Thursday 2nd October 2025
A bricked-up cellar entrance in the wall on the western side of
Deverill Road, Warminster, just north of The Fox & Hounds.
Photograph taken by Danny Howell
on Thursday 2nd October 2025.
Danny Howell writes:
If you are walking up the Boot Hill part of Deverill Road, Warminster, soon after you pass the Fox & Hounds public house, you may notice what appears to be the bricked-up arch of a doorway in the wall alongside the pavement. I took the attached photo only a couple of days ago, on Thursday 2nd October 2025.
This doorway once gave access to a beer cellar used by the landlords of the Fox & Hounds in days long gone by. And at one period Frank Moody, who had various businesses at Fore Street during the 1920s, including a bicycle shop, a furniture store, and also a pig-slaughtering house and a bacon factory there; he used this cellar at Boot Hill as a curing place and as additional storage for cured bacon. Frank Moody died in 1930.
This cellar also had military use during the Second World War, not with the regular army but with the town’s Home Guard. The land above it provided vegetable garden ground for the residents of Christ Church Terrace.
What I’m going to repeat next is going to sound very “Dad’s Army”.
On 19th March 1986 I tape-recorded the memories of Percy Vincent, and published them in my book Remember Warminster Volume Three. Among his wealth of recollections, Percy recalled:
“During the War I was in the Home Guard . . . We were in different sections. My section was operating by Christ Church. We took a piece of the churchyard wall at Christ Church out, opposite the Fox And Hounds pub. We took the top off the wall and dug in a bit, a hole, so that we could get in. That was our strong point against anybody coming up Boot Hill. They had to come round the corner and our fire-point lay there.”
“Opposite that was a couple of old-fashioned doors laid in the wall, where Moody’s bacon factory had some cellars, where they put the bacon. That was cold storage before fridges came about. We had a flame-thrower in there. It was just before you get to the Fox And Hounds pub, on the right. There was a wall and halfway down that wall were two wooden doors and that was the cellar belonging to Moody’s, the bacon factory people. We commanded that cellar and we put our flame-thrower in there. That was our point at Christ Church.”
Fortunately we have more written recollections concerning the cellar at Boot Hill.
Wilfred Middlebrook, who lived at Christ Church Terrace, during the war years, wrote a newspaper serialisation in 1971 which he called The Changing Face Of Warminster. In it he wrote the following notes about the cellar. He noted:
“An underground cave.
The Fox And Hounds still retains its private malthouse at the rear, unused for many years. An adjacent ‘cave’ under the gardens, was once used for curing bacon; the smoke emerging from a small chimney protruding from one of the Christ Church Terrace gardens above. This cellar was used by the Home Guard during the last War as a magazine for their ammunition and explosives, complete with a sandbagged defence post in the gardens that roofed the cellar, and a matching strongpoint in the Christ Church cemetery across the road.”
“In August 1941 the newly-formed Home Guard staged an anti-invasion exercise in Deverill Road, manning the defence posts they had dug and sandbagged at the bottom of my garden in Christ Church Terrace, and the cemetery post across the road. Thunder-flashes were lobbed about the place, blowing the tops off my carrots, but the ‘enemy’ happened to win this particular round. An ‘enemy’ agent, dressed as a nun, gained entrance into my house at the point of a gun concealed within his/her flowing robes. After hiding in the front bedroom and biding his time, he finally threw open the window and bombed the lot! A few days after the Home Guard had stocked their magazine – the old Fox And Hounds beer cellar under my front garden – with explosives. My neighbour was discussing our crops. ‘Are your potatoes coming up yet?’ he asked. ‘Not yet,’ I replied, ‘but they soon will be if anything goes wrong down below!'”