes was next door at No.39. She had Naval connections. Her son was in the Navy and I’ve got a feeling her husband had also been in the Navy. No.38 was where Mr. and Mrs. Bird lived. Mrs. Bird was formerly Dorothy Mitchell. Mrs. Breeze was at No.37. All the houses on the east side of the street have got long gardens going back to Eastleigh Court.”
“When the properties at Bishopstrow were renovated, half our house (No.32) went into the one next door. In between ours and No.33 was the old wash-house. They put that into the next house. Over the years most of the cottages in Bishopstrow have changed hands, sometimes so many times it’s a job to remember who has come and gone and who owned what. The ones at the end of the village belonged to John Saunders at one time. Mr. Simkins, who had the shop at Boreham, owned a cottage or two in Bishopstrow at one period.”
“My other grandfather (my mother’s father), Alfred Pearce, lived at 36 Bishopstrow. He was a very interesting man to talk to. When he was a boy he lived at Poulshot, near Devizes. He ran away when he was 15 and joined the army. He left Poulshot and went to Devizes and joined up. When his mother found out where he was, he was in South Africa. He was at Rorke’s Drift [22nd January 1879]. He fought in the Boer War [the first Boer War, 1880-1881] and came back to England having reached the rank of sergeant major in the army. He had been through quite a bit in the Boer War. He had the South African Medal. It’s a lovely medal. My cousin in Guildford has got that because he’s the only one to carry on the Pearce name. After he came back from South Africa my grandfather stayed in the army and was at one time stationed at Portsmouth. That’s where he was when Queen Victoria died [on 22nd January 1901]. She died at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. He was one of the party that took Queen Victoria’s body back to London.”
“Grandfather used to tell me all about these things. As I say, he was very interesting to talk to. He could have gone to the Chelsea Pensioners Hospital but my mother’s youngest sister, who wasn’t married, she was a spinster, gave up her work and came home and looked after him. He did get a pension from the Chelsea Pensioners Home, although it was only a few bob a week.”
“When he came back from South Africa grandfather must have gone back to Poulshot to see his family. His wife, my grandmother, came from Potterne. They married and they must have lived at Poulshot for a while because my mother, who was their eldest child, was born there. Then the family came Warminster way, to Crockerton. Grandfather Pearce worked on a farm there but I don’t know whose. He was a farm labourer after he came out of the Army. Really and truly, in those days, there wasn’t much else to do. Then he must have changed jobs and moved from Crockerton to Bishopstrow.”
“There was a retired army man called Major Olphert who lived at Bishopstrow Farm. Major Olphert used to come down to my grandfather Pearce’s cottage in the village. Major Olphert used to walk from Bishopstrow Farm, crossing over the road and coming along the path from the mill to the back of the churchyard. He used to walk round by the church and come into the village that way. He used to spend hours with my grandfather. They had both been in the Army. They were both old soldiers and they had a lot in common. They had a lot to talk about. They spent ages together reminiscing. I wasn’t very old but I can remember them doing that. Major Olphert was very keen on my grandfather. He used to bring a lot of books down for my grandfather to read. My grandfather hadn’t had a very good education. What he knew he had learned through books. He had educated himself. Major Olphert brought down all sorts of books – biographies, war books and military things – for my grandfather to read.”
“Major Olphert was a married man. He and his wife used to come to Bishopstrow, to church, quite a lot. They were both pleasant and kind people. I remember Mrs. Olphert more than her husband. She was a big woman. She used to go to town in a pony and trap to do her shopping. You’d see it trotting along Boreham Road. I don’t know where she parked it when she got to town. She very often used to stop and pick the village kids up. It used to seat about three. She’d take them for a ride in the pony and trap. She’d do that. The pony was a little brown one and the trap was brown too.”
“Major and Mrs. Olphert weren’t very well off. When they left Bishopstrow Farmhouse they went to live in a house up Boreham Road, behind what is now the Conservative Club [Now in Canon’s Close but originally a house called Donum and numbered 7a Boreham Road – later 68 Boreham Road. The house was built in 1936 by the Rev. Dixon, who lived at Prestbury House (now the Conservative Club). Rev. Dixon knew Major Olphert and his wife but because they had no means he let them live in the house which was named Donum, the Latin for ‘gift, present or sacrifice,’ in recognition of him helping them out.] When the Olphert moved out of the farmhouse at Bishopstrow Farm, Mark Gauntlett took up residence there.”
“Major and Mrs. Olphert had a son. I don’t know what become of him. He lived at home with them for a while but he went away. Whether he went away to work or college or something I don’t know. I remember he was tall like his mother. [Major William Cautley Olphert died on 14th February 1940 and his wife Irene died on 22nd May 1948].”
“When Dr. Kindersley lived in Warminster he used to come out to Bishopstrow to visit my grandfather for a chat. My grandfather used to toast bread over the open fire. He’d spread the toast with dripping and eat it. Dr. Kindersley loved to sit in my grandfather’s cottage and eat dripping on toast with him. One day Dr. Kindersley said to my grandmother ‘Hasn’t your husband got a coat? He never wears a coat.’ That was true, my grandfather never wore a coat. He didn’t like wearing one. Dr. Kindersley said ‘I’ll give him a coat if he wants one.’ The offer was politely refused. Grandfather didn’t want one. He used to get about in his waistcoat and his shirt sleeves. He wore a shirt, one that had to have a collar and a stud. It was quite a performance on a Sunday when he wanted to go to church because granny had to see to the stud.”
“Grandfather was a big man. He was six foot four and he weighed 21 stone. When we were children we were frightened to death of him but he was one of the meekest men you ever could meet. He was a gentle giant. If we misbehaved my mother used to threaten us. She’d say ‘I’ll go and get your grandfather to sort you out.’ Grandfather had a walrussy moustache too. That must have been the fashion in those days. I think that stemmed from his army days.”
“When my grandmother died my aunt, my mother’s sister, who wasn’t married, gave up her job to look after grandfather. She was housekeeper to Dr. Blackley when he lived at West House in West Street, Warminster. She gave up work and came home to look after grandfather. If she hadn’t done that he could have gone to the Chelsea Pensioners’ Home.”
“Grandfather lived until he was 79. He died in the early years of the Second World War. The War was on and, being an ex-military man, he was very interested in it. I remember him saying the War would be a long drawn out job but we would win it. I wish now that I had kept a note of the things grandfather said but in those days we didn’t think about it. We were young and there were no tape recorders.”
“Grandfather is buried at Bishopstrow Churchyard. He hasn’t got a gravestone. My mother and father didn’t like derelict old stones in churchyards, so they didn’t bother with stones for their parents. They didn’t believe in that. They wanted money to be given for flowers in church instead.”
“My grandmother, that’s mother’s mother, Mrs. Pearce, came from Potterne. Her maiden name was Elizabeth Cook. She was short, quite short. She was a lovely lady. We had a lot to do with her when we were younger. She used to look after us if my mum and dad wanted to go out anywhere. Mum and dad didn’t go away very often but they used to like to go on the charabanc trip from Bishopstrow to Tidworth Tattoo. This is before the Second World War. The tattoo didn’t start until about ten o’clock at night and they didn’t get home until the early hours of the morning. My dad used to thoroughly enjoy it. He had that military thing in him. We got left with my grandmother. She was a lovely person. She would give us hot apple tart. I used to like it then but I couldn’t eat it now. My husband likes stewed apple and custard but I couldn’t touch it. The thought of it puts me off but I always used to eat my grandmother’s apple tart. That was a treat. Gran used to look after us when my parents went to Tidworth Tattoo and we used to have the time of our lives. I think you’re always nearer your mother’s side of the family than your father’s.”
“Grandmother had five brothers. They worked on the railway when it was built from Devizes up to Paddington. They worked their way up on the railway, living in rough huts, and they never came back. They married and stayed in London. Two of them ended up as train-drivers and the other three worked in the offices to do with the railway. They did quite well.”
“My earliest memory, and I was only saying this to someone yesterday, is being pushed in a pram with my sister from Bishopstrow to Upton Scudamore on Sundays. My uncle, that’s my mother’s brother, lived at Upton Scudamore. His name was Alfred Pearce. He worked as a gardener at the Rectory in Upton Scudamore and he lived in a cottage in the Rectory grounds. My parents used to walk to there and back. That’s the first recollection I’ve got. That was quite a way for them to walk. They spent the day at Upton Scudamore and they walked back to Bishopstrow in the evening after tea.”
“My dad wasn’t like his father. He was more like his mother’s side of the family. He wasn’t like the Moore side at all. He was a very placid sort of a man. His name was Herbert Henry Moore and he was born at Cuckoo’s Corner, at Mells, in Somerset in 1888. He came to Bishopstrow with his family when his father moved with the Cox family from Mells to Bishopstrow Farm. My father worked as a gardener at Barrow House for the Erskine family. They had seven people working in the garden in those days. Dad started as the garden boy there when he left school. He worked his way up to be the second in the garden. He worked in the greenhouses, that’s all he did, looking after them and bringing on plants.”
“Dad must have met my mother Annie Elizabeth Pearce because her parents, Alfred and Elizabeth Pearce, lived in Bishopstrow. My mother was working in service at Bishopstrow Rectory for the Atwood family and my dad sang in the church choir. That’s how they must have got together. They got married at Bishopstrow in 1913. [Herbert was 24 and Annie was 26].”
“Before the First World War my mum and dad moved to Keyford at Frome. He had found work there. It was a better job. I forget the name of the people who he went to work for but they were gentlemen farmers. They had a manager and three or four cottages. My mother didn’t like it at Frome, so father soon gave the job up and they came back to Bishopstrow. This was before my time.”
“When the First World War broke out dad volunteered and went off to War. He joined the Middlesex Regiment and was a stretcher-bearer. He was taken a prisoner of war in Germany. When Armistice was declared my mother didn’t know where he was. She didn’t know if he was dead or alive. There wasn’t much communication in those days. He was repatriated at Ripon in Yorkshire. He turned up in Bishopstrow a fortnight or more afterwards. He just turned up. He’d lost seven stone in weight. They were badly treated when they were prisoners but he never spoke about it much.”
“After coming home from the First World War, my dad lived with my mum at my grandparents’ home for a while. Then my dad and mum got their first home. That was No.41 Bishopstrow, where Len Francis later lived. That was empty, so they went to live there. Dad went back to work for the Erskines at Barrow House. Dad enjoyed working for them. The Erskines were nice people and they had money. There’s no doubt about that.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Erskine had a son called Mike. He used to ride a motorbike at terrific speed. He used to be very friendly with Bert Dale and he was another mad thing on a motorbike. Bert Dale used to live in Sutton Veny. He used to reckon that to get to Warminster, from Sutton Veny, through Bishopstrow, on a motorbike, took four minutes. You could hear him roaring over Sutton Common, coming towards Bishopstrow. That was before anything was built out there. I remember seeing him come through Bishopstrow on a motorbike. If you blinked you missed him. There were a lot of complaints about it. People said it was too dangerous. Of course there wasn’t a big amount of traffic about in those days.”
“The Erskines eventually left Bishopstrow. They went to live at Byne House at Church Street in Warminster. My father then went to work in the garden at Eastleigh Court and my family moved up the road to No.32 Bishopstrow. No.32 and the neighbouring houses must have belonged to Eastleigh Court. The Southey family, who had lived at Eastleigh Court, had left Bishopstrow and gone abroad for a few years. Old Captain Southey had let Eastleigh Court to a man called Earle and that’s who my dad went to work for.”
“Mr. Earle and his family were nice people. Mr. and Mrs. Earle were both very tall and they had two sons. Mr. Earle employed quite a big staff. There were about six in the garden because it was a big garden. I don’t remember the house staff but there must have been quite a few because they had their own dining hall. There would have been a housekeeper and the maids and all that.”
“I can remember going up to Eastleigh Court to lovely Christmas parties when we were kids. The parties were held in the ballroom. They had a Christmas tree in the ballroom and it was lit with candles. That was dangerous, wasn’t it? It was really something to see it. The house was decorated beautiful for Christmas and we had lovely food. It was quite a ritual. We had to have our best clothes on and we had to behave ourselves. Mother and father and us children went and so did the people opposite us, the Garretts at No.28. Mr. Garrett and his wife had a son and a daughter. They went. Quite a few other people in the village went and, of course, there were quite a few young children. It was a big party. It was only for the people in the village who were connected with the Earle family. It wasn’t for the whole village. We didn’t know we were one-up on the other kids in the village. That never entered our heads. The other kids knew but we didn’t brag about it.”
“One Christmas I remember the Earles had a party and somebody dressed up as Father Christmas. There was also a huge snowball. The snowball must have been made of cardboard and cotton wool. I can still ‘see’ that snowball now. It was out of this world. It was like a fairy-tale. Inside the snowball was a present for everyone that went. The Earles always gave the men a pair of new boots each, for a present for Christmas, which was quite a present wasn’t it? And the wives always had a length of material to make themselves a dress, and a tin of tea. I’ve still got the tin my mother had. It was lovely tea. It was Mazawattee tea. And each child had a present. I was given a fairy-tale pop-up book. I remember they also gave us enough material to make my sister and I a dress. I remember it was checked red and white and blue and white. As I say all of this came out of the snowball. So, really and truly, the Earle family were very good to the people who worked for them. We did very well at Christmas, but mind the wages were poor. Of course, people who worked in private service weren’t very well paid but they had a lot of perks.”
“Mr. Earle also had another house. It was down at Milborne Port, near Sherborne, in Dorset. When the time came for him to leave Eastleigh Court, because the lease was up and the Southeys were coming back from abroad, he went back to Sherborne. When Southey came back my dad worked for him for a little while but not long because he didn’t want so many gardeners.”
“After dad finished working at Southey’s he went to work at Heytesbury. He worked in the garden at Three Chimneys in Mantles Lane. That was for Colonel Robinson, who had been in the Indian Army. Dad was earning 12 shillings and six pence a week. This was about the first or second year of the Second World War. He asked Colonel Robinson for a rise and he was immediately given the sack. That’s what it was like years ago. Nevertheless it was the best thing that ever happened to dad because he then got a good job at the DCRE in Warminster. That’s where he ended his working life.”
“My father and mother had been married seven years before they started a family. That was because my father had come back from the War in such a poor state. My sister Phyllis was born first. She was born 16 months before me, in 1921. My sister was the first baby Dr. Kindersley brought into the world when he came to Warminster first of all. Dr. Hodges at Ulster Lodge was our family doctor later on. I think, luckily, we didn’t need a doctor very much. You couldn’t really afford a doctor. Mother paid into a doctor’s or sick club. She paid about tuppence a week. That covered us for any doctors or medicines. My mother, like most other villagers, usually relied on home remedies, like if you had a cold you rubbed your chest with fat. Or you ate boiled onion soup if you had a cold. Honey and lemon or honey and vinegar were used to soothe a bad cough.”
“There were more illnesses about years ago. I remember when the girl opposite us in Bishopstrow had scarlet fever. They took her off to the isolation hospital at Bradley Road in Warminster. She was gone six weeks. That was Joan Bond. They thought Doris Grist (later Mrs. Simmerling) had TB and she went to Winsley. They say TB is coming back again and they’re blaming badgers for the spread of it. Apart from the measles we were a pretty healthy family.”
“I can remember when I was seven my mother was very ill. She had erysipelas [a skin complaint also known as St. Anthony’s Fire] in her face and lost her sight temporarily. It closed her eyes up. It was to do with the brain. If it had gone over her brain it would have killed her. It started like flu symptoms. When I think about it now I realise it was like this meningitis you hear about so much at the moment. Dr. Hodges treated mother. He had to come and lance her eyes so that she could see. She lost all her hair but it grew again. That was one of the symptoms. She got over it but it was very serious.”
“John Francis’s mother would lay anyone out in the village when they died. I don’t remember a midwife. There was a district nurse at Heytesbury who used to come out. She had a little old-fashioned car. Her name was Miss Sheppard. She used to deal with babies. I remember her but there was no midwife living in Bishopstrow.”
“I was born on 12th April 1922. I didn’t have a good relationship with my sister when we were young. As we got older we got more tolerant of each other but to begin with we were always fighting like cat and dog. I was always accused of starting it. I did everything wrong and my sister didn’t. She was the one that used to shout before I got anywhere near her, so I got the clout in any case. I always came off much worse. My mother used to say to me ‘I know if I hit you I’ve usually got the right one.’ It was like that.”
“I was a very naughty child. Looking back I realise what it was. My sister was delicate and got the attention. I was rebellious and played my mother up. If I went outside to play I would look through the window and poke my tongue out at my mother. Then I would go off playing for hours but mother had a long memory, so when I went back home she would give me a clout. I would say ‘What was that for?’ She’d say ‘That’s for what you did through the window when you went out.’ I used to play mother up but she always got the better of me. Whatever she had in her hand she would throw it at me, like a wet dish cloth if she was washing up. It didn’t hurt. It frightened you more than anything. At dinner times, especially on Sundays, my parents always had a little cane on the table. That was to remind me I had to behave myself.”
“I was baptised at Bishopstrow Church. We regularly went to Church there and I went to Sunday School twice a day on Sundays. That was held in the village hall which had formerly been the school. Miss Heath lived next door to us at Bishopstrow and she was the school-teacher. I never went to the village school because it closed before my time. It closed in 1921. Miss Heath went on to teach at Longbridge Deverill when Bishopstrow School closed. She often used to come in our place. She and my mother were friends. My mother used to air the bed for her while she was out at work. [Miss Alice Grace Heath died on 13th March 1952].”
“Squire Temple left the hall to the village but he never left no money for the upkeep. It was tumbling down. It wanted money spent on it. There were no modern conveniences there. It had no proper toilets and no electric. The people in the village, like Jack Breeze, used to hold whist drives to raise the money for repairs. Jack Breeze was good at doing repairs. Other men in the village used to go and help with painting and things. It was all free gratis. They gave their time free. Temple would never give anything towards it. He wasn’t really a benefactor. He might have given the hall to the village but it was in a terrible state when he handed it over. He was doing himself a favour. He should have given a couple of thousand pounds with it but he never. He never had nothing done to it in his time.”
“Temple was disliked. He used to be a magistrate on the bench at the Town Hall in Warminster. Everybody used to keep out of his way. They knew they would get fined a lot by him, especially if they were motorists. He hated motorists and he would always fine them as much as he could. People used to say, if they ever had an offence, ‘Let’s hope Temple isn’t on the bench because we’ll be for it.’ That was a well known saying.”
“Temple was the squire. You had to doff your hat to him and call him sir. I think people were a bit afraid of him. They were a bit in awe of him. He did have an aura about him. I know when I went to Sunday School I had to call him ‘Sir’ and curtsey to him and all that sort of thing. He had a wife and three children. They were tall and very smart looking people. He had two boys and a girl. One son was a doctor. I forget what the other one was. The girl was an artist. We didn’t see much of them. They went away to school and they weren’t around much. People said they didn’t get on very well with their father. I don’t think they had much to do with him.”
“Mrs. Temple was a tall woman and she looked a bit domineering. I’ve no idea what Squire Temple’s marriage was like but he used to like the ladies. That’s definitely true. He had a reputation for that. He was notorious for it. People knew he liked women but they didn’t dare say anything. There used to be a woman in another village and they always reckoned her child was his. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know. You know how these tales get about.”
“Temple used to walk from Bishopstrow House to Bishopstrow Church along the Weirs. He could walk along the path down from the house, go through the tunnel under the main road, into the gardens, out through the gate in the wall to the bridge over the Wylye, and along the Weirs to church. The grounds and the footpaths were always kept nice. All that ground from the bridge to the road was kept cut. It was always nice and tidy.”
“He came to church with his wife. She used to go into church first and sit in the front pew. He used to stand outside and wait for people to go in. He used to wear a tall hat and he would be the last one to walk into church. He walked into church as if he owned it. He had a rapport with the vicar and he had a say in choosing which vicars came there.”
“The Weirs were Temple’s private domain. If you were down the Weirs and you saw him coming you would turn around and walk back. You’d try and keep out of his way. He’d tell you that you were trespassing if he caught up with you. On the other hand, when we were school children, all the kids from Bishopstrow would sometimes be allowed to go up to Bishopstrow House. I don’t remember having tea there but we were allowed to go for a boat ride along the river Wylye. Temple used to have a rowing boat on the river. We used to walk down that path from the house, under the road, to the little gazebo place in the gardens where he kept the boat. We were given a row along the river from the back of Bishopstrow Mill to Boreham Manor. The boat used to take about six at a time. Temple didn’t row it himself. Someone, one of his old retainers, did the rowing. The river was good in those days. It was kept clean and tidy. I do remember going on the boat once or twice. We had to behave while we were in the boat though. It was mind your p’s and q’s. Oh yes, definitely. So, Temple was good in his way to children. We kids would never have had a ride in a boat otherwise.”
“The three houses (now two) on the main road, opposite the Weirs, next to where the entrance to the house, the hotel, is now, belonged to Temple. I’ve got a feeling that’s where some of his staff lived. The head gardener lived in the first one. That was Mr. Tucker. The other two were occupied by people who worked in the garden as well. Wilf White and his wife lived in the second one but I’m not sure if he worked for Temple or not. I can’t remember who was in the third one. I’m sure the people in those cottages were all connected with Temple. He didn’t have a big staff.”
“We always used to go to church on Sunday evenings. We had to go. That was a ritual. We always went to Bishopstrow Church at six o’clock on a Sunday. I wouldn’t say my father was religious as such. My mother was more the religious one of the family but she didn’t broadcast it a lot. My mother, when I think about it, was a very good woman really. Mother and father were believers and they brought us up to be the same.”
“My dad was clean-shaven and he was not too tall. He had a fair complexion and a lovely red face. He had a lovely disposition. He had a wonderful temperament. He was very happy-go- lucky. I could twist him round my little finger. He was full of fun. He liked a joke and a laugh. My mother was a bit on the staid side. My sister is like that but I’m like my dad. We used to have a lot of fun. If we ever wanted to do anything or go out anywhere we used to ask mother. She decided what we could or couldn’t do, even though she would always say ‘What did your father say?’ If we asked father he would always say ‘What did your mother say?’ He never went against her. She was always the boss in those situations.”
“My dad’s father, as I told you, was a miserable old chap. After his wife died my mother used to look after him and he was horrible to my mother. I don’t know if it was because he resented her being alive when his wife was dead, or not, but he really was horrible to her. I was getting on then, I was coming up to my teens, and I used to take notice of how he treated my mother. I used to think why should my mother take that from him. I would say to her about it. She used to say ‘He’s your father’s father and it’s my duty.’ I wouldn’t have put up with it myself. He did say some nasty things to her. She never complained about it though. Mother was like that with everyone. She was friendly with the neighbours. She was a good natured woman. As far as I know she never had a single enemy. She’d do anything for anybody. There are not many people about like that now.”
“Like my mother my dad was a staunch Conservative. He wasn’t Conservative because his employer was. No, I think that was his own conviction. He didn’t push his politics but he would speak out if he thought it was really necessary. He wasn’t one to aggravate another. He’d turn the other cheek. He had opinions but he wasn’t really opinionated.”
“He belonged to the Conservative Club in Warminster when it was at Church Street. He used to go down there playing billiards. He liked a pint and he used to go to the Yew Tree at Boreham occasionally but not very often because he couldn’t afford it. He liked to smoke a pipe. Mother didn’t mind him smoking as long as he left his pipe, his matches and his tobacco on the table downstairs. Upstairs was out of bounds. He never would have smoked upstairs in any case. I never heard him swear. He might have swore in the company of others but he never did in front of us. My mother wouldn’t have had that. She didn’t like people swearing. She used to say you can express yourself without swearing.”
“Dad worried about the world when the Second World War started. Having been through the 1914-1918 War he had his own memories of and experiences but as I say he didn’t talk about it. He must have had a rough time. Dad kept himself to himself. Dad was very genial. He would mix in with people and hold a conversation but Mr. Everley was the only chap he went out with. I don’t think dad had any enemies. He was such a laid-back sort of person.”
“Dad wasn’t mechanically minded. No, not at all. Except he used to mend our shoes. He’d buy a little piece of leather to do that. There was a little shop in George Street, down the bottom end of Warminster, run by Miss Francis. That’s where dad got the leather from. I used to wear my shoes out in no time. I was a terrible tomboy. I couldn’t walk properly anywhere, I always had to kick things. It didn’t go down very well with my mother but I think my father enjoyed it. He always wanted a boy. I was the second daughter and I turned out to be a tomboy. So I was the next best thing to a son.”
“Mum was reserved. That’s the word. She didn’t smoke and she didn’t like women going to pubs. I remember when my sister was growing up she went to a pub once. My mother thought that was terrible. That was a real sin to her. She made it known she didn’t like it. She was a great one for voicing her opinion. She didn’t mince her words if she thought she was right.”
“My mum kept herself to herself but she used to natter with the immediate neighbours. She belonged to the Mothers’ Union in Bishopstrow but she wasn’t the sort of person who would go visiting other people’s houses. Oh no. She didn’t mind them coming to her though. A lot of women went in and out of each others’ houses in Bishopstrow. Oh yes. Often it caused a lot of trouble when someone said something about someone else.”
“Bishopstrow was a very close knit community in those days. You never locked your doors and if anyone was sick someone would turn up with a pudding or something for them. I know when my dad died I had to go to work to live. I got a pound a week pension from the Army but they used to take six shillings out of that for income tax. So I had to work. This was 1944. The authorities said ‘You’re young, you can work.’ That was their attitude. When you think today what all these army wives get and there’s psychiatrist’s treatment for people. I had nothing. I remember I had to go to work. My mother had bad legs. She had varicose ulcers. The women in Bishopstrow used to say to me ‘Don’t you worry about your mother.’ They said ‘We’ll see to her.’ When I got home I found someone had been in home and laid the table and put out a dinner for me. They had cooked mother something too. It was a good atmosphere in Bishopstrow.”
“It was a good close knit community until after the War. That’s when young people started drifting away and didn’t come back. That’s when things changed. I only know Harold Parham and his wife in Bishopstrow now. Harold’s wife worked for the Reverend Dixon at Prestbury House when she left school. She was an orphan in the Orphanage at West Street, Warminster, and her first job after leaving the orphanage was with the Reverend Dixon. Mr. and Mrs. Parham are the only ones I really know in Bishopstrow now. And I know of Brian Hallett. That’s about it. Mrs. Alford, in the bungalow on the corner of Dairy Lane, I know of her but I don’t really know her. Harold Parham is about the only one I can say I really know. I knew Leonard Francis but he’s gone now. He died over a year ago. I knew him and his parents. Len’s brother John lives over at Boreham Field.”
“Bishopstrow has changed. The houses there are all in the hands of private individuals now. Years ago they were owned by just a few landlords, usually the big employers, who let them to their workers. We lived at No.32. The four bottom ones belonged to Eastleigh Court. The ones at the top belonged to sundry owners. I think the Gauntletts had some of them. I think Temple owned some on the other side of the road, near where the shop was. Those up the steps, opposite Church Lane, later on belonged to the War Office but I reckon they originally belonged to the Gauntletts. Not where Mrs. Bigwood lives now [No.46], because that was always private. Mr. [Martin Ernest] Bush lived in No.46 when I was a girl. He was the manager of the Co-op in Warminster and he’s buried at Bishopstrow Churchyard [he died on 27th February 1944, aged 79]. The house next to No.46, where Harold Parham now lives (No.45), and next door to him, where the Mitchells lived (No.44), and the ones next to that where Mr. Snelgrove and my grandfather lived (Nos.43 and 42), must have belonged to the Gauntletts. Mr. Snelgrove was on the farm for Gauntletts.”
“Those four cottages, Nos.42 to 45 Bishopstrow, I’m sure they belonged to Gauntletts, because the people who lived there worked for them. Then of course the War Office bought them and when the War Office got rid of them they sold them for about £100 to £200 each. The sitting tenants could buy them if they were able to but a lot of them didn’t have £100 in those days. Old Mr Parham bought his and the others were sold off. My grandfather had moved to Glastonbury, so he didn’t buy his, and it wasn’t villagers who bought the others.”
“My parents lived at No.32 Bishopstrow. That’s where I grew up. When I was a young girl it was thatched. The thatch came off and was replaced by tiles in about 1928. I was going to St John’s School at the time but I was home from school with the measles. My sister and I both had the measles. We had a whale of a time watching the men take the thatch off. There were layers and layers of thatch, years’ worth, to come off. The men got filthy. They put a tarpaulin on the roof after taking the thatch off, until when they put the tiles on. The work on the houses was done by Chummie Kill from Warminster. It was his men. I’ve got a feeling Chummie Kill had something to do with when the houses were bought and sold. I’m not sure what but he was involved.”
“Outside the front of the cottages were little flower borders and a cobbled path between them and the road. I remember the cobbled paths and the flower borders very well. Everyone tried to outdo one another with their flowers. They always grew wallflowers in the borders and nasturtiums up the walls. Before the Second World War, probably not long after 1930, the road through the village was altered. It used to be a lot higher in the middle and it used to cause a lot of trouble with water. There was a flooding problem. So, the Council or someone, had a great lump taken off the road. The village was without a proper road for ages. When the road was altered they took away the cobbled footpaths and the little borders. They put a new pavement, a flat one, down. There were no street lights though, not even when I left Bishopstrow in 1965. The village street was pitch dark at night.”
“Our cottage was rather basic. You went in the front door and you could look straight through to the back door. There wasn’t a passage because it was just one room. You went straight into the living room. There was a big larder on the left- hand side. It was big enough to eat in. There were stone floors in the larder and the living room. We didn’t have carpet. My parents had lino with mats on the top. There was a biggish window in the larder and shelves round three sides of the room. In the living room was a sideboard, a table and four chairs, a settee, and a little table in the corner. There were a couple of armchairs. There was a fireplace with an old fashioned range. We had that taken out before we left. The stairs for going upstairs were next to the fireplace, on the right-hand side. They were wooden, open stairs, and they turned round, real twisty.”
“There were two bedrooms upstairs. My parents had the big one and my sister and I had the other one. My mother had a full suite, washstand and dressing table, a wardrobe and a big bookcase in the big bedroom. I think she had a second bed, a single one, in the room too. That was in case someone was ill. We had a three- quarter bed in our room. We had a dressing table and a chest of drawers. There was no room for a wardrobe but there was an alcove with a curtain in front. We used to hang our clothes on hooks behind the curtain.”
“There was no electric. We had oil lamps for lighting downstairs and candles to go to bed with. We weren’t even allowed to carry the candle up to bed. Mother did that. When we got in bed mother would take the candle away. That was because of the thatched roof. When mother left the room she took the candle away with her and that was that. We had no light at all at night. We were in the dark.”
“Each house in the rank had a toilet each. The toilets were halfway up the garden. It was a bucket toilet, a basic earth closet. My father used to empty it. He would empty it first thing in the morning and he did it twice, sometimes three times, a week. It was always a joke because he used to rotate it on the garden. It was dug in and we always had numerous tomato plants come up because the seeds used to go straight through us. We always had good vegetables, so there’s something to be said for the fertiliser!”
“We tore up old newspapers for toilet paper. My parents always had the Daily Mail. It was a penny. Someone delivered it. Either Coates & Parker or W.H. Smith in Warminster. W.H. Smith had a shop about where Kwik Save is now. I still have the Mail. I think I like it because my parents liked it. My parents also took the Warminster Journal. They called it the local rag. It’s like today, people had to have it in case they missed something.”
“We had a tap inside the back door. There was a porch and the sink was in there with the tap. If you wanted a wash you filled a bowl with water and carried it into the larder. You washed in the larder with a bowl on the kitchen table. If you wanted a bath you had to wait until your father and mother had gone to bed. We had a tin bath that used to hang on a nail on the wall outside. On Saturday nights the bath was brought in and placed in front of the living room fire. There was always a kettle boiling on the grate. You filled the bath with some cold water from the outside tap and you added a few kettles of hot water to it to get the temperature right. Mum and dad would go on to bed and my sister and I would take it in turns to have a bath in front of the fire. There wasn’t really any privacy. We were two girls of course. I don’t know what we would have done if we’d had any brothers. Afterwards we had to lug the bath outside and tip the water out. Years later we had a bath in the outside wash house. It was all so different to having a bath today.”
“Mother used to do our hair. Friday night was hair-washing night. I used to have very thick hair. It was always a trouble to dry it. You had to dry it in front of the fire during the winter. We had a coal fire. There were quite a few coal merchants in Warminster who would deliver out to Bishopstrow, like Button’s, and Birds And Bryer Ash. My parents got their coal from the Co-op. Giddy Lines used to bring out the coal for the Co-op. My parents had a coal cupboard in the kitchen. The coalman used to have to bring the coal through the living room to the kitchen. It was ten pence, in old money, a bag. It’s probably £10 a bag now. I know when I lived at Boreham Field I used to burn Coalite and that was £7 a bag then. It’s a lot of money when you think you’re burning it. Later on my parents did away with the coal cupboard and got a bunker for outside. We had quite a lot of trees up the garden in Bishopstrow if we wanted some wood but we didn’t burn a lot of wood on the fire. My parents reckoned it was dangerous for the chimney.”
“My mother did her washing the old-fashioned way. Next to the house, in the middle of the two houses, was a place made like a wash- house. In there were two coppers and some mangles shared by four houses. There was also a tap in there for filling the boilers. The neighbours arranged between themselves what days they could have the use of the wash-house. My mother had lived there the longest, she was top dog, so she had first choice. My mother did her washing on a Monday. Mrs. Coles, who lived next door, did hers on a Tuesday. The woman on the end did hers on Tuesdays as well.”
“My mother only used soap and soda for washing the clothes. She never used soap powder. She used ordinary common soap and she used to use blue. She had a mangle, an old-fashioned one, with the wooden rollers, to squeeze the water out. The clothes were then carried up the garden and hung on the clothes-line. Mother was a good washer. When I think about washing machines now I realise how good she cleaned our clothes.”
“On Tuesdays the clothes were dampened down and folded into baskets. Wednesday was ironing day. It was quite a ritual. Of course in those days there were no electric irons. Mother had flat irons which she used to heat on a Primus stove. She never got any marks on the clothes. If she could see me washing and ironing now, how I do it, she would turn in her grave. She was very particular.”
“Mother used to do other people’s laundry as well. She took in laundry from the big houses including Bishopstrow Rectory and one or two others. She did quite a bit but she didn’t get much for doing it. Mother used to reckon that the washing she did kept us in shoe leather. She did it for Mr. and Mrs. Marriage who lived at Heronslade. Mr. Marriage had Boreham Mill. His chauffeur, Mr. Macey who lived at the bottom of Boreham Hill, would bring the washing to our house in a great big hamper. It was full of sheets, the rough ones, that had to be ironed back and front.”
“You also used the boilers for burning your rubbish. If you had any old boots or anything like that you wanted to get rid of, you burnt them in the boiler. At Christmas the Christmas puddings were done in the boiler. We had one copper for that. Each person wrote their names on their puddings and they were all done together in the copper. You took it in turns to stoke the fire.”
“Mother cooked on the range and we also had an oven we could fit on the Primus. It was pretty primitive really. When you had the range going you always had a hot oven, so we always had nice rice puddings and things like that. Pies too. She used to have a bake up on a Saturday and we always had a roast dinner on a Sunday. There was usually enough meat left over from Sunday to make a meal on Monday. There were enough vegetables left over, too, to make bubble and squeak to go with it. Tuesdays we had scrambled eggs or mashed potato. We always had eggs because we kept chickens in a run up the garden. We had about a dozen. If we had a broody hen dad would get some eggs from somebody else, so we didn’t have to use our own, and sit them so we had some chicks. The chicks were brought down and put in a basket by the fender. Mum would get the basket up on to the kitchen table and feed the chicks some rice and chopped up egg. We never used our own eggs for raising. We always bought a clutch off someone else.”
“Mother was a good cook. It was good grub. The food today doesn’t taste the same. Today it’s all out of packets. Years ago you never bought a packet of anything. We always had plenty of vegetables. Father had his garden. There were allotments in Bishopstrow but dad didn’t have one. He used to go and help his father though. He had a big garden. If dad wanted any extra he used to grow it in his father’s garden. My grandparents didn’t need as many vegetables as us.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Stevens had a shop in Bishopstrow. Mother didn’t go in there much but I don’t know why. You couldn’t get everything you wanted in Stevens’. I don’t think the Stevens could afford to stock a lot. When I think about it I don’t know how the Stevens’ managed. They were a married couple but I don’t think they had any children. Mr. Stevens was a little man with very dark hair. I don’t remember his wife very much. It wasn’t a proper shop. You stepped inside the door to a room. When Mrs. Hallett had it later on, it was just the same. Mr. and Mrs. Stevens concentrated mostly on selling beer. It was really an off-licence. There was a sign over the door which said ‘Not to be consumed on the premises.’ I remember it said that. The shop belonged to a brewery, the Lamb Brewery at Frome I think.”
“People in Bishopstrow, particularly the old men, took their jugs into Stevens’ place to get them filled with beer or cider. On Sunday nights, after church, my dad and mum and my sister and I used to go to my grandfather and grandmother’s for supper. My grandfather would send my father over to Stevens’ shop to get some beer. Grandmother had some little glasses, about an inch high, and we were allowed to have some beer in them with our bread and cheese. We were allowed a little glass full. We couldn’t have any more, my mother used to say, because it would make us bad tempered.”
“If the people in Bishopstrow wanted shopping they had to go into town or round to the shops at Boreham. There were two shops at Boreham. One was Hicks’, where the antiques shop was until recently, and the other was Fitz’s, where the Post Office is now. A lot of Bishopstrow people went round to Hicks’ for their shopping.”
“My mother didn’t very often go into town shopping, only occasionally. I don’t remember her going in to buy food. That was delivered. My mother got her bread from Butcher’s bakery at Silver Street in Warminster. They delivered out to Bishopstrow. They had a horse and cart to start with but later on they had a van. Mum also had stuff from the Co-op and they delivered. She went into town and put her order in or she ordered when they delivered for the following week. The Co-op was a good place for her to shop with because she got some divvy. When I started worked first I went to work at Everett’s grocery shop in Warminster. So, of course, mum used to get her groceries from there then. I used to take mum’s order into Everett’s because I used to get a bit of staff discount, a shilling in the pound or something like that.”
“Mum bought our clothes from Hibberd’s. She paid into a clothing club there. That’s when Mr. and Mrs. Pearce ran it. It’s where Bateman’s is now. I didn’t get hand-me-downs from my sister because I was bigger than her. Our clothes were passed on to our cousins at Upton Scudamore.”
“My sister and I had to keep our bedrooms tidy and we had to help out with the household chores. We always had to do the washing-up on a Sunday. One of us had to wash and the other had to wipe. We graduated to helping mum make the gravy and cooking. Mum also showed us how to knit and sew. She was quite good at that.”
“I never got pocket money. Mum would buy sweets and biscuits for us once a week. She had a tin she put them in. When they were gone that was it until the following week. The sweets were boiled ones. I remember the red and white striped mints, the humbugs. The biscuits were usually ginger nuts. Those were my father’s favourites.”
“In the evenings we sat around the table, with an oil lamp on the table. We did knitting or sewing, or we played cards. Being that there was four of us we used to play cards quite a lot. We played whist, rummy and crib. My dad was fond of crib. That was our evening’s entertainment. We had no music. The only music we had was when we went to church. We didn’t have a wireless until later on, when we got electric. I remember when we got the electric my sister and I bought my mum an electric cooker. We had both left school and were working then. We bought the cooker at Monk’s in Warminster. That’s when Mrs. Monk had a shop at the High Street, where Gibson’s the chemist is now. Our first radio and our first fridge also came from Monk’s. My mother would make us save up for things before we could have them. She wouldn’t allow us to have anything on tick. It had to be cash.”
“Dad never had a car, only a pushbike, and I don’t ever remember going on a holiday. We used to have a Sunday School outing by charabanc. Sometimes mother came with us, sometimes she didn’t. More often than not she didn’t and we kids went on our own. The outing usually went to Weymouth. The charabanc was supplied by Mr. Cornelius in Warminster. The outing was well looked forward to. We had to pay a little bit towards it, about a shilling, but of course that was a lot of money in those days. Mum used to beg, steal or borrow it from somewhere so that we could go. When we got to Weymouth we went straight out on to the sands. We always took sandwiches for our midday meal but they always took us to a restaurant for our tea. They gave us a tea of cakes and sandwiches and buns. I’ve got a feeling Mrs. Temple or the parson paid for that. We spent weeks looking forward to it, then it came and went, and then we had to wait another year to do it again.”
“The only other thing we had to look forward to was the fair in Warminster. That was twice a year, in April and October. It was all through the Market Place and the High Street. Part of it went down Weymouth Street as well. It lit the town up and the roundabouts were steam-driven. The Noah’s Ark or the big horses were always set up outside the Post Office. It was a big fair and it was held by charter. It was very exciting. People used to talk about it for weeks in advance. My parents took us to keep us quiet. We went to the fair with mother and father. We weren’t allowed to go on our own. We saved up to go to it. We’d try to collect a few pennies. We couldn’t afford to go on many rides but the showmen very often gave free rides for kids. We used to buy a bag of chips to walk home with. We used to see how long the chips would last.”
“Christmas was always looked forward to. We used to have a Christmas tree. It used to get planted back in the garden afterwards and dug up again the next year to be used again. We also put up decorations in home. Father would kill one of the cockerels for our dinner. I remember mother used to make her own mincemeat and her own Christmas cake. We used to have our Christmas dinner at home and then usually we went to our grandparents for tea.”
“We used to hang our stockings up on Christmas Eve before going to bed. In the morning when we woke up it was a treat to go down through the stocking to see what was in the end of it. You always had an orange in the bottom of the stocking, a few nuts and a few sweets. If you were lucky you got a small toy or a pack of cards or something like that. It was nothing very much because our parents couldn’t afford it but we enjoyed what we had. I believed in Father Christmas until one year I was awake and I saw my father come up the stairs and take my stocking off the end of the bed. I was ever so disappointed. I was about five or six when that happened.”
“Today the children have too many material things. That’s my personal opinion. I think during the War things were short and the next generation decided to give their children the things they never had. I don’t think that did anyone any good. Children today have brand new bikes but they never put them away. They just throw them down outside. They don’t value things now. They get too many things all year round. It’s Christmas every day for youngsters now.”
“After I was confirmed we always went to the midnight service at the church on Christmas Eve. Very often we went to church on Christmas Day morning. It wasn’t high church. It was just an ordinary service with no incense or any of that. I don’t like that anyway. You don’t need all those elaborations if you are a believer. Those things are for show. When I first started work I used to clean the brass at Bishopstrow Church. A group of us volunteered to take it in turns to clean the brass. It wasn’t until I started doing that I realised what lovely things there were in Bishopstrow Church. I don’t mean ornate things. I mean things like the carving and the windows.”
“We didn’t have many toys when we were children. We had dolls but I didn’t have a doll’s pram. My uncle made us a nice doll’s house and he made all the furniture to go in it. I remember we also had a teddy bear each. We also had a hoop and a skipping rope. We used to get out in the road playing hopscotch. We marked the road with a bit of chalk. There wasn’t any traffic to run us over.”
“We didn’t celebrate bonfire night. My father would never let me and my sister have fireworks. I don’t remember being bothered about it. If father said no, well, that was it. It was no good to complain. One or two boys up the street had fireworks. I’ve never liked fireworks. I don’t think we missed out by not having them. I had a happy childhood, oh yes, definitely. When I see what goes on today I realise how happy we were. We didn’t have a lot of money but we had a lot of fun. People want material things now.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Grist lived next door to us. I don’t know where the Grists came from. I know when they left Bishopstrow they went to live at Woodcock. Mr Grist was a bricklayer. He and his wife had four daughters. That was Doris, Joan, Pearl and Joyce. Doris was a year older than us and Joan was a bit younger than me, but we were all quite close. We used to get on well together. We didn’t quarrel. It could be quite noisy out in the back garden. There were eight of us because there were the two Kimber girls, Phyllis and Vera, the other side. When the Kimbers left Bishopstrow they went to live at Victoria Road in Warminster. Vera lives at Portway now. I think Phyllis lives there as well.”
“So, there were eight of us girls who used to play together. We didn’t stay in the back yard to play. We used to go down to the box bushes at the Weirs. We played houses. We used to take mum’s old lace curtains down there and drape them over the bushes. We would pretend the box bushes were houses. We used to spend hours down there. There was no risk then of being abducted. That’s where we used to play when we weren’t up Legg’s farm or down over in the cricket field. In those days you couldn’t play on the cricket field much because the water level was up. That was always under water in the winter. The meadows used to flood right over. It was to do with the level of the river.”
“My grandfather, Walter Moore, had to dig the graves in the churchyard at Bishopstrow when he was the sexton. The water level was a problem in the churchyard. The graves would fill with water while grandfather was digging them. He had to keep bailing the water out of the graves. Even when a funeral service was going on in the church, before the coffin was brought out to the churchyard, he would have to keep bailing the water out of the grave or the coffin would have had to have been lowered into the water. It was very wet during the winter months.”
“We used to go up on Battlesbury in the summer and spend the day up there. We’d take a pile of sandwiches and a bottle of water. We would take a few potatoes with us. There was a keeper’s hut in the wood on Battlesbury. It was in the wood, towards the left. There was a track went up through the wood and the hut was in a clearing on the left. We never saw the keeper. I’ve no idea who he was. We’d light a fire not far from the hut and bake our potatoes in the fire. As long as we weren’t misbehaving or tearing any trees down, no-one didn’t bother us. It was all chestnuts and oaks and a lot of box bushes in the wood on the front of Battlesbury. A whole crowd of us used to go up there playing. We’d go in the morning and not come home until teatime. Our parents didn’t worry. They knew we were alright up there. We used to have the time of our lives. We used to know every inch of Battlesbury. Mr. Bazley, at Boreham Farm, farmed the land up to Battlesbury. The Army didn’t have so much land then, so we could roam all over the place. We’d pick a bunch of cowslips to take back to mother, to keep her quiet.”
“We used to go in the old chalk quarry, where St George’s Close is now, and pick the white violets. That quarry was being used when I was a girl. The farmers used to get chalk out of there. There was another quarry, a sand one, up Grange Lane. I remember once some children nearly got buried in there. They were digging and the sand fell on them. One of the bigger children got them out. They were lucky. Grange Lane used to be kept up together but it’s not now. The farm vehicles used to go up and down, so they kept the grass down, and you could go up through there to get to Battlesbury. During the Second World War there was a prisoner of war camp up the lane. The road out towards Bishopstrow Farm, from Home Farm, wasn’t built until the Second World War or just after.”
“Another road that wasn’t built until the War was Woodcock Road from Boreham to Woodcock. There was a footpath went up from Boreham, from what is now the crossroads, to a stile at the end of the wall near the two thatched cottages. The wall isn’t there now. Those cottages were in the middle of a field. The path went from that stile to another stile about where the bus stop is now, near the entrance to the camp. A track went across the fields from there and met what was then the end of Woodcock Road at John Wallis Titt’s and the council houses. I can remember there was a ditch alongside the track and people used to throw rubbish into it. It was just fields between the council houses and Boreham Farm. It was very different to today, the area is built on now with houses.”
“I was four and a half when I started school. I went to St. John’s at Boreham Road. We wore our ordinary everyday clothes to school. I had to walk to school in the morning, walk back home to dinner, then back to school afterwards, and walk home again after school in the afternoon. The teachers, Miss Lander and old Miss Lyons, wouldn’t let you take sandwiches for your dinner. That’s why we had to go home at dinnertime. The only time they let you stay there was if the weather was bad in the winter. Then you could take sandwiches. The dinner break was an hour and a half, from twelve noon until half past one. It was a long way for a tiny tot to walk from Bishopstrow to St John’s School. No adults came with us, to help us across the road. We used to cross at Boreham Crossroads. We were told to cross there. I went to school with the Grists.”
“Miss Lander was the headmistress. I liked Miss Lander. A lot of people didn’t but I did. She wrote a nice piece in my autograph book when I left. I had a certificate for three years unbroken attendance. Miss Lander was a funny looking woman. She wasn’t nice looking at all. Miss Lyons was our first teacher but I didn’t like her very much. Miss Lyons was a bit of a tyrant. She used to rap us on the knuckles. I wasn’t frightened of her but I was slightly in awe of her. Miss Lyons was tall. She wore rimless glasses and tied her hair in a little bun at the back. I should think she was a quite nice looking woman in her younger days. Miss Lander and Miss Lyons used to wear tweeds and that sort of thing. They were both very old-fashioned. If we did something wrong they would make us stand in the corner or go and stand outside the door. That was a real tragedy if that happened to you. You were shamed like that.”
“Miss Lyons took us for the first two years and then we went into Miss Lander’s room. We did English and we had pencil and paper to write with. We also did maths. We didn’t have our own desks. We had to pack our books away in the cupboard at the end of the day. The girls did a lot of sewing. We were shown how to darn and how to sew buttons on. Sewing was my favourite lesson.”
“We had an assembly before lessons. It was held in the school hall and Miss Lander used to take it. We sang one hymn and said a couple of prayers. On Thursdays the parson used to come into the school. That was the Reverend Wake. He only had one eye. He was a very nice man and he was very popular. He was very much a people’s parson. On Ascension Day we always went into St. John’s Church for a service and we were each given a bun afterwards. Mrs Rule, a vicar’s wife who lived at Boreham Road, used to pay for the buns. Then we could have the rest of the day off. We really looked forward to that.”
“The classroom had an old black stove with a pipe going up for a chimney. The caretaker, Mr. James, who lived in the house next to the school, saw to the stove. The room was ever so cold in the winter. The toilets were flush ones but they were pretty primitive. The girls’ toilets were inside and the boys’ toilets were outside.”
“The playground didn’t have a tarmac surface. It was only dirt with tufts of grass coming up through it. There was a lime tree in the middle of the playground. In the spring the leaves would be all sticky and the kids used to get filthy because of that. We used to do a lot of racing up and down, and we did a lot of skipping. I remember when we were at St. John’s there was an eclipse of the sun and we were allowed to stand out in the playground and look at the sun through pieces of smoked glass. I remember that. It was quite a sight.”
“I went to St. John’s School until I was 11. That was about six or seven years. I think our primary school education was quite good. We never did any tests except for the 11 Plus which I didn’t pass. I suppose I had been too idle. Failing the 11 Plus had no effect on me. People weren’t so bothered about that in those days. I left St. John’s and went to the Avenue School.”
“The Avenue School was very different to St. John’s School. It was so much bigger. It took us some time to get used to it. There was also the distraction of the trains going past outside on the railway. You were allowed to look at them during the first week and afterwards if you were caught looking at them you were made to go and stand outside in the playground. If that happened you had to catch up with your work during the lunch time.”
“Harold Dewey was the headmaster at the Avenue School. He was a good headmaster and he used to dish out the cane whenever he wanted to. He was a terror but I often think about how in an English class he showed us how to address envelopes properly. Whenever I write an envelope now I think of him. What he taught us held us in good stead.”
“I liked it at the Avenue School. I went into an A class. Miss Garden was my form teacher. She was nice. She was Scotch. The boys used to take the mickey out of her something terrible. They played on how she talked. She used to make trouble-makers stand in the corner. I remember she caught a boy and girl writing notes to each other. She made them stand in front of the class with the notes pinned on them so that everyone could read them. That was worse than the cane.”
“Mrs. Watkins, who lived at Westbury Road, taught maths and sport. Mr. Leslie Davis, who lived at East Street, taught art. No one liked him very much. He used to shout at us a lot. Mr. Silcox used to take music. Mr. Pearce was the science master. The girls used to go to cookery lessons at the Close, where the Youth Centre is now. I enjoyed cookery. Miss Hughes took us. She married a chap called Coates. The boys used to go to woodwork at North Row, in where Dewey House is now. The boys also saw to the school garden which was over towards the railway line. Sports were held on the school field. Freddie Bartholomew, who was brought up by his aunt at his grandparents’ house near the north-west corner of the school field, used to come out into the field to play with us. He was very precocious. He wasn’t what I would call a likeable little boy and I didn’t like him much.”
“My school mates included Audrey Roberts. She used to sit next to me. Her father was the manager of Lucas & Foot’s shop in the Market Place. That’s when they used to have managers run gents’ outfitters. Mr. Roberts was a nice man. The Roberts’ family came from Devonshire and they lived in one of the houses at Station Road in Warminster. Audrey later married Maurice Hankey and they live at Victoria Road now. Their daughter, Mrs. Taylor, lives not far from me. Ken Doel was also in the same class as me. Ken Doel was from Horningsham but he now lives at Manor Gardens. There was also a Jeffery Doel in my class and he lived at Halfway Cottages, Upton Scudamore. I think he’s dead now. Reg Norris was also in the same class as me. I think he lived at Princecroft. There was a big family of Norris’s. Another classmate was Irene Snelgrove. She originated from Codford and she married Ken Elloway. There was also a girl from out Horningsham. Her name was Mary Barrett. Her father worked on Longleat Estate. I think he was a foreman on the estate. Mary still lives in Horningsham but she’s Mrs. Dix now. She had a sister Margaret who was blind. When they were young they lived at Lane End, Corsley, in a nice house opposite the White Hart pub. I still see some of my old school pals when I go to town. There were about 30 of us in our class. They talk about big classes today and shout the odds about it but we were alright.”
“I used to walk to and from school. I used to go Boreham Road way but there wasn’t much traffic going along there, unlike today. We didn’t go home at lunch time. We took sandwiches because there were no school dinners. There was a room at the school for us to eat our sandwiches in.”
“I learnt to swim while I was at the Avenue School. They took us to the open-air baths in the town park. Mrs. Watkins took us. We walked down there via North Row and Weymouth Street. The water was cold and the changing rooms weren’t particularly good. We used to enjoy it though because it was out of school.”
“I sang in the school choir and we took part in a music festival at Devizes on three occasions. We brought back a shield each time. I can remember one or two school trips. Only people who could afford to go, went. I was lucky enough to go to Swindon Railway Works with the school. We went by train. The works were still in business then and it was quite interesting to see everything. There was an outing to Whipsnade Zoo. It was arranged just before I left school to go to work. I remember I had booked up for it. I left school and the trip to Whipsnade was about a week after I had started work. It was a bit of a cheek to ask for the time off but my employers let me and I went. I enjoyed it. We went by train. I remember seeing the big animals like the elephants and the giraffes. It was an eye-opener. It seemed such a vast place with big enclosures for the animals. I had been to Bristol Zoo before but that was much smaller than Whipsnade.”
“I left school when I was 14. There was quite a lot of unemployment about when I left school in 1936 and jobs were hard to come by. When girls left school they went into domestic service or into a factory to work. That’s all there was. I had no idea what would become of me. I always wanted to do book-keeping because I was always good at maths. To get a job in a shop was like gold dust. I was lucky because I was friendly with a girl who worked, book-keeping, at Everett’s, the grocers, in Warminster. Her name was Joan Harris. Her father was a chauffeur for the Tanner family at Barrow House in Bishopstrow. Mr. Harris had been in the Navy. He lived in one of the cottages up behind the house. He had some hammocks which were strung up in the trees and Joan and I used to lay in them during the summer. We used to sleep out there at night in the summer. The Tanners were printers at Frome. The Tanners announced that they would be moving from Bishopstrow to Freshford. Joan’s family were going to move too, so that her father could continue working for Mr. Tanner. When Joan knew she was going to leave she asked me if I would like her job at Everett’s. Joan very kindly put my name forward and I went for an interview. Miss Mary Everett interviewed me. A lot of people wanted that job. It was offered to me and I said yes straight away. I was lucky to get it.”
“I left school on a Friday and went to work at Everett’s shop on the Monday. I was pleased to start work. I wanted to earn some money. I didn’t have to take an exam before leaving school. I just left. I could have left at Easter because my birthday was then but I hadn’t got a job. My father said I had to stay at school until I got a job. Once Everett’s said they would take me on I left school but I used to go back to the Avenue School to play hockey after school hours. Mrs. Watkins ran the hockey and she was also in charge of a rambling club. I was in that too. I used to go with them at weekends to Bratton and places like that. About a dozen of us used to go. Eventually the interest dwindled and they disbanded the club. People had found other interests.”
“Everett’s shop was in the Market Place where Robbins’ the butcher is now. Everett’s was an old-fashioned grocery shop and it was lovely. There were counters on two sides. They were lovely mahogany counters. At the back was a nest of drawers with all the spices in.”
“John Everett and his sister, Mary, owned the business. Mary wasn’t married. John had a wife and they lived at Bell Hill. They had two sons called Roger and Brian, who went to Lord Weymouth’s Grammar School at Church Street. They used to help out in the shop at Christmas time. Brian, the elder one, as soon as he was old enough, went in the boys’ service of the Fleet Air Arm and he did quite well for himself. He ended up as a helicopter inspector at Boscombe Down. He lives at Andover now and came to see me not long ago. The last I heard of Roger he was working for Bibby’s, the cattle feed people. He lives in Oxford now.”
“John and Mary were running the business. They were part of a big family. The rest had married and moved away. They had a brother called Bill and about six sisters. One still lives at Frome now, that’s Mrs. Roberts and she used to work at Barclays Bank. She used to play hockey for Wiltshire when she was young. I think she’s still alive. Her eldest sister is still alive and lives with her son and she’s over 100. They were always very nice. Their mother, old Mrs. Everett, was a nice old thing. I can always remember her saying to me ‘Don’t you do what I did. I was married at 17 and had three children by the time I was 21.’ She was a sister of the wife of Mr. Chambers who had the jeweller’s shop in Warminster. Mr. Everett used to come in from Shaftesbury way, Tisbury, to court her. The Everetts came from out there. At one time they had mills and were involved with clothmaking. Old Mr. Everett shot himself in a stable behind the Warminster shop [14th October 1919].”
“I worked in the office at the back of the shop. Miss May Rendell was also in the office. She was senior over me. She used to live at North Row. She taught me book-keeping. I still correspond with her. She’s in her eighties and she lives with her niece near Southampton [Laura May Rendell died at Bishops Waltham on 5th June 1998]. I was very keen to learn. I loved figures. I still do. I wasn’t allowed to use the telephone until I had been there a 12-month. You had to speak properly and you had to get to know the customers. Most of them had accounts and the goods were ticked up. You were told the customer’s name once and you weren’t allowed to ask it again. You had to remember it.”
“All the goods for the shop came in off the railway. They were brought down from the station to the shop with a horse and cart. The railway owned the horse and cart. The station would ring up and say ‘We’ve got a load for you.’ You had to be prepared to accept it at a certain time. If the biscuits came in and they were broken we had to keep them back, to return them to the traveller. The customers wouldn’t accept broken biscuits. We had to learn to pack them properly. You couldn’t send broken biscuits out to the gentry.”
“Everything in the shop was weighed up. Nothing was sold in packets. A lady used to come in twice a week to weigh the sugar and the flour and the soda and the soap flakes. She weighed everything. Her name was Mrs. Taylor. Her maiden name was Prince. She lived at Beech Avenue. Her husband died when he was quite young. In those days if a man died under a certain age his spouse didn’t get a full pension. Mrs. Taylor got a pension of about five shillings a week which she couldn’t live on. So she had to work. She had worked in a grocery shop before. So she came to work at Everett’s for a couple of days each week.”
“After the stuff was weighed it was put out on the shelves in the shop. People came in and bought what they wanted and it was delivered. There were two errand boys. Later on they had a van. Eventually they had two vans. One of the errand boys was Raymond Burgess and he came from Crockerton. There were quite a family of Burgess’s living out there. I think Mr. Burgess is dead now but I’ve got a feeling his widow lives now at St George’s Close. I don’t remember the name of the other errand boy. There were seven men and I was the only girl when I started there. When the Second World War broke out several of the staff left. May Rendell was in the office with me. Frank Warren was on the provisions counter. Bill Mole also worked in the shop and so did Ken Sheppard who lived at Crockerton. I also worked with the two Arnoldis. Ern Arnoldi later had the furniture shop in Warminster. The other one, Ron Arnoldi, got married and lived at Corsley. Those two brothers married two sisters. Ron, when he left Everett’s, went to work for Maurice Main’s wholesale tobacconist’s business. I think Ron died while he was working for Maurice Main. He died quite young, I think he was in his fifties. [He died on 1st March 1971].”
“Everett’s had quite a trade. As well as the shop in the Market Place they had another shop at George Street. Bill Everett ran that. Two people worked there with him. That was the other Sheppard boy, Horace, and Frank Humphries who lived along the Bath Road. If the George Street shop wanted anything delivered one of the errand boys from the Market Place shop had to go down and deliver it for them. I did the accounts for that stuff too. I had to enter what they ticked up into the ledgers.”
“I did the accounts and sent out invoices. I had to make out weekly or monthly bills. Some of the customers had books and I had to write it all out in detail. I remember one customer, old Mr. Parrott, up at Bugley Farm, he only paid once or twice a year, so I had six months or more to write up in his book. I had to add all that up and there wasn’t any calculators to help you. Parrott would pay after harvest time when he had sold his corn, or maybe he’d pay after he had sold some animals off the farm. Someone taking all that time to pay was par for the course in those days. It wasn’t unusual. Most of the farmers did that. Of course, people like that made the business a bit tight at times. You had to politely ask them if they could give you their cheque. Otherwise, people like Teddy Parrott wouldn’t bother. He didn’t give two hoots. I’ll tell you someone else who was like that, and that was the solicitor Mr. Vicary who lived at Smallbrook House. He was another who wouldn’t pay on time but he had money. He had groceries six months at a time before paying. Christmas used to stretch people like Vicary, because they ordered little truckle cheeses to give to their clients as presents. A truckle cheese was £1. Several of them on the bill soon amounted to something.”
“Very often, the customers were friends of the Everett family, which made things awkward about asking them to settle up. Like, the Parrotts were particularly friendly with old Mrs. Everett. So, people like them took advantage of the family. That’s what I thought. It didn’t worry me too much. I was young and I didn’t take much notice. Everett’s had a lot of customers for miles around. They used to deliver out to places like Imber, Shrewton and Chitterne. We had a lot of customers at Imber. We used to supply the pub there. Mr. Everett used to go out getting the orders, the girls would put the orders up, and the errand boys delivered them. People paid for what was delivered and placed an order for the next time. It was quite a good arrangement really.”
“Sir Sidney Herbert, who lived at Boyton Manor, was a valued customer. He was a good payer. He was a man with money. I never ever saw him. I think he was something of a recluse in some ways. He did a lot of entertaining with hunt balls and things. He used to hold big dinner parties and he bought what was wanted from Everett’s. If he ordered anything special and we didn’t have it we rang up a shop in Bath and they used to send it up to us at Warminster on the train. We had to go up to the Station and collect it.”
“Sir Sidney Herbert shopped in bulk at Everett’s. He would buy everything in dozens, like a dozen bottles of whisky. Most people would only buy a quart bottle of whisky. At that time whisky was only 12 shillings and sixpence a bottle. That’s when I started work first. Brandy was 17 shillings and sixpence. It shows what duty goes on spirits today. You could get a good bottle of table wine for half-a-crown. Mind, ordinary people didn’t drink those sort of things in those days like they do now. They used to make homemade wine themselves but they didn’t buy wine from shops, except maybe at Christmas time. You could get a quart bottle of that Tarragona stuff for two shillings and ninepence. Everett’s had a licence to sell wines and spirits. Mr. Everett used to go once a year to the magistrates to get a licence. Mr. Kennard, at Wilson and Kennard’s, did the same.”
“Sir Sidney Herbert’s order would be phoned in to the shop. The housekeeper would phone. I don’t remember ever seeing her. She would order everything that was wanted in the kitchen, from drink to butter and cheese and fruit and vegetables. If we submitted a bill to Sir Sidney before the last day of the month he would always pay up on the first of the next month without fail. He was a very good customer. The housekeeper would check the bill. I had to write everything out in detail on it. The butler, Mr. Webster, would go into the bank and draw out a load of £100 notes. He would come into the shop and pay by £100 notes. They were the big notes with the wording like ‘Pay The Bearer’ in big italics. The notes were printed in black and white. I can remember the first time I saw one, when Herbert’s bill was settled, I spent ages holding this £100 note looking at it. My mouth was wide open. I had never seen one before. Well, I had never seen a £5 note before, let alone a £100 note.”
“Everett’s relied on people like Herbert to make that business what it was. Mr. Everett was extra nice to people like that. He did his best to get what they wanted. For instance if they wanted strawberries out of a season for a party, Mr. Everett would contact a big fruiterer in Bath and the strawberries would be sent to Warminster by train. The cost of the carriage would be added on to the bill. They were charged extra. I don’t suppose the carriage was much. The railways were used quite a lot in those days for delivering goods. The housekeeper would ask the price of things when she ordered them. We had to give her an idea of the price, and we had to make sure the bill was what we had quoted. You couldn’t add anything extra on once you had given the housekeeper the price. I don’t think Mr. Everett made a lot out of some of the orders, because very often he had to send the errand boy out to Boyton with just one particular thing. Some people weren’t very helpful. Like someone in Warminster might ring up at the last minute and say they wanted something for dinner, and then the poor little errand boy had to dash off to the customer, whatever the weather, with it.”
“The well-to-do people had accounts but the ordinary people paid as they went. You had to be careful too because there were one or two bad payers. We knew who the bad payers were. Wilson and Kennard was the other grocery shop in the Market Place. They were further along, between the Old Bell and Coates and Parker’s. Mr. Everett and Mr. Kennard used to liaise with one another. They would let each other know about bad payers. That’s how we avoided giving credit to people who tried on a wheeze with us. There were plenty of people about who lived on their wits.”
“There was a gentlemanly rivalry between Everett’s and Wilson & Kennard’s. Mr. Kennard and old Mrs. Kennard when she was alive used to come up and spend a lot of time with old Mrs. Everett. They used to play bridge in the afternoons. They had a bridge party. That was old Mrs. Everett, old Mrs. Kennard, old Mrs. Hall from Hall’s Paint Works, and Mrs. Falwasser. They used to play bridge together in the afternoons in the Everett’s house above the shop. They would have a tea afterwards. I used to have to ring up to get their taxis when they wanted to go home. I’m talking about before the Second World War.”
“Old Mrs. Everett lived above the shop with her daughter Miss Mary. The son, John, lived with his family at Bell Hill. When her mother died Mary continued to live above the shop on her own. She stayed there until they sold the shop. It was a big place. I wouldn’t have liked to have stayed there on my own. There were three bedrooms on the top floor. Miss Everett didn’t seem to mind. She used to lock herself in her bedroom. She said if anybody got in they got in and that was it. She made sure everything was locked up after we left the shop to go home.”
“I used to go upstairs to the Everett’s home. It was lovely. The front room, above the shop, had a view up Station Road. It was a nice room. I should think it was cold in there in the winter though because the north wind used to come down Station Road. They had some nice furniture. When the shop was taken over the property was mucked about. There was a garden out the back, with a wall around it. It was between the bank and the dentist Mr. Bowie. That walled garden went right up to where Reggie O’Brien, the engineer, had his place. There were some nice fruit trees in the garden.”
“When we arrived for work we weren’t allowed in the front way. We had to take our bikes around the back, to the garden, and in that way. I don’t know what it’s like now. I saw in the newspaper recently that Robbins the butcher, who have got the property now, and Frank Batchelor next door, were applying for planning permission to build there. Years ago there were quite a few outbuildings out the back. There were stables where the horses that were used for delivering were kept. They delivered with horses and carts before I worked there. There were three garages up the top of the garden.”
“I used to have to take the shop-takings to the bank. Miss Everett always wrote the figure in the book and I took it to the bank. It was straight forward. Mr. Everett banked with Lloyds. Eventually the account was moved to the Westminster Bank, which was across the road from the shop, where the Kwik Save supermarket is now. I think the Everetts moved the account to the Westminster Bank because they were friendly with Mr. Nicholls, the manager. Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls were great customers at Everett’s. Mr. Nicholls eventually gave up being a bank manager because his eyesight was going.”
“John Everett was a very nice man. He and his wife were good to me. They expected you to work of course. The hours were Monday, from half past eight until six; Tuesday, half past eight to six; Wednesday, you finished at one o’clock; Thursday, you worked until seven; Fridays, until eight; and Saturday, until half past eight. They were long hours. The shop stayed open until late to attract customers. It was surprising how many people used to shop on a Saturday evening, after tea. Of course, the price of things like bacon was reduced then to get rid of it, because there were no fridges in those days. A lot of people shopped on a Saturday evening to get things for a few pence cheaper.”
“You used to look down your nose, if you worked in a shop, at anyone who worked in a factory. They earned more money than you but you thought you were much better than them. Factory work was menial but it was better money. The pay when I first went to Everett’s was ten shillings a week. I had to pay fourpence out of that for an insurance stamp. So I took home nine shillings and eight pence. I gave my mother five bob. I used to save some. I saved a couple of bob a week.”
“My sister worked for Mr. Cowles, the chemist, in the Market Place. She worked there for 16 or 17 years. She used to get samples from Cowles’, so we didn’t have to buy soap and that sort of thing. I used to get samples from Everett’s. We shared these together and that’s how we were able to make do. We used to have Wednesday afternoons off. That was half-day closing in Warminster. The girls who worked in the shops all knew one another and we were all friends together. Once a month, three of us used to cycle to Frome, to go in Woolworths, to buy stockings at sixpence a pair. That was me, my sister, and Betty Gilbert. Betty worked at Walker’s Stores, near the corner of Market Place and Weymouth Street, where Southern Electricity later had a shop. It’s now Haine and Smith, the opticians. George, her brother, used to live in East Street. There wasn’t a Woolworths in Warminster then. We used to go Chapmanslade way and come back via Corsley.”
“The village hall in Bishopstrow was used for dances once a week. They used to have sixpenny hops and they were held on Friday nights. Les Whitmarsh, from Warminster, used to provide the music. I wasn’t allowed to go to the dances. Mother said ‘No.’ Father said ‘If your mother says no, you can’t go.’ Whatever mother said was the answer. I wasn’t very old then. This is before the Second World War. I’m talking about the early 1930s. People used to come out from Warminster to go to the dances. The village hall was packed out. It’s only a small place. Winnie Breeze and the Cliffords used to go. The Cliffords lived on the Bishopstrow Road, at Boreham. There were four girls in their family. They worked in the factories in Warminster and they used to bring their friends out to Bishopstrow.”
“After the Tanner family left Barrow House a Mrs. Cliff came there. She was a wealthy woman. They reckoned her money came from coal mining. In those days working in a mine was sweated labour for nothing and that’s where she made her money from. During the War we used to go up Barrow House, once a week, to do knitting. There were quite a few of us who used to go. It was on Wednesday afternoons, our half day off from work. My sister used to go as well and several people from the village. There were a dozen or more of us, old and young. Mrs. Cliff would be with us. We used to knit in the drawing room. We were knitting for the Navy and the Army. Socks and balaclavas and mittens in khaki and navy blue. We used to knit sea boots and stockings and all that sort of thing. Mrs. Cliff used to get the wool from somewhere. It was never questioned where or how she got the wool. I think we must have all been niaive or were frightened to query it. I wasn’t bothered if the wool was knocked off or not. I suppose we were all accessories to the fact if it was. She must have had a source of supply somewhere. The parson, Mr. Earl, used to come and read to us, and we used to have our tea there. We always had a good tea with a nice cake and China tea. It was a good thing to go to.”
“Mrs. Cliff did quite a bit for the village. She was a dowager sort of woman. She wore tweeds and things. She was quite old. Her husband was dead. She had one son in the Navy and another son in the Army. Her sons were in high ranking positions. She had several people working at Barrow House for her. John Francis’s mother used to go up there working as a daily. It was a nice house.”
“After Mrs. Cliff left Barrow House it became a school called Draytons. Years ago there used to be a path which went from Barrow House, through the fields to Henford Marsh. It went alongside the river. I don’t know if the path is still there but it used to be a right of way. It was a public footpath. I’ve walked along there. We used to go swimming in the river Wylye near Boreham Mill. It’s very muddy there now, it’s dangerous. That’s where the wild daffodils used to grow. There was a little copse which we used to call Horsepool. We used to go there picking primroses. It was very nice there. There were otters in the river Wylye near Boreham Mill. I can remember when the otter hounds used to hunt along the river. I can remember seeing the hounds in the river but I was quite small then.”
“When I was a girl I used to run along the tops of the walls on the bridges at Boreham. Old Mr. Ball, who lived at the bottom of Grange Lane, came to my dad one day and he said ‘I wish you would stop your daughter running over those bridges. I nearly have a heart attack when I see her doing that.’ Mr. Ball worked in Boreham Mill. My dad said ‘If she’s daft enough to fall off that bridge into the river, that’s up to her.’ Dad never stopped me. The old chap was very worried about it. I wasn’t the only one doing it. A lot of us kids in Bishopstrow used to do it. We showed no fear.”
“There was quite a lot of water in the river in those days. I know someone drowned by the Weirs once. I think he was a boy from the village. I don’t know what his name was. It happened at the little iron bridge. They said he was sitting on there and he fell in and drowned. I can remember my mother talking about it. They reckoned it was the mud in the river that killed this person. He was trapped in it. The channel beside the path used to fill with water and it would flood the path. I haven’t been round there for years.”
“The river was deeper than what it is now. There was far more water in the river years ago. It was used to power all the mills like Henford, Smallbrook, Boreham and Bishopstrow. The water was very deep at Bishopstrow Mill. We always kept away from it there because it was very fast flowing and deep. They used to dredge the river years ago and clean it but they don’t seem to do that now.”
“These days they divert the water out of the river Wylye, further up the valley, to other places. They pump it out. The water boards do that. There must be a limit to what they can do. Again, it’s money. The people running the water boards are looking after themselves and the shareholders. I hate it when I get my water bill. We don’t use half as much water as say a big family that has got a washing machine going all the time, yet our bill is the same. It makes me cross. I say to my husband John how I feel like leaving the tap on.”
“People’s lives are always dictated by money. There’s always been the haves and the have-nots. We’ve had some very wealthy parsons at Bishopstrow. The Reverend Bazeley was a very sickly man. He shouldn’t have had a parish at all. He wasn’t up to it. When he left Bishopstrow he went to St. Denys’, Warminster, and was the chaplain there. He died and his wife, who didn’t have any family, went to a nunnery down Bournemouth way.”
“During the time the Reverend Sealy was at Bishopstrow Church his wife started the Mothers’ Union in the village. That was the Bishopstrow and Boreham Mothers’ Union. They used to have their meetings at Bishopstrow Rectory. Some of the ladies in Bishopstrow, but not all of them, were in the Mothers’ Union.”
“When I was confirmed at Bishopstrow a Mr. Earl was the parson. He had been the headmaster at Stowe Boys School before. He was a bachelor. He had a man servant and a housekeeper, who were husband and wife, and they had the top flat at the Rectory. The day I was confirmed, with some of the other children, there were so many people in the church they couldn’t all get inside. They had to relay the service to the others outside. Afterwards we had a beautiful tea on the lawns of the Rectory. It was super. This was 1935. Everyone who had been confirmed and the people who came with them were all given a tea. It was terrific. It was a real feast.”
“Mr. Earl had a lot of money. He spent quite a bit on the church. Same as the Atwoods before him. They spent a lot of money too on the church. There was also a Reverend Wansey and he’s buried at Bishopstrow Churchyard. He had four sons. He wasn’t there very long. He died quite young. There was also a parson called Johnson. This was before Mr. Earl came. Johnson was one of those parsons who used to wear a little flat hat, like a narrow brimmed bowler. He had money.”
“Bishopstrow has been very lucky. That’s why St. John’s Church at Boreham were so keen to merge with it. Bishopstrow was the wealthy part of the two-some. I don’t suppose the church is so well off now. Perhaps the money isn’t there now but it was years ago. I think that’s where a lot of the stained glass windows at Bishopstrow Church come from, because of wealthy people who lived locally who paid for them. The Teichmans, who lived at Highbury House on Boreham Road, had a nice one. The Teichmans used to go to St. John’s Church but they fell out with the parson there. They always came to Bishopstrow after that. There is one, if not two windows, to the Southey family in Bishopstrow Church. There’s definitely one by the pulpit. It’s a lovely church. Bishopstrow was rich that way. And of course, people went to church years ago. The Southeys and the Temples always had the two front pews in the church. No one else had to sit in those.”
“The Southey family lived at Eastleigh Court. That was a lovely house. There was a room with a gallery and a beautiful ballroom. There were several servants in the house and gardeners working outside. George Millard, who lived opposite us, was a gardener at Eastleigh Court. The Southeys must have had quite a bit of money. They were in farming. They farmed Eastleigh Farm.”
“When we were children we never went across the fields at Eastleigh Farm. We were too afraid of Colonel Southey’s keeper William Pridham. He lived in one of the two semi-detached cottages at Eastleigh Lane. That was known as Keeper’s Cottage. Pridham could see across the fields from the window of his house. He had a wife but I don’t think they had any family. I think Mrs. Pridham was kept well under the thumb. Mr. Pridham kept the vermin down on Southey’s estate and he used to rear the pheasants. He had a pen by the side of the garden. I expect Southey had shooting parties who came but I don’t know anything about that. Southey had enough ground there to do it. The Wylye Valley Hunt used to come through Bishopstrow though. The hounds were kept in kennels at Tytherington. There were a lot of people around the area who used to go hunting.”
“Mr. Pridham was a miserable old devil. Well, we kids thought he was. We always used to try and keep out of his way. I remember we kids used to go up Southleigh Woods. The woods weren’t fenced off. I don’t think the woods were managed. If a tree fell down it stayed where it fell and fungi and mushrooms grew on it. We used to go in the woods picking primroses and Pridham would come along and take the flowers out of our baskets. He would throw the flowers on the ground and stamp on them. He was like that. There were a lot of cantankerous people about years ago, like my grandfather Walter Moore, he was another miserable old devil.”
“Mr. Hedges lived next door to Mr Pridham. Hedges was a horrible old bloke when we were kids. He was the bailiff at Eastleigh Farm. He was another one who used to chase us out of the woods. Hedges later moved from the cottage at Eastleigh Lane to the big house, the farmhouse, at Eastleigh Farm. Hedges lived there for a while. He died and his wife died but the daughter, who hadn’t married, continued to live at Eastleigh Farm for a while. I think David Waddington went there after that.”
“David Waddington had previously had his own business in Warminster, selling things at the livestock market. He was an auctioneer. [David Waddington sold his business to P.K. Quartley in August 1938 and became farm bailiff at Eastleigh Farm.] The Southeys used to go off abroad for six months of the year. I’ve got a feeling Waddington used to run the farm for the Southeys when they went off abroad. He ran the show in their absence. Waddington used to walk about in plus fours and long stockings, and he always had a good tweed cap on. I don’t remember too much about David Waddington except he used to come to Bishopstrow Church. The Waddingtons were good church folks.”
“After Waddington left Eastleigh Farm [he retired to St. Leonards On Sea, where he died in 1958] the Williams’ went there. Mr Williams was the manager there when Major Walker was farming there. Mrs. Williams was a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gurney. Her name was Peggy but she died. She was a very sickly lady. She was latterly in a wheelchair. She was eaten up with arthritis. She’s got a sister [Sybil] who lives over in one of the houses at Bert Legg’s farm [Bishopstrow Court]. Her name is Mrs. [Hugh] Martin-Leake. She is Mrs. Williams’ sister. Her husband was in the Welsh Guards I think. Mr. and Mrs. Williams had four children. That was three boys and a girl. Mr. Gurney, at one time, worked as a farm manager at Rye Hill, between Longbridge Deverill and Maiden Bradley. The Gurneys then moved to Upton Lovell, where Mr. Gurney worked as the farm manager for Major Walker. Mr. Gurney’s son-in-law, Mr. Williams, then came to Eastleigh Farm to be the manager there. I don’t know where Mr. Williams came from originally.”
“That house at Eastleigh Farm has been changed. I think the Walker family, who farm it now, had a granny flat or two made there. I know a Mrs. Walker, presumably Major Johnny Walker’s widow, was living there not so long ago. At one time Major Walker and his wife had Sutton Veny House but that’s a nursing home now. After Major Walker died Mrs. Walker had a granny flat built on the side of Eastleigh Farm. She died a year or two ago [Caroline Henrietta Walker, nee Clive, died on 16th November 1996]. I think you’ll find Eastleigh Farm is very different to what it was in my day. Same as Eastleigh Lane now has a tarmac surface. When I was young Eastleigh Lane was quite a rough track. It was never kept up with tarmac.”
“The Payne family lived in one of the two houses up the lane at one time. Old Mr. Payne and his wife were a nice old couple. One of their sons, Harry, lives at Woodcock [St. Kilda, 47a Woodcock Road, Warminster] now. He’s older than me. He must be in his eighties. [Harry Payne died on 20th April 1999]. His brother [Jack] married one of the Dewey family [Hetty].”
“There were two cottages on the corner of Eastleigh Lane and the Sutton Veny road. They belonged to Eastleigh Court. Mr. and Mrs, George Baden lived in one of them. George had been Colonel Southey’s batman during the 1914-1918 War. He stayed on for Southey after the war as his chauffeur. The Southeys had a big car. Mr. and Mrs. Baden used to go up and live in the house, Eastleigh Court, and caretake when Colonel Southey was away.”
“The Badens moved from their cottage on the corner of Eastleigh Lane to a house in the village, next door to the Grists. Actually it was before the Grists were there. We lived at No.32, the Grists lived at No.33 and the Badens were at No.34. He still worked at Eastleigh Court when he was living at No.34. Eventually he moved up the street to No.47 Bishopstrow. That’s past the old school. Years ago, I’ve been told, No.47 was two cottages but it was made into one. The stairs were in the middle with rooms each side. You could tell it had been two houses. At one time one of the Bond family lived there. I don’t know who lives there now.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Baden had a son called Harry and a daughter called Betty. Harry was in the Air Force and was lost during the Second World War. I don’t know what happened to Betty in the finish. She married a chap called Williams and they had two daughters Susan and Ruth. They lived at Boreham Field but Betty left her husband and went up north somewhere.”
“The Millards lived in the other cottage on the corner of Eastleigh Lane, on Sutton Veny Common. George Millard worked in the garden at Eastleigh Court. He and his wife had six children. They were a big family. The youngest son, Harry, married my sister. The cottage only had about two bedrooms. The place at the back was only like a lean-to. There was no running water. They had to get their water out of a well in the copse opposite and I don’t think they had electric light. The cottage wasn’t big enough, so the Millards moved to the village, to No.28, next door to Sweetland Cottage. Eventually those cottages on Sutton Veny Common were condemned and they fell down.”
“The cottage at the other end of Eastleigh Lane, down the bottom of the hollow, near the Marsh, was where the shepherd for Eastleigh Farm lived. He was an old chap but I don’t know who he was. I can’t remember anything about him. That cottage was two or three made into one but it was very primitive at one time. There was no running water or well water at that cottage. The shepherd and his family had to get their water out of the river Wylye.”
“Eastleigh Farm had a lot of animals. They always had Red Poll cattle there. They never had any other cattle there. It was always Red Polls. They were quite a sight and it was a biggish herd. Colonel Southey must have had quite a lot of money.”
“Colonel Southey was married twice. He had no children with either his first wife or the second one. He had a sister, Miss Southey, who lived at Eastleigh Court until he got married a second time. The sister wasn’t married. When Colonel Southey’s new wife arrived on the scene I think the sister moved on. The new wife was a widow or a divorcee. Her name was Mrs. Clark. She had a grown-up daughter who got married at Bishopstrow. I remember her getting married but I wasn’t very old then. I was about 15. It must have been just before the Second World War. This daughter married a fellow in the Grenadier Guards. They had a big do with a guard of honour in their busbys outside the church gate. I sang in the church choir. We were given half-a-crown each for singing in the choir at the wedding.”
“Colonel Southey was highly respected in the village but his second wife wasn’t. She was a bit of a painted dolly. When he married her, people said she was only after his money. The villagers didn’t give her the respect they gave him. Oh, definitely not. She wasn’t really a lady. He was a real gentleman, one of the gentry but not her. There was a bit of a stigma because she had been married before and she wore a lot of make-up. People in the village didn’t go for that in those days. She was quite a bit younger than him too. I don’t know how they met. No one in the village ever found that out. Colonel Southey used to go off abroad but she didn’t always go with him. She often went to places on her own while he stayed at the house. Of course he had servants to look after him.”
“Mrs. Southey left Bishopstrow after Colonel Southey died. He’s buried at Bishopstrow Churchyard. I think the property was left to Colonel Southey’s nephew, young John Southey. He inherited the estate. I don’t remember the going of the Southey family from the village. Mr. Nevill, who had an engineering factory in Westbury, had Eastleigh Court later on, and some of the cottages in the village which went with the house, including No.31. I remember when No.31 was empty. Several people approached Mr. Nevill to buy it but he said he didn’t want to sell it because he wanted to keep it for a gardener.”
“Most of the old cottages in Bishopstrow have been modernised now. It’s very different to how it was. Some places don’t even exist any more. There was a baker’s shop near the top of Church Lane. I can remember my parents talking about it. They said it was opposite the school, on the triangular piece. It was behind where the seat is now. It was a grocery shop with a bakery behind. It was a thatched place and I was told it burnt down. The fire must have been over 80 years ago. That grocery and bakery was run [for about 40 years] by old Mrs. Heath, the mother of Miss Heath who was the schoolteacher. Mr. [Thomas Frederick] Heath died [on 22nd October 1881, aged 38] and old Mrs. Heath came to live next door to my parents, at No.31 Bishopstrow. This is before my time. My parents married on 24th March 1913. My parents told me old Mrs. Heath was laying dead at that time. She must have died in March 1913. [Edith Heath’s gravestone at Bishopstrow Churchyard says she died on 20th March 1913, aged 70].”
“I can’t remember that bakery. [According to Mrs. Heath’s obituary in the Warminster Journal, 28th March 1913, the bakery ‘on account of its dilapidated condition was demolished about three years ago (1908).] There was no building there when I was a girl. There was just a wall along there because Arnolds used to keep pigs out there. The Arnolds lived in a house down the lane, where Mr. Cullen later lived. That was Mrs. Arnold, two or three daughters and a son. The Everleys lived next door. Mr. Cullen had the Arnolds’ place to start with and when the Everleys died out he added their place and knocked it all into one. Mrs. Everley’s had three bedrooms and three rooms downstairs. There used to be honeysuckle over the door.”
“Years ago, there were a couple of little cottages on the west side of Dairy Lane, overlooking the Everley’s place. I can’t remember the cottages but I can remember seeing the rubble where they had been. They must have fell down. It might have been something to do with the bakery fire. The fire from the bakery might have spread but I don’t know what happened really. My mother used to talk about those cottages. There was a gate you could go up through, from Dairy Lane, to those cottages. They would be marked on an old map.”
“When you look back you realise how the village has changed, not so much with buildings being done away with or altered, but how the community operates. Today most of the villagers own their own homes and are independent. They live their own lives and do their own thing. Most of them work outside of the village, sometimes miles and miles away. Years ago the villagers relied on the local gentry for their jobs. The gentry provided employment and money for the village. The Southeys contributed to Bishopstrow, same as Mr. Earle who rented Eastleigh Court while they were away. Mr. Earle always gave us lovely Christmas parties. Same as Commander Regnart, who lived at the Grange, at Boreham, used to have the kids from Bishopstrow up to the Grange for parties. Commander Regnart lived at Boreham but he used to come to Bishopstrow Church.”
“My parents knew their place in society. They never spoke about resenting the well-to-do people. You had to have rich people like that to employ the poor people. The rich provided the work. Looking back now you can see it for what it was. The rich kept you down. You were the scum more or less. My parents never had nothing. When you think about it they were really quite poor.”
“My dad used to stock up the garden, so we always had loads of vegetables. We always kept chickens, so if we couldn’t afford a joint one weekend he used to knock a chicken on the head. We’d have that. On the other hand, when I think about it, we always had a great big larder at Bishopstrow and that was always stacked with preserves and pickles and pickled eggs. We never went short of food.”
“My parents didn’t want for anything. There wasn’t anything to want for. Today there are too many material things. We didn’t have a fridge of course. We had a well. It was in the back yard by the old wash-house. It had a pump with it. In the summer when the weather was hot, the butter and the milk was put in a bucket and placed down the well. That’s how we kept it from going sour. I’m talking about the days when the milk was delivered in a churn on the back of a pony cart.”
“Paddock’s, at Knapp Farm, delivered milk and so did the Legg family at Home Farm. It was personal choice who you got your milk from. Legg’s used to deliver our milk. My mum and dad got married at about the same time as Mr. and Mrs. Legg (Bert’s father and mother). That was about 1914 or just before. That’s about when the Legg family came to Home Farm. I can remember my mother saying that Mr. and Mrs. Legg, when they first came here, only had two cows. That’s what they started off with. They built up from two cows. Luckily they had four sons to help. The Legg boys had to do the milking and deliver the milk before they went to school in the morning. They had to work. Leslie, the youngest one, is about the same age as me, maybe a bit older than me. Bert was the eldest. There was also Garf and Wilf. Rhoda was the sister.”
“We used to go up Home Farm during the school holidays. We used to spend all day up there. Mrs. Legg didn’t mind how many children she had up at the farm. She was a dear old soul. She never minded at all. Nearly all the kids of the village used to go up there and play. Mrs. Legg used to give us a glass of hot milk straight from the cows. We used to have a lovely time at the farm. The Leggs were not in the slightest stand-offish. They were ordinary working class people and they got what they got through hard work. The Legg family always worked hard. They were admired for that. Of course, the Legg family have had all that trouble recently with the barn fire [October 1997]. That was terrible. It was arson. I felt so sorry for them.”
“The farm belonged to Squire Temple at the big house, Bishopstrow House. It was the farm which went with Temple’s estate. Hence the name, Home Farm. The Legg family rented it. They were the tenants until about ten years ago. That’s when the Temples sold the farm to the Leggs. Nowadays sellers keep the option to try and build houses on the fields. That’s what you call pretty crafty. That’s having the cake twice. People selling land get far more for it if it has planning permission. Like recently, last year, when it came up about building houses on the fields of Home Farm, it was somebody called Temple who was trying for that. He is a descendant of the old Temple family. He wanted to build houses in the field on the left-hand side as you go up to Home Farm.”
“We used to play in the yard at Home Farm. We weren’t allowed to roam everywhere. We were under control. Mrs. Legg would come out and see we were alright. Her own boys would be there with us half the time. The two youngest ones certainly were. We played games and watched the cows. We never got up to any mischief. You daren’t because Mr. Legg would have been down to see your father or mother if you did. We knew that. We saw quite a lot of Mr. Legg. He was generally about there. He was a nice old chap. Mr. and Mrs. Legg were a close couple. Later on they moved up to Knapp Farm on Temple Corner after Mrs. Paddock went. Mr. Legg died of gunshot wounds at Knapp Farm. He and his wife used to attend Bishopstrow Church. They’re both buried, close to the gateway, at Bishopstrow Churchyard.”
“I had a lot of boyfriends and acquaintances when I was a teenager. Leslie Legg, from Home Farm at Boreham, was one of them. He used to come round to my house at Bishopstrow, bringing me boxes of chocolates and pints of cream. Leslie was older than me but he was small. I was a lot bigger than him. My dad used to tease me. He used to say ‘You’ll get had up for kidnapping if you go with him.’ That put me off. I said ‘I’m not having people saying that,’ and I dumped him. It was just one of those things. In those days you didn’t pair off so much. You went out in gangs more, boys and girls together.”
“My next boyfriend used to cycle up from Westbury to see me every evening. His name was Bill Hemmens. He was a weaver in Laverton’s cloth factory at Westbury. We met at the fair in Warminster. It wasn’t really love at first sight. My sister was friendly with a chap from Westbury. He brought Bill up one night and that’s how we met at the fair. Bill’s father worked on the railway at Westbury, like most men did in Westbury in those days. He was a cleaner. He used to clean out the fire-holes on the engines. That was a dirty job. He worked at Westbury Railway Station. I went down to Westbury to meet Bill’s parents and he came to Bishopstrow to meet mine. We couldn’t afford to go anywhere much, except to the pictures on Saturdays, so we used to walk miles up over the downs. I think we must have known every inch of Battlesbury and it was surprising the number of people we used to meet up over there, doing the same thing.”
“Bill lived with his parents at the Butts in Westbury. Bill’s father was a nice man. Bill’s mother was alright but she was very jealous to begin with. Bill was the eldest of thirteen children and she didn’t think he would ever get married. Among those thirteen children was a set of twins. One of those was in the Navy and one was in the Air Force. There are still quite a few Hemmens living in Westbury now. The youngest one, Ian, used to live at Bishopstrow [at the bungalow called Wylye View, at the southern end of the village] and worked as a milkman [for the King Street Dairy] in Warminster. I think he and his wife split up. He now lives in Wincanton I think. The Hemmens’ were a big family but the mother had them well organised. She didn’t have a hard life. All the kids had various jobs to do. They lived in two council houses made into one. Since the parents have died it’s been put back into two houses and one of the sons still lives in one of those now.”
“My parents used to offer me advice. You could talk to them and they would listen to you. I could talk to father if I had a problem. My mother was a bit difficult sometimes. My parents never spoke about sex. Things like that were unheard of. Sex never raised its ugly head. The only thing they used to say to me was ‘Don’t you ever bring any trouble home.’ I didn’t know what trouble was. I suppose I did indirectly. Well, when I was a teenager in Bishopstrow there were a lot of boys about. As I said there were the four Legg boys over at Home Farm for a start. We all used to sing in the church choir together and go to choir practice and things like that. We all thought it was wonderful when the War started and there was blackouts so you couldn’t see what you were doing. We had no street lamps in Bishopstrow. We didn’t even have electric light in the cottages at Bishopstrow until just before the War.”
“Bill was in the Wiltshire Regiment, the Territorials. He got called up straight away when the War broke out in 1939. He was stationed in Kent but he used to come home on leave and he’d spend the time between my house and his home in Westbury. He came home on leave and we got married at Bishopstrow in September 1941. Bill was five years older than me. I was only 19 and my parents didn’t want me to get married so young but they liked Bill. They didn’t try to put me off but I had to do a lot of persuading. Bill and I got married by special licence. This was when the Reverend Bellars was the parson at the Minster. We had to go down to see him to get the special licence and that had to go through the Bishop of Salisbury. The Reverend Earl married us. He didn’t charge us. He married us for nothing as a wedding present. That was nice of him. I got married in a two-piece, using clothing coupons. The best man was Bill’s brother Charlie. He married an Indian girl while he was in India with the army and he brought her back to England to live. He was in the Gloucester Regiment. Bill and I had our reception at my parents’. We had been saving up our rations and had made a cake. That’s what we had, a homemade wedding cake. Bill bought the wedding ring in Folkestone, where he was stationed. In 1941 things weren’t quite so short as they were later on. By 1941 things hadn’t really bitten in.”
“Bill went back to Kent after the wedding. The last time I saw him was in 1944. I went to see him when he was stationed near Hastings. He got a special permit for me to visit. In those days it was a prohibited area, you couldn’t just go. He got the permit and I went. It was about the 14th or 15th May 1944. He went over the Channel to France on the 7th of July and was killed near Caen in Normandy on the 10th of August 1944. He was with an officer who was badly wounded. The officer was flown back to a hospital in Hampshire. He wrote to me straight away and told me Bill was dead. Bill was killed on a Thursday and I knew on the Saturday because this officer wrote and told me. It was three weeks after that I heard from the War Office. They informed me with a note which simply said ‘We regret to inform you that your husband has been killed in action.’ That’s all they said. You had to accept what had happened and get on with your life. It would be different today. There’s counselling and all sorts of things now to get you through those circumstances. I didn’t get any psychiatrist’s treatment or help like you would today. I just had to make the most of the situation and carry on as best I could. Bill was a lovely chap. I remember him as a young man. You don’t realise it until you see the soldiers at the Armistice Day Service that he would now be an old man with white hair. War is very sad.”
“Warminster was full of troops during the Second World War. They were billeted in the Masonic Hall on the corner of Market Place and Station Road, and opposite there on the corner of Market Place and Carson’s Yard next to where the Gas Company was. And there were soldiers living above some of the shops in the town centre and in places like the old Brewery at the High Street. There were troops all over the place. Tanks used to be parked all along Boreham Road, from Imber Road to St. John’s Church. There was nothing but tanks on that side of the road. During the War the Americans took over Prestbury House as their PX.”
“I had to go fire-watching once a fortnight, in the Market Place, in the rooms at the top of International Stores, where Payne’s (Balfour News) are now. We used to go in a side door up the yard and go upstairs, over where Polly’s, the tea room, is now. We looked out the front of there. You couldn’t have a light on because of the blackout. It was a terrible place and it was full of rats. There were some horrible old beds in there but you couldn’t go to sleep. There was fire- fighting equipment but I don’t know what we were supposed to do if we saw a fire. Luckily we never got called out. There was a fire officer who used to walk round and he used to check that we were there on duty. Otherwise you wouldn’t have got paid. The fire-officer’s name was Cockerill. He used to have a key to get in. Each shop had to produce so many people to do this fire-watching and I got paid four bob a night. I can’t remember who paid us. You had to be there at ten o’clock at night and we finished at six in the morning. I used to go home, have a wash, change my clothes and go on to work.”
“During the War and after, things were rationed. Things were short at times. People brought coupons into Everett’s shop, where I worked. That was another horrible job I had to do, counting coupons. You daren’t breathe because they were only little things about as big as your thumb nail and if you weren’t careful they would scatter everywhere. I had to count the coupons in bundles of a hundred and take them into the Food Office, which was at Weymouth Street, near the corner with the Market Place, where Mr. Philip Piper, the solicitor, has his office now. It was quite a job really. The coupons were sent back and that’s how the shop got its quota of stock. We were refunded. If you sent meat coupons back in they sent you a chit to say you could buy so much meat, and so on. We were lucky at Everett’s because St. Monica’s School, at Vicarage Street, was registered with us for food. St. Monica’s School didn’t have much money in those days and they didn’t take a lot of the food they were entitled to. So what we used to do at Everett’s was, if St. Monica’s had, say, dried fruit or sugar they didn’t take, we the staff could have a bit extra each. We had to pay for it though. That’s how we got some extra. And there were quite a few farmers around Warminster who used to make their own butter, so they didn’t bother with their butter ration. That’s how we got enough butter for ourselves. The Everett family were ever so good to us like that. Mind, it was only two ounces at a time. It was ages before enough was saved up to let customers have a little bit. If we hadn’t had people on the books who didn’t take their rations we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did.”
“I used to go to the Regal Cinema at Weymouth Street on Saturday nights. That was about the only entertainment you could get in Warminster. Mr Bert Kerr was the manager. In those days you had two showings of the film. I had to work in the shop until half past eight on Saturday nights so I couldn’t go to the first house. I had to go to the second. So, I had to get permission from my mother to be out late. I didn’t get home until 11 at night. You had to book your seats in advance or you wouldn’t get in. They used to queue halfway up Weymouth Street. It was about one shilling and nine pence to go upstairs in the balcony in those days. It was lovely in there. There were double seats in the back row and there was always quite a fight for people to get them so that they could have a smooch. Oh yes. It’s so different now. Today they’ve got to have violence and nudity in films, and there’s too much of it now. I used to enjoy going to the films before it got like that. I remember going to see Spring In Park Lane and Orange Blossom Time. It was all so very innocent. Now nothing is left to the imagination.”
“I was still living at home with my parents at Bishopstrow. I hadn’t set up a home of my own. I suppose it was fate that I should still be at home with my mother and father when they died. Mum and dad both died in 1950. Dad died in the January. He was 61. Mum died in the following October. She was 62. They hadn’t reached pensionable age and dad was still working at the time. They’re buried at Bishopstrow. They haven’t got a tombstone. Mother wouldn’t have that, she didn’t want one. Dad had good health until about 1949 and then he had high blood pressure. After dad died mum had no inclination to live. Her health had been good but she didn’t want to live after he died. The doctor said she died of a broken heart. My parents absolutely doted on one another. They never showed it physically in public but deep down they were very much in love and very fond of each other. I’m sure of that. So, I was left on my own at Bishopstrow.”
“My sister Phyllis had married Harry Millard in 1942. They got married at Bishopstrow. Because it was war-time they didn’t have a white wedding. Harry was in the military police. He was in the Provo Corps stationed at a military prison. My sister and Harry were going to get married on Boxing Day 1941 but he had to take a prisoner to a court martial, so the wedding had to be cancelled until the 1st of January 1942. They were getting married by special licence, so the change of date was okay. So, my sister was married the day before her 21st birthday.”
“Harry only had one eye. He lost an eye when he was 12. He had measles and the eye became paralysed. The doctors took his eye out and gave him an artificial one. He went through the war classed as A1 with one eye. He joined the Home Guard when he came out of the Army. He went up the downs with the Home Guard, firing at targets. Someone fired a rifle. The bullet hit a stone, came back, and hit Harry’s good eye. He lost his sight. He went to St. Dunstan’s and through them my sister and her husband were able to loan some money to buy a confectioner’s shop in Swindon. They had been living at 89 Boreham Field and they had a son called Christopher.”
“The shop was at Penhill in Swindon, where there’s a lot of trouble now. They worked and paid back the money they had loaned. Harry didn’t cope very well with his blindness. My sister had to deal with things. If she hadn’t been used to shop-work St. Dunstan’s wouldn’t have loaned them the money for a shop. They wanted him to do physiotherapy. Blind people were usually trained to do that, but because Harry had been a carpenter and cabinet maker before joining the Army, his hands were too hard. Harry and Phyllis did quite well with the shop. They were successful enough to have themselves a house built on the main road, the Cirencester road.”
“Unfortunately Harry died in his sleep one night. My sister was left there on her own. Christopher had gone to Cardiff University. It was very difficult for Phyllis to run the shop on her own. At one time they had a girl helping out in the shop but she was a bit light-fingered so they got rid of her and didn’t replace her. After Harry died my sister stuck it for 12 months and then she told me she wanted to give up the shop and come back to Warminster. She asked me if I knew if there were any houses going. At that time I was working at Butcher’s the builders. It was the time when Butcher’s were building Copheap Rise, off Copheap Lane, in Warminster. It must have been the early 1970s. It was the second phase of the development. Phyllis asked me to send her some plans. I got the people in the drawing room to send her some. She decided to have one of the houses but I organised it for her. I made all the arrangements. I chose her bathroom suite and things. She was happy for me to do that. She didn’t know what she was coming back to. Her house in Swindon was nice and she didn’t have any trouble selling it, so she had the money to buy one of the houses at Copheap Rise. She’s quite happy there. She reads, she watches television, and she’s friendly with her neighbour Mrs. Bone. She’s got a car, so they can both go out together.”
“Phyllis’s son Christopher comes to see her quite often. He did very well at University. He worked hard and won a scholarship. He lives at Westbury On Trim. He’s the managing director of a company. He’s a metallurgist and goes to Germany on business. He’s done very well but he worked hard to get where he is.”
“My sister never regretted coming back to Warminster. She and me are not very close though. We never have been. We have never had a lot in common. I’m very much like my father but my sister is like my mother. I was the tomboy and she was the lady of the family. I was always playing with boys and going down the Weirs, getting in water, and coming in home with wet feet. That’s how I was. I did everything wrong and she didn’t. We never agreed when we were young. At times we were more like enemies when we were growing up. We’ve mellowed now. I’ve got a cousin, Evelyn, who lives in Southampton now. She married Bert Sharp from East Street. I’m closer to my cousin than I am to my sister. You see, my sister went to Swindon and she was there 13 years. I’m closer to Evelyn because we had more to do with each other. My sister and I are friendly. We are not bad friends but I wouldn’t say we were close. We ring each other up and have a natter. I saw her at Christmas but I might not see her again until my birthday in April. She’s got arthritis and has got a job to get about. I don’t go up to her at Copheap Rise very often. We are happy being apart. We are happy as we are. We don’t quarrel or argue. Sometimes I think people are better away from their families. You are given your family but you can chose your friends.”
“After my husband’s death I hadn’t thought about re-marrying. I had mixed feelings about that. I did marry again but I thought a lot about it before I did. Bill, my first husband, always used to say ‘If anything happens to me don’t walk about with a long face. Get married again.’ I waited eight years before I got married again.”
“I met my second husband, John Leaney, when he was stationed at the School of Infantry in Warminster. He was born at Ramsgate. His people still live at Canterbury. I met John at the YMCA at Weymouth Street. It was where the Joint Social Club later was. It’s all gone now. It’s where the back of the Safeway supermarket is now. The YMCA was a club for service people and I did voluntary work there. I helped cook and wash up. I was general dogsbody. Lots of chaps used to come in the YMCA. It was cheap and there wasn’t much else for chaps to go to in Warminster except the pubs. Not everyone wanted to go to pub.”
“John and I got married in 1953. We got married at Bishopstrow. The Reverend Green married us. He was in charge of both Christ Church (Warminster) and Bishopstrow. We had to pay. He didn’t do it for free like the Reverend Earl had done for me before. It cost about a pound. That was a week’s wages to us. We had a reception at the old school hall in Bishopstrow and set up home in my old home at No.42 Bishopstrow. John came out of the Army just afterwards and went to work up at the 225MU at Crabtree. He was in the packing department there. When that folded he went to work at Westbury, to a similar place the Army had on the West Wilts Trading Estate. From there he went to Avon Rubber in Melksham. The money was better there. He worked in the laboratory there, testing the rubber before they made things with it. John liked doing that. It was a clean job, it wasn’t a dirty job. He worked there until he retired. I think it’s different there now because it’s computerised. When John was there it had a bigger staff. It’s an American firm who have got it now. John took early retirement. They wanted to make people redundant. They were shedding staff. John put in for it but he had to wait 12 months until he was 60. So he only had two or three jobs after his 12 years in the Army. We didn’t have any children. That was unfortunate but it was one of those things we couldn’t do much about.”
“We got our first television for the Coronation in 1953. We got it from Monk’s in Warminster. We were the first people in Bishopstrow to have a television, so we had half the village in to watch the Coronation. They brought their sandwiches with them and sat around in our place looking at the tv. It was out of this world to watch that. I regretted that my father died before he could have seen television. He would have loved that. He would have loved watching sport and nature programmes and current affairs.”
“I continued to work at Everett’s. I was there for 25 years. John and Mary Everett retired and the shop was bought up by a multiple, Budgett’s of Bristol. A Mr. Carr came from Bournemouth to be the manager. He was part of the set-up that had bought Everett’s. He hadn’t been in a shop with a wine licence before. He tried to pick my brains about the wine side of the business but I thought why should I tell him anything, he’s the one earning the money.”
“Budgett’s made it known that they would change the shop into a supermarket but they didn’t change it straight away. They still carried on with accounts for a couple of years and then it changed. I said ‘No way am I going to sit on a till in a supermarket when I’ve been doing book-keeping all my life.’ I made up my mind to leave. I saw a job advertised in the Warminster Journal. Butcher’s, the builders, wanted someone to do the wages. I went down to Butcher’s, at George Street, and saw about it. I had to get references because I was going to handle money, a lot of money. I had only had the one job, at Everett’s. The only people I could ask for a reference was the Everett family. I wrote and asked Mary Everett. I thought it was a bit of a cheek but there wasn’t really no one else I could ask. She wrote back such a nice letter. She said ‘What can I say? We termed you one of the family.’ I thought that was rather nice. I was friendly with Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls. He was the bank manager at the Westminster Bank at one time. He went blind and lived at Boreham Road. I knew him quite well and he gave me a reference as well, so I was alright.”
“Within a week Butcher’s told me I had got the wages clerk job with them and I gave my notice in at Budgett’s. That was the biggest shock out for Mr. Carr, the manager for Budgett’s. He didn’t think I was good enough to get the job at Butcher’s. Well, it was a big shock for me too. I wondered after if I had done the right thing but I soon realised I had. So I became the wages clerk at Butcher’s the builders. Mr. Carr, back at Budgett’s, later left them and went to work at Payne’s, the newsagents, for a while. I think he lives at the Ridgeway in Warminster now.”
“It was alright working at Butcher’s. Mr. Geoffrey Butcher was a nice man to work for. We had to work mind and it was hard work, because when I went there first I hadn’t done wages as such. I had always done book-keeping though, so I knew the rudiments of it.”
“I started at Butcher’s in September 1967, when they were building the Portway Estate. The work there was phasing down but there were still 100 people working at Portway. There was a lot of Irish labour there. The foreman at Portway wrote out the time sheets. That was part of his job. The office couldn’t cope with doing that. Altogether there were about 250 on the payroll. It was a bit frightening to begin with. It was quite a bit to cope with but we managed. They say if you can do builders’ wages you can do anybody’s wages. That’s what they say.”
“I had to do the wages by hand. The figures were done in your head. There was no computer. It worried me at first when I started doing the wages but I had a system. I used to do a page at a time with 20 wages on. When you did the money you calculated down the side of each page what money you wanted. You counted out from what had come from the bank what was on each page. So, if you had anything left at the end of the page you knew you had made a mistake and had to go back through the envelopes. You didn’t seal the envelopes until all the wages were done, just in case.”
“It was quite a job doing the wages because you had to work against the clock. The time sheets were given to me on a Monday. I had to analyse them, put the overtime in and the rate of pay. We did have a woman who used to work it out with an adding machine. That was Mrs. John who lived at Woodcock. She worked it out for me. It was a difficult job doing the wages because if the men worked on a Saturday they very often had different overtime and if they were going a certain distance they had to have travelling money.”
“I had to start writing the payroll out on Monday afternoon to get it done. I had to finish it by Tuesday night. I had to have all the breakdown done, to know what was wanted from the bank. It had to go to the bank first thing on Wednesday morning. The money was ordered on Wednesday morning to be collected on Thursday morning. The men were paid on Thursdays. It was quite a job. It was very much against the clock. There was a foreman with each little gang. If the foreman forgot to leave the time sheets with me I had to put them on the end of the payroll and they wouldn’t be in proper order. Of course we also had to work out the tax and the national insurance. We didn’t have ready reckoners. You had to work it all out yourself. It was heady and I was very tired afterwards but I enjoyed doing it though.”
“Tax officials used to come once a year. One year a woman came from the tax office and she was most objectionable. I should think she was fresh out of college. She was terrible. She was most rude. We had cards for the clocking-on machine. She went through the cards. I remember she said to me something about someone’s tax. She didn’t know what she was talking about. She kept going through things but she couldn’t find anything wrong. The money had gone in and the tax had balanced. She kept on and on about things and I must admit I was pretty short with her.”
“I was working with a chap who was in the next office and he was senior to me. His name was John Francis and he came from Westbury originally. He lives at Broxburn Road now. I told John Francis about this girl from the tax office. He said ‘Don’t worry, we won’t see her again.’ And we didn’t. She never came again. She was only about 18. We always reckoned she wasn’t liked at the tax office and her boss had sent her out of the office.”
“That girl wasn’t very nice. I let her know. I remember I told her ‘We do half of your work for you.’ We did. The tax office weren’t very good really when you think about it. If we had somebody new start and they didn’t bring a P45 with them, you had to ring up and get a special form sent. That meant, when you asked them, they would send you another form to fill in with as many details as you could. One time, we had one of these forms sent to us a few times requesting details about the same person. We knew we had already supplied the details. We posted the form back and we knew we had because we had a post book we recorded everything in. We always entered those things in. Three times the tax office sent us the same form asking for details. An old chap who worked in the office, who used to come in three days a week from Salisbury, wrote all across the top of the form ‘We charge ten shillings for a search fee.’ He sent it back. It wasn’t anything to do with me. I thought I’m not getting mixed up with that. We never had that form back again. That was where someone at the tax office was too lazy to look in a file. They would rather send another form out for us to fill in, instead of looking for the details on file.”
“Sometimes the employees came in the office and quibbled things, especially if I had made a mistake on their time sheets or hadn’t given them the correct overtime. Some of them could be quite abusive. If John Francis could see anyone was getting out of hand he would step in and take over. In those days there were bonuses if the men did the jobs properly and quickly. One man accused me of having his bonus once. It was a big lie. I couldn’t have had his bonus, it wasn’t even written down. John Francis stepped in then. He said to me ‘You go into my office, I’ll deal with this.’ I don’t know what he said to him but I remember that chap never liked me after me that.”
“Most people were paid weekly. In those days it was cash. I only did wages. I didn’t write out the cheques for paying for the building materials. That wasn’t my side. They had someone else to do that. Some of the timber came in from Southampton. Some used to come in from Bristol. Most of it came from Southampton way. They had a big joiner’s shop and there were about 20 men in there. There was a man in charge and an under-foreman. Ron Rogers was in charge of the sawing.”
“My office looked out up the High Street. It was a nice office. I could see Woolworths and St. Laurence’s Chapel. I used to have my desk under the window. I didn’t see much of Mr. Butcher. Perhaps only once a month, perhaps not. Geoffrey Butcher was more interested in the outside work. We used to say if we didn’t see Mr. Butcher we knew everything was alright. He knew he could rely on the office staff and he knew we could do our jobs. I know when I went for the job he said ‘Thank goodness somebody older has come. I’m fed up with youngsters.’
“Geoffrey Butcher used to get the building contracts. He had friends all around who used to give him work. A lot of the jobs came by word of mouth. He had a good reputation. Mr. Butcher worked hard. He would even go out on a Sunday to find work for the men when they came in on Monday. I should think it was a worry. All the up and coming jobs had to be mapped out. He had to know where the men were going next when a job finished. I suppose it was a worry when you consider how big the staff was.”
“Butcher’s used to have quite a lot of apprentices. Geoffrey Butcher used to call them ‘my boys.’ He said it always gave him great satisfaction when he went to prize-giving day at Trowbridge College and it was his ‘boys’ who won a prize. He was good to his apprentices. There’s no doubt about that. They couldn’t grumble about him. It cost him a lot to keep those apprentices. It cost several thousand pounds a year to keep an apprentice. I think at one time he had 35 apprentices. That’s a lot of money. They used to have to go to college one day a week to start with and then they had a block college course which was six weeks. They still had to be paid for the 40 hour week at the hourly rate. I suppose some of it, but not all of it, was claimed back, but it was still a lot of money. Very often, after they got their apprenticeship they left after a while, so you never got the benefit of it.”
“I was only thinking the other day about the Obelisk at Silver Street. There’s a stone acorn on the top of it. Old Mr. Hillier, who worked for Butcher’s, restored it [in December 1969]. He was a nice old chap. He came from Tisbury. He used to do a lot of nice stone work. Long after he retired he would come in if something special wanted doing. He was a real craftsman. I remember him quite well.”
“Butcher’s was a big thriving concern when I was there. It’s all come to an end. The firm was sold. A lot of the workforce when they had to leave went self-employed. So many of the people at Butcher’s had done their apprenticeships there and some had been there nearly all their lives. Mr Butcher felt sorry for them.”
“They’ve built houses [George Street Place] now on what was Butcher’s Yard. I can’t understand how they managed to build them. The Swanee river comes down through there, from the back of Manor Gardens, and runs on under George Street. The water used to be quite deep. In the winter the water was up to the top of the ditch. There used to be ducks on there. They build houses anywhere now. Same as down the Marsh they’ve built hundreds of houses there but years ago that used to flood and was always under water in the winter. You couldn’t get round there. It was always waterlogged. We used to go down the Marsh getting frogspawn when we were children. I suppose they drained the Marsh before they started building. It makes you wonder.”
“I left Butcher’s in 1985, before it was sold. I worked at Butcher’s until I was 64. I did 18 years there. They didn’t want me to go but I said I’d had enough. Computers were coming in then and I was too old to start learning computers. I could have but I had always done the wages manually. They got the computer before I left. Someone had to do the donkey-work putting the input in, of course. That was me. I was the donkey but I didn’t mind. When I left there were about 130 working outside and 20 inside. About 150 altogether. Matthew Butcher worked out how many wage envelopes I had done during my 18 years there. It was thousands.”
“I loved book-keeping. I did it all my life really from when I left school at 14. I did it for 50 years non-stop. I was always interested in figures. I watch Countdown on the television. I can do the sums on there with no trouble. They have schoolmasters on there but they can’t do it. They’re terrible. I suppose it’s a bit nerve-racking being on television but they should be able to do it. This brings us back to schools. They don’t teach tables anymore. I think you can take a calculator into an exam now. I don’t call that brain work. No way. When I took exams you were only allowed a pencil and some paper. The beady-eyed teacher used to walk up and down so you couldn’t cheat. They teach funny things in school now like psychology. What good is that? No wonder there’s so many cranks about. Half of ’em when they get their degrees can’t get a job. There aren’t enough jobs for people. The workplace has been computerised. I think at school you should do reading, writing and arithmetic, and English. Mind, English isn’t used much now, well, not good English. You’ve only got to listen to these announcers on the telly now to realise that. They have anybody on tv now.”
“John and I had moved out of Bishopstrow in 1965. I had a lot of unhappy memories of Bishopstrow after my mother died. She died suddenly. I could always see where she fell. She dropped dead at my feet. I said to John one day ‘We’ll get out of here.’ We put our name down on the Council housing list. Because I worked in Warminster we soon got a house at Boreham Field. That was No.154, nearly opposite the entrance to The Dene. Jossy Ford had lived there before us. He went up Sambourne or West Parade way. Our neighbours at No.154 were Phyl Preece one side [No.153] and Jim Allardice and his wife and family the other [No.155]. We lived at Boreham Field until 1988. I had got phlebitis in my legs and I couldn’t get upstairs very well. Doctor Brown was very good. He put a good word in for us and we got this bungalow at Corner Ground. This is No.7. Mrs Keane had lived here before us. She went to Medlicott. She was a little short woman with greyish white hair. I don’t think she was local. We’ve been here ten years. I like it here. It’s quiet and it’s nice. We keep ourselves to ourselves and the neighbours are good.”
“I’ve had a good life. I’ve worked hard for what I’ve got but I don’t think hard work hurts anybody. I wish I could get about better but other than that I don’t want much. Good health is a help. That’s the main thing. People seem to have different ideals today. If you’re married or you’ve got a good marriage you’re considered odd. They were saying on television yesterday that England is the worse country for unmarried mothers, with 87%. That’s a lot of people. The lowest apparently is in China. If people are prepared to work at marriage, well, fair enough, but things do go wrong. If the man loses his job and they’ve got a mortgage, they lose their house. A mortgage is the only way to get a house now.”
“I feel sorry for young people today. I’m glad I was young when I was young. Yes, I do feel sorry for young people now but a lot of it is their own fault because they want all these material things straight away. They’re not prepared to work for it. If, after we got married, we wanted something like a fridge or a hoover we had to work for it. Now they want everything to start with. When they get married they make a list of presents they want and put all those things on it. The latest craze now is a dishwasher. These young girls don’t want to stand at a sink to wash up. Apparently the detergent you have to put in the dishwater costs the earth nearly. You’ve got to have special soap for cleaning and special stuff for rinsing. It all costs money.”
“Money has got all out of proportion. Look at footballers for a start. I’m told they get £2,000 a week. I don’t think anyone is worth all that money just to kick a ball about. Same as these people on television. They’re not worth it. Like, I’ve just read in a newspaper, one of the cast of Coronation Street gets £100,000 a year and he’s wondering whether they will drop him. He’s worried about his job. It’s ridiculous. Compare that to the pittance that the pensioners get. I don’t think old age pensioners get a fair deal. They’ve had to work hard for the bit of pension they’ve got. I think all pensioners should get a cheaper tv licence and things like that. I’m picky about what I watch on television. I like to watch the news once a day. I prefer BBC to ITV because I’m not very happy with all the adverts on ITV.”
“The people who have lived here the longest at Corner Ground only pay £5 a year for their tv licence. It stems from the time when that was all you had to pay if you were in warden-controlled accommodation. John and I came here after the paperwork was altered so we don’t get ours for £5. We have to pay the full fee, about £100. I can name four people at Corner Ground who only pay £5. The rest pay the full whack. It doesn’t seem fair does it? I say we’ve never had the reduction so we don’t miss it, but it doesn’t seem right. I wrote to Dennis Walters when he was our M.P. He replied to me saying he was sorry he couldn’t do anything about it because the legislation had been altered. He said nothing could be done about it. It was one of those things.”
“I said to the warden here once about the newsletters we get from the Council, which say about the people who owe rent. I asked the warden how people got away with that? It’s thousands of pounds. They list in these newsletters how many people owe for one month, two months, and so on. Some people hadn’t paid for years. How do they get away with it? I don’t suppose the Council can turn them out. The warden said ‘These people have only got to pay £5 toward it and they get let off.’ It’s the same with electric bills. If you pay £5 off it’s considered you are trying to pay. If the Council or the Electricity Board takes the person to court the silly old judge says the person is not in a position to pay and lets them pay a ridiculous amount like a shilling a week. I would hate to get in that position. It would worry me to death but it doesn’t worry a lot of people. It’s an eye-opener when you see what money is owed to the council. If it was being run as a business they would have to close the business. I suppose they get overdrafts and things and hope mugs like us pay our way regularly on the dot. When things go wrong these people on these councils just change jobs and go elsewhere or they give them a golden handshake to get rid of them. These politicians are just the same. They do wrong but they end up with another job or a load of money to go away. It does annoy me when I see all this rent that is owing. A lot of people don’t pay rent at all. It’s paid by social security. It’s us that’s paying for them.”
“John and I both worked and we paid into pensions of our own. Now we’re penalised. We can’t get anything off our rent and things like that because we saved. We have to pay everything in full. We pay £500 a month, near enough, to the Council for the rent of our bungalow and garage. The people that don’t work or haven’t worked or haven’t saved for their old age are better off than us because they can get things either for nothing or reduced. They’re laughing. John and I have worked and paid our way. We are able to run a car and we’ve had good holidays but we worked for those things. We have a car but it’s only for the convenience.”
“I know for a fact that decimalisation did everyone out of pocket. Remember I worked in a shop. When decimalisation came in [in 1971], the prices were rounded up to an even amount and they never came down again. The Common Market is no good to us. The French are no good to us, no good at all. That was proved during the War. They let us down twice. I don’t think much of the Common Market but can we get by without it now? We’re supposed to be Europeans now but I think we should keep our own identity. I don’t see myself as a European, I’m English, I always have been and I always will be.”
“The Labour Government got in last year but what difference will it make to us? Yes, we definitely needed a change of Government. The Conservatives had been in too long and things had got stale. I think the new Prime Minister, Mr. Blair, is trying to do things too fast. I suppose it’s expected of him but things don’t appear to be going too well. Look at this arms business. What a hoo-ha that is. I don’t think Mr. Blair has had enough ministerial experience. You’ve got to have some knowledge of being a minister. I suppose we shall have to wait and see how things turn out.
“I don’t think much of the world today. You only have to look at television to see what’s happening and it’s all to do with religion. All wars are religious wars. Ireland, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine and the Middle East. It makes you wonder. The people in the world aren’t nice. They are out for themselves and what they can get for themselves. They wouldn’t think of doing someone a good turn. And people can’t mind their own business today. They’re out to stir it. I don’t care what other people do or say. They can say what they like about me as long as I don’t hear them. That doesn’t worry me at all and I don’t envy anybody.”
“You can get away with murder today. Even some of the police are corrupt themselves now. We used to go scrumping apples when we were children. I can remember my father saying ‘If you don’t behave yourself I’ll stop Mr. Clayton when he comes through Bishopstrow.’ He was the policeman who lived at Sutton Veny and he had to cycle through Bishopstrow to Warminster to get his orders. He had a son who was usually with us scrumping apples. We were frightened to death that my father would stop the policeman and tell him. You had respect for policemen then but not now. They’re as twisted as anybody.”
“There should be more discipline. I don’t think children respect their parents today. That would be a start. But there again, the parents aren’t around now. You’ve got what they currently call latchkey kids. The parents go out to work and the children are left to fend for themselves. I think that’s a lot of the trouble today. When I was young my mother was always there. She did laundry for people, at home, so that she didn’t have to go out to work. She was there for us kids and I respected my mother to her dying day.”
“I do the National Lottery but it’s a mug’s game. John and I have won some small amounts. We’ve had a few tenners and we won £100, on four numbers, just after Christmas, when it was a roll-over. Of course you’re out of pocket when you add up how much you’ve spent on tickets during the year. It’s a gamble. It’s nice on a Saturday evening if you’ve done a lucky dip, to see if you’ve won anything but it’s foolish to think you’re going to be a millionaire. I would like to see the accounts for the Lottery. They would make interesting reading. I bet the people running it do alright for themselves. They’re on the right side. I would like to see Richard Branson, who runs Virgin, running the National Lottery. I’m sure he would plough the profits back in. And I don’t agree with what they give the Lottery proceeds to. They give all this money to the arts and the ballet. Who goes to the ballet? We don’t. You can’t afford to go to it because of the prices. I would prefer it if the money went to the health service and worthwhile things. I’m sure most people feel like that.”
“When I left work people told me I would be bored to tears at home. I’m not bored. I did miss the people when I left because the wages office at Butcher’s had been a busy one, especially on Thursdays when it was payday. We used to have a laugh at work. We liked to have a bit of fun. After I left one of the men in the joiner’s shop said to me ‘Oh I wish you’d come back. There’s no-one to have a laugh and a joke with anymore.’ Yes, I had a lot of friends at Butcher’s but I didn’t really miss anything when I gave up work. I was surprised really. The paper comes in the morning and I’ve got time to sit and do the crossword without looking at the clock to see if it’s time to go to work. I’m quite happy. I’ve got nothing to go out for, so I’m happy to be in home. John likes to read. He’s happy. We’ve got a little telly in the bedroom so if he wants to watch something I don’t want to watch he goes in there. That’s how we are. You’ve got to give and take.”
“I knit a lot. I knit for charity. I make blankets. They’re going to Bosnia at the moment. It’s to do with Mother Teresa and it’s done through the Minster Church. Mrs. Tanswell, when she was alive, got me on it. When I retired from work she said ‘We can’t have you sitting at home. You’ve got to knit squares.’ So I started and after she died I carried on with it. I buy some wool and I also beg it from where I can. It takes 42 squares to make a blanket and they come and fetch it. On average I knit four squares a day. So it takes 10 days or so to do a blanket. Sometimes over a weekend I do extra. It keeps me out of mischief. I can’t sit and do nothing. I don’t go far these days. My roaming days are over.”