Yesterday, Tuesday 17th April 2012, the funeral of Bill Symes was held at St. Aldhelm’s Church, Bishopstrow. At the request of Bill’s family, Danny Howell, who spent a lot of time in Bill’s pleasant company, was asked to write and read out a tribute to Bill. After the service, Danny was asked by several of the mourners if they could have a printed copy of what he had said in the church. Which now prompts him to share the tribute with an even wider audience. What follows is the slightly longer, unedited version of the tribute, as originally wrote by Danny, from which the excerpts he spoke at the funeral were taken:
Bill Symes: a tribute by Danny Howell.
They say the past is another country, and if you know anything of Bill’s past, you will be in no doubt that his life was one he made something uniquely special.
I am pleased to say I spent many happy hours in Bill’s pleasant company listening to his recollections. Sat indoors, with his cap on, he would talk about Cox’s Drove, Millard’s Hole, Spilsbury Pond, Penny’s Park, and other places. If you didn’t know these places yourself, you wouldn’t know where on earth he was talking about. But they all existed and still do within less than a mile of where we are now.
And he had a treasure chest of tales for every place, like the grass snakes at Horsepools, the secret tunnel at Eastleigh Court, the deep well at Bigbury Wood, the largest of elm trees that stood between Mill Lane and Watery Lane, the Junkers 88 plane that came down near Ladywell Barn, and more.
He knew all of this because he spent a lot of time wandering around the lanes and woods and over the hills, observing things first hand. He would go for walks every evening and at weekends. Later on, he took his children with him and their friends would tag along too for the great adventure it all was. Bill was a familiar sight round here, especially on his beloved bike. He was very much part and parcel of this locality. To me, Bill’s intimate knowledge of this parish was so vast I always thought of him as “Mister Bishopstrow And Boreham.”
That’s not to say he was a know-all or bigheaded about it. In fact he was quite the contrary. Bill’s favourite saying about himself was “I started at the bottom and worked my way down to where I am now.” He even contemplated having that on his gravestone. He said “If Spike Milligan can have “I told them I was ill’ on his, then why can’t I have “I started at the bottom and worked my way down.’ That’s an indication of Bill’s sense of humour. I hasten to add he’s not having those words on his gravestone, he later thought of something more in keeping.
Bill certainly had a very curious, inquiring intellect, because he gathered in his head all sorts of information and anecdotes concerning Bishopstrow and Boreham. This penchant for discovering more things about his locality, remained with him all his life. Just recently, some turntables and a massive saw pit were uncovered in Blackett’s Wood, not far from here, just the other side of the Bypass; they are remnants surviving from the military railway that connected Heytesbury Station with Sutton Veny Camp during the First World War. When I told Bill, he immediately said to me: “I suppose you are going to go and have a look at they. If you do, take me with you, I want to go with you, I want to see they, I’d love to see they.”
He did have a passion for steam locomotives and vintage vehicles. Before he was six years old he could tell, by the noise alone, whether a steam lorry making its way up Boreham Hill, was a Foden or a Sentinel.
Not only did Bill have a world of almost mythical places, he had a cast of characters to populate it – not fictional characters, but real larger-than-life people.
His favourite story concerned this very church. He would tell you of the time when the incumbent here in the 1920s and 1930s, the Reverend George Atwood, arranged to go shooting on the downs for a day with Mad Jack Bennett, one of the areas’s most notorious characters. Mad Jack arrived at the church at the hour agreed, as indicated by the hands on the dial of the church clock. Mad Jack waited outside. The Rector was inside, attending to someone or something else. Bill said Atwood was being “a touch tad tardy.” Mad Jack soon lost his patience and got out his gun. He fired at the weathercock, blasting away the initials N E W S which indicated the four main points of the compass. The Rev. Atwood rushed out of the church, wanting to know what was going on. Bill loved to tell that story. And as always, with Bill, he added his own riposte to it: “Ah”, said Bill, referring to Mad Jack, “He had he out of there, alright.”
The character who gave Bill his biggest store of stories was Squire Grenville Newton Temple, the Lord of the Manor. Bill’s favourite story about him concerned the time that Squire Temple, who had been out for the day, was brought home to Bishopstrow House by car hire and taxi proprietor William Sloper. When Temple got out of the car, Mr. Sloper asked him for the half-a-crown fare. Temple raged it was too much and only handed over two shillings before striding off into his mansion. Mr. Sloper, determined not to kowtow to the Squire, sat in the car and refused to move. One hour later, Temple bounded back out of the house and hurled a sixpenny bit at the car!
That was the world that Bill rejoiced in, the world he had entered on 20th July 1927, when he was born at 14 Boreham, the house next to the Yew Tree pub. His parents were in temporary lodgings at that house with the Moore family. Bill’s father soon afterwards bought a property on Boreham Hill, where they lived for about ten years, and then they moved into one of Park Cottages, renting from Miss Bradfield.
Bill told me many things about his childhood. He summed it up by saying “I was as well off as any schoolboy at Boreham who came from a working class family. If I could get myself a penny a day, which I did, to buy some sweets from Mrs. Fitz at Boreham Post Office and Shop, well I was doing alright.”
Bill attended St. John’s School and the Avenue School. I say attended but he soon realised school wasn’t really for him. He would skive off. He’d set off for St. John’s but would take a right turn down Rock Lane, and he’d spend all day, without anything to eat, curled up under a bush in the old Ballast Hole Quarry, where part of the Boreham Field housing estate now is. His friends, Vera Sheppard, Grace Norris and Joey Howell, covered for him for a while but eventually persuaded him to return to school.
He hated school and didn’t pay much attention during lessons. His school report would be so uncomplimentary that he would push it down a drain in the side of Boreham Road as he walked home at the end of term. And he had no interest in sports. He said he was no good at it. While the other boys played football on the school field he was told to help out in the school garden. He spent his time digging the shrubbery and pushing compost in a wheelbarrow to the plots for potatoes and beans. By all accounts the compost had quite a potent “aroma” which permeated his clothes. Bill said when he went into Mrs. Watkins’ class after gardening, she would push her nose up, flutter her nostrils and say “Did you have to bring that in here!”
Bill said the only thing good about school was the school holidays. He would run up to Bishopstrow Farm, where farmer Mark Gauntlet had two traction engines for steam threshing and ploughing. Bill would ride on the cultivator that was hauled by a long steel cable between the engines, either side of that big 70 Acres field between Battlesbury and Middle Hill. There’s a couple of photographs of young Bill in one of my books (The Wylye Valley In Old Photographs) – in one photo he is stood on the traction engine, in the other he is on the cultivator – he’s wearing short trousers and what looks like his school blazer and cap.
Battlesbury was one of Bill’s favourite places. He would climb up the ramparts to the very top of the hill, where one of his Boreham neighbours, Georgie Love, had the job of raising or lowering the red flag on the pole by the old reservoir, warning that the military were live-firing. Bill also liked to visit the keeper in the hut in Battlesbury Wood, and Bill would go looking for linnets’ nests in the box bushes. It was an idyllic time.
Somehow he managed to play truant from the Avenue School for 16 weeks continuously. He would spend the school hours loitering at places where he thought grown-ups wouldn’t know who he was, places like Roly Poly Lane and Sandy Hollow. Then questions started to be asked, not at home but at the school, so Bill devised a master plan. He instructed one of his mates to tell the teacher that he had died. Well, of course, that ruse didn’t last long. It must have been the next day that the schoolteacher just happened to meet Bill’s mother in the street and expressed condolences at the unexpected news of young William Symes’ passing away. Young Bill was in very serious trouble when he got home that afternoon! The School Attendance Officer, Mr. Noyce, called on Bill’s father at Bishopstrow Mill. Bill’s father went to the Avenue School and saw the Headmaster, Harold Dewey. Bill’s father pleaded for leniency for his son. It worked! Bill, the lucky so-and-so that he was, didn’t even get so much as the cane for his absenteeism.
There were some consolations among the drudgery of school life for Bill. As soon as the Second World War started, Warminster, like other places took in evacuee children from London. Bill said he saw the arrival of “A crocodile of Cockney kids”. There were so many evacuees that the Avenue School hours were rearranged. Bill and his classmates were told that they were only to come in the mornings one week and afternoons the next, and there were weeks when school was held only every other day. Bill said that suited him fine – more time to spend roaming and exploring Boreham and Bishopstrow! The number of evacuees was considerable but (70 years later) Bill could reel off to me the names of just about all of them and where they were billeted. I laughed when he said the two Crozier brothers, who lodged at Grange Lane, were soon known by everyone as “Big Smells” and “Little Smells”.
Bill left school a month before his 14th birthday. A full-time job was available at Bishopstrow Mill, working alongside his father. Bill was as pleased as punch about it. He had been working there part-time during the school holidays since he was 12. His full-time job at the Mill earned him half-a-crown a week to begin with, which soon rose to the giddy heights of five shillings, and was the princely sum of £5 in the finish. He loved the job. He kibbled the cow cake, crushed the oats, worked the winnower, and caught the rats in gin traps. There was a smallholding attached to the Mill and Bill’s additional chores included feeding the pigs, collecting the hens’ eggs, and throwing sticks up in the air to get the turkeys off the shed roofs when it was time to get them in at night.
On the day of his 17th birthday Bill started driving a Commer lorry, delivering hay and straw, and grain and feedstuffs, to and from the Mill. He didn’t take a driving test. He only had to go to the Post Office, fill out a form, pay five shillings and be handed the licence. Deliveries were made to farms for miles around. A much liked perk was that some farmers would bring out some cider and there was always time for a natter. Jesse Drake at Norton Bavant was a regular customer, having six tons of cattle nuts at a time, and after unloading there Bill would be told to go into the house and see Mr. Drake’s housekeeper who would always give him a half-a-crown tip. There were also regular jaunts with the lorry to BOCM at Avonmouth Docks, John Curtis’s at St. Phillips in Bristol, Rank at Southampton, and the McDougalls flour mill at Andover, which Bill enjoyed.
Loading and unloading was all done by hand and it was hard work but although Bill was small in stature he had big arms and was very strong, something which earned him the nickname Popeye. The wheat was in sacks weighing two hundredweight and a quarter. The sacks were loaded up on lorries, in two layers. Very often, sacks delivered to farms had to be carried up steps and into lofts. But Bill could do it. He told me a fellow employee at Bishopstrow Mill was Norman Barnard from Stockton. Bill would prove his strength by carrying both a two hundredweight and a quarter sack of wheat and an 8-stone Norman Barnard on his back, the entire length of Bishopstrow Mill.
Four months before his 18th birthday Bill received his call-up papers for the Army but fortunately for him the War was coming to an end. He was told to report to Hadrian’s Camp at Carlisle by 10.00 p.m. on the following Monday. He took the train from Westbury, and went via Paddington and Euston. Getting off the train in Carlisle, he and the others were taken in lorries to the camp, given a mess tin of cocoa, two crusts of bread and some margarine, and a tin of bully beef. An hour later they were taken by the lorries back to Carlisle Station. They travelled to Stranraer on the West Coast of Scotland, from where, at four in the morning, they took the ferry to Larne in Northern Ireland. Bill and his comrades ended up at Ballykinler Camp, in view of the Mountains of Mourne.
He trained as an infantryman for six weeks there, and then spent ten weeks in Colchester. Next, as luck would have it, he was made a lorry driver in the MT. He transported troops and delivered rations. He said it was a very cushy number.
It was while delivering to the camps on Salisbury Plain that Bill met Irene Duffy, a Lancashire lass, who had worked for the NAAFI prior to joining the ATS. She had been posted to Bulford Camp. That’s where Bill and Irene met, when Irene was serving food to the soldiers. Something must have attracted Bill to Irene, it may have been the khaki uniform and the wooden clogs she was wearing. It was the start of a loving 58 year relationship.
They were wed in Irene’s hometown of Rochdale in 1947 and commenced married life living with Bill’s parents at Boreham for six years. Next they were in a tied-cottage at Bests Lane, Sutton Veny, for a year, before gaining their first council house at Ferris Mead in Warminster. Twelve months later they moved to Boreham Field, where they resided for 44 years, before finally moving to a bungalow at The Dene.
After his army service Bill returned in May 1948 to work at Bishopstrow Mill but only for two years. He heard that the Wilts and Dorset Bus Company wanted drivers. So he applied at Salisbury. He was asked to drive a bus, with a supervisor, up to Old Sarum and back. He was then told if he underwent two weeks instruction and passed he could have a driver’s job. He said the whole thing was a doddle.
Bill started driving for Wilts and Dorset on the first of May 1950. His first conductor was Doug Lakey’s sister Bet. Later on, Bill King became his conductor. If the bus was running particularly late, Bill would simply drive on past several bus stops, with the conductor shouting out the back of the double decker “We’re not stopping, we’re not stopping!”
There is the tale of the time the Bus Station in Salisbury was being renovated and an old beam was going begging. Bill King decided he wanted it. Getting the beam back to Bill King’s home in Warminster wasn’t going to be a problem for the two Bills. With something of a struggle they got the beam on to their bus. It was, by all accounts, about 18 feet long and a foot square. All the way back to Warminster, passengers getting on and off the bus had to step over the beam in the aisle between the seats.
And if it was dark or very cold, Bill would often drop passengers off outside their homes rather than the nearest bus stop. And Bill prided himself that he still took the bus out during the deep and prolonged snow of the winter of 1963.
One of the routes that Bill drove was three trips every evening from Warminster to Sutton Veny Camp and back. The bus had 55 seats, but every night over a hundred soldiers would get on it, having come out of the pubs in Warminster. Bill said most of them were drunk and all of them rowdy. He said it was impossible for the conductor Georgie West to get them to pay the fares, so they didn’t bother trying.
Jack Baker tells the story that a bus once broke down at a place called No Man’s Land, off the A36, on the edge of the New Forest. Bill was sent there, late at night, to drive a relief bus, to rescue the stranded passengers and bring them on home to Salisbury and Warminster and the villages in between. Bill had always been used to there being a plain crossroads in Wilton. But that particular day the Council had constructed a new roundabout at Wilton Crossroads, with a large circle of kerbstones and a built-up mound in the middle. It was late at night, gone 11.30 p.m. and Bill, deciding there would be no other would-be passengers waiting at any stops, drove the bus at speed, to get everyone on his bus back Warminster way without further delay. It seems at Wilton he never noticed the new raised roundabout and he took the bus and everyone on board straight across, actually up over it, up one side and down the other. He was over it and some way along the Warminster Road before he realised what he’d done, so, undeterred, he just drove on!
Bill drove for Wilts and Dorset for exactly 20 years, he only gave it up when they brought in the one-man operator system for the buses. He was happy to drive the bus but not collect the fares and issue the tickets as well. He did try it for six weeks but found he couldn’t cope. In his words it got “compellicated.”
He then got a job as a general labourer at the REME Workshops in Warminster. If you listened to Bill’s stories about his time at the REME, you would come to the conclusion that no one ever did any work there.
Bill said one man, after every dinner break, went into a shed in an isolated spot in the workshops, and spent the entire afternoon asleep on a camp bed. That went on until one day Mr. Neald, the boss, opened the door and found the man snoring loudly. Mr. Neald had the shed demolished the next day and that was the end of that.
Bill also said a group of women employees, every Monday morning, brought all their family washing from home to work with them, and spent all day Monday washing and drying inside a big shed.
Another man, said Bill, spent all day, every day, leaning on a window sill, looking out of a window. Bill eventually said to the man, “When you retire, they better give you that window as a leaving present, otherwise you’re not going to know what to do with yourself.”
No wonder then that Bill called the REME Workshops: “A holiday camp.” When Bill reached retirement age, he had to leave but didn’t want to. He knew he would miss the people who worked there and would no longer be able to enjoy seeing all their unusual antics.
Bill had also driven coaches for Berridges at weekends, on troop runs, and he also drove lorries for Fred and Sybil Gibbs.
But at all his places of his employment he seemed not to see it as work, not as about earning money, or contributing to the local economy. For him, the workplace was simply somewhere you went to meet other people, to interact with them, be sociable and enjoy their camaraderie. If any of his fellow employees, wherever he worked, ever moaned about the work they were doing, Bill’s response was always “Well, if you don’t like the job, why do you come here?”
As a widower he visited his sister Jean, and also his friends, Harold, Bill, John, and Gwen. His family and friends visited him – always heeding of course that he wasn’t to be disturbed when the Formula 1 Grand Prix racing was on tv.
When the weather was fine Bill liked to sit on his folding chair on his doorstep, watching the world go by, and if he saw a young mother pass with her little boy clean and immaculately dressed, he would say “Isn’t that a wonderful sight, I do like to see that, I do like to see that.” More often than not Bill would nod off in the chair in the warm sunshine. Passing by in my car, I would stop and say “Bill, are you alright?” and he’d stir and say “Ah, Dan, what’s on? Come in and have a cup of tea with I.”
On the last Friday afternoon I spent with Bill, he changed tack. Instead of talking about the past he spent most of the afternoon talking about his family. He mentioned all of his children individually. He was so immensely proud of them and their achievements, whether they were in business, employing people, securing contracts around the world, being successful in that way, or whether they were doing other things, like keeping horses and sheep on a smallholding, or working in a shop, or just getting on with their lives, doing their own thing and living in a cottage with roses round the door. He adored them all.
Bill’s world wasn’t totally parochial. Somehow he knew all sorts of things about far flung places around the globe. He would suddenly tell me something about Mombasa or Antarctica. Or he’d come out with something about someone like Che Guevara. Last year he was reading over and over again a biography of Bonny and Clyde. He said he was so fascinated by the story that he just had to keep re-reading it.
Bill led a charmed life. He enjoyed everywhere he went and everything he did. I was going to say what a lucky man Bill was to have had such a wonderful time but it has to be said how lucky we were, we people who knew him, who were able to enjoy his delightful company, to be part of his engaging conversation, and to be on the receiving end of his loving and caring nature.
Bill was certainly a very caring person. I witnessed it personally myself. When my father had the first of a series of strokes, Bill was the first person to come and knock the door to see how my dad was, and it wasn’t a one-off, he came to see him on a weekly basis for ten years. I will always appreciate what Bill did.
Likewise when Bill’s wife Irene was ill, it was nothing unusual to see Bill with Irene in the wheelchair going up Woodcock Road to town and back. And if they had forgot something off the shopping list, they would immediately turn around and go back up to town again. I said to him about this, how he found the energy and never grumbled, and he simply said “I would do absolutely anything for my wife.” What a wonderful man he was?
Irene died in 2005. I think I’m right in saying Bill visited her grave here at St. Aldhelm’s Churchyard, every weekend without fail, whatever the weather. And he kept her slippers exactly where she had left them. Bill died on 6th April, on what would have been Irene’s 84th birthday.
They say all good things must come to an end. Bill now goes to be reunited with Irene, something he truly wished for. I asked him once if he believed in God and Heaven. He said he used to think different but now he would like to think that there is something special for all of us afterwards. Every night before he went to sleep he would ask God to bless his sister, his six children, ten grandchildren and six great grandchildren, their partners and their friends. He used to joke that by the time he had finished it was nigh on nearly morning.
Bill’s family will miss him dearly but they can take comfort that he has left them enough love to last forever. And he gave me some advice to share around: he said: “Remember this, a glass of whisky is the best medicine, and a walk over Battlesbury is the best doctor.” Bill also said “Don’t ever trust doctors, parsons or lawyers.” He told Bert Legg that. Bert said “You forgot to mention accountants.” So from then on accountants were added to Bill’s list of the condemned.
Bill, we admired you for the man you were, we liked your homespun philosophy and we loved your sense of humour. You may have joked that you started at the bottom and worked your way down, but we all know different. You were undoubtedly much nearer the top of the pile than the rest of us because you cared so much for your wife and family, you were conscientious and thoroughly decent, you were a good-living man, and you were respected by all who knew you because you were indeed a top-class human being.
