April 2020 Reviews

By Juliet Webster

(Poppyland Publishing 2019 152pp ISBN 978-1-90979-666-7-6) £9.95

The Yellow Caravan evolved from the inheritance of a box of documents. A maiden lady called Honora Elwes (known as Honor) left the box to her nephew who in the 1970s passed it to the author, Juliet Webster, a great-niece of Honor. After an initial look at the contents she left the box undisturbed until the opportunity arose to investigate it more closely. Among the papers was a diary, a poem (otherwise called ‘the ballad’) and photographs all pertaining to a tour round Norfolk enjoyed by three well to-do young women in a horse-drawn caravan in 1912—one of them was Honor, then aged 23. She was accompanied by her 20-year-old sister Winifred (Win) and a cousin Judith (Judse), who was 25 and who planned most of the route, which took about two weeks. Webster marked the centenary of the tour by reading the ‘ballad’ at Holkham in May 2012. Later, having entered the poem in an essay competition, she won a trophy and the opportunity to have it published. Poppyland, the publisher, was shown related material and deemed the project eligible to become part of their ‘Norfolk Documents’ series and so it was that The Yellow Caravan was published in 2019.

The three young women started their tour at North Wootton, near Kings Lynn, where they hired the caravan, a converted Bioscope Wagon weighing roughly 1¼ tons. The horse came with a groom, Charlie Canham, who cared for it and was available for a variety of practical tasks. The party was also accompanied by two dogs, Kaiser and Seizer (Caesar). The first week was spent travelling roughly east via Burnham Market, Holkham and Cromer to Northrepps. Their journey then took them south and west through the Broads necessitating some trips on ferries with associated anecdotes. They aroused curiosity among the local population: they were briefly thought to be suffragettes; asked if they were a travelling show; and were mistaken for tinkers. North Norfolk’s undulating hills provided challenges, occasionally requiring the hire of an extra horse. They were not short of places to camp, often taking advantage of offers from landowning family or friends. Cooking was done outside on a camp fire in good weather, otherwise on a coal-fuelled stove inside. Ablutions were organised in a discrete tent erected each night by Canham.

The three original elements of the story were added to by Webster’s approximate re-enactment of the trip during the summer of 2019, accompanied by Honor’s great nephew Ben Elwes, a professional photographer. Modern photographs alongside those contemporary with the journey add an extra dimension, enhanced by the historical background of many places visited, including references to residents present in 1912, presumably gleaned from research at the Norfolk Record Office and the 1911 census. Apart from photographs, Webster’s attractive account includes extracts from the poem and diary held together by her fascinating narrative. Appendices I, II and IV contain contemporary recipes, wild flowers (an interest of Honor’s), and inns visited by the caravan. Appendix III gives a current list of camp sites and hotels suitable for those eager to follow the path of the caravan. A postscript covers subsequent biographical details of some of the people mentioned in the adventure. The index covers mainly people and places; there is a list of sources and further reading rather than a bibliography.

My attraction to this book was immediate, partly influenced by my roots, stemming from Norfolk millers and mill owners in my father’s family, and interest did not waver while reading the account. Webster is to be congratulated on her diligent research and delightful presentation that is both entertaining and informative. Jane Walker completed the Diploma in Local History at Cambridge University Institute of Continuing Education in 2006. Her research has been devoted mainly to Datchworth, Hertfordshire. She edited Datchworth Tithe Accounts 1711-1747 (Hertfordshire Record Society, 2009) and is currently working on an edition of a collection of unpublished sixteenth and seventeenth century wills and inventories originally analysed by Lionel Munby.

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By Bill Reed

(Athelstan Museum, Malmesbury 2017 42pp ISBN 978 9998274-0-3) £6; THE TRUE STORY OF THE MURDER OF HARRY NEAL by Bill Reed (Athelstan Museum, Malmesbury 2018 56pp ISBN 978-1-9164852-1-1) £6; LINOLITE LIMITED: the inside story by Bill Reed, with Barry Dent and Sarah Pettigrew (Athelstan Museum, Malmesbury 2019 132pp ISBN 978-1-9164852-2-8) £10

Bill Reed is an oral historian responsible for the ‘Malmesbury Voices’ archive associated with the Athelstan Museum, and both You’re One of Us Now and Linolite Limited – the Inside Story depend heavily on oral testimony. The conundrum he presents in both these books is how oral evidence can be integrated into a written text—too much editing removes the colour which the witness provides, too little results in an over-long and detailed account. The balance struck here is quite good. Both books address local subjects of much more than local interest. As becomes clear in the text, Linolite was a significant national business with whose products (light fittings, then all sorts of electrical fittings) many people will be familiar while being perhaps surprised at their origin. And in You’re One of Us Now the wartime role of EKCO in the town, making radar components without anyone being permitted to know what they were, is very well described, along with the wartime Mass Observation project which was applied to the works.

Linolite is in the form of a series of short essays covering particular aspects of the business: so the early story of the company and its products, the wartime role and the move to Malmesbury are followed by reminiscences of ‘Reception, Switchboard and Post’, ‘Labelling and Packing’, ‘Health and Safety’, ‘The 1971 Jubilee’, ‘Plastic Mouldings’ and short pen-pictures of some of the key individuals. In the natural way of things there is much more recent material than wartime and post-war content, and it stops short in a couple of key areas. For instance, there is only a very short account of the role of Michael Frye, written by his son and hinting at the achievements of a most interesting man—one of several episodes that leave us wanting to know more, arguably no bad attribute in a local author! But in closing off the very end of the company the book completes the picture well.

In You’re One of Us Now the narrative of the EKCO company’s move from Leeds via Southend-on-Sea to Malmesbury is prefaced by a brief account of the early life of Michael Lipman, who was to become one of the main figures. The description of how and why such a move was planned, and of the various problems of completing it and then managing an important in-coming business under wartime conditions, is revealing. It draws considerably on the Mass Observation project to which the works was subject and which is described in some detail. The number of personal memories of that time is, understandably, small, but they are well used as illustration. It is unfortunate that the work (like Linolite) is almost entirely unreferenced: although the acknowledgements and bibliography suggest the sources, which piece of information came from where is not clear and this may make the use of the book for future research problematic. But the account reads well nonetheless.

The title of The True Story of the Murder of Harry Neal suggests, perhaps, a new insight into an unsolved murder; or perhaps a recently-revealed miscarriage of justice—so I turned to it with some anticipation. The events are set, naturally, in and near Malmesbury, during the war in 1942. The account is written wholly in the present tense, a style which can present problems to the reader in following the events. It too is unreferenced, although the author’s note at the start and the acknowledgements at the end show that much of the information came from the family of Harry Neal and from the Smart and Irvine families (who feature in the text), and from ‘Malmesbury Voices’. The account itself is detailed and thoroughly laid out, although it cries out for a map—the contemporaneous one on the back cover one is too small to help. It includes, however, a great deal of ancillary information, much of it incidental to the plot, so the reader’s attention is drawn into a number of dead ends. Nonetheless, the story moves along well enough to its conclusion (which is, after all, that the original verdict and the way the accused was treated were correct). The book closes with an ‘epilogue’ of further detail of little relevance to the story, but no doubt of interest to the local readership who are the main market for this work.

Together these three small books, very local to Malmesbury, contribute to a coherent picture of the town after 1940. The Murder of Harry Neal is really very local, and probably not of great interest elsewhere: but Linolite Limited and You’re One of Us Now are of much wider appeal and, incorporating as they do a number of personal reminiscences, carry the greater weight to anyone interested in the presentation of local history. And, of course, throwing light on two of the back corners of the story of the Second World War, they take their place in that bookshelf also.Fabian Hiscock completed his MA by Research in History at the University of Hertfordshire, where he is a member of the oral history team. His main research interests lie in the long eighteenth century and in the English inland waterways, as well as in the local history of western Hertfordshire.

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By Jon Smith

(Jon Smith, Heath House, Barningham 2019 336 pp ISBN 978-1-5272-4948-6) £9.99

There are many ways of writing a local history and this is a more unusual, but nevertheless effective, one. The format is not a continuous narrative, nor a series of chapters, but a gazetteer with 1815 entries closely printed in double columns (plus 342 photographs and 15 maps) which introduce the people and places associated with the history of Barningham and its community and nearby places. Barningham is a small village in North Yorkshire, just south of the river Tees—small, but important enough to generate a lot of information about many topics. The cover blurb candidly admits that the book is about ‘everything you could want to know about the village and its neighbours (and possibly some things you don’t)’. As the author confesses, ‘Some of what you’ll find inside is of historical value, a lot of it unashamedly trivia, but all of it, I think, is worth preserving’. Local people will doubtless gain great pleasure from this way of presenting their past to them, and one can imagine someone settling down in front of the fire to glance through this book, frequently calling out with enjoyment, ‘Well! I never knew that before!’ The author, as his own entry tells us, is a journalist, chairman of the Barningham parish meeting, and founder and archivist of the local history group. He has gathered most of the entries himself but drawn also on the researches of three fellow-members of the local history group as well as the papers of Merryne Watson (1912-1994) whose entry tells us that he wrote in the 1970s a series of long articles on everyday life in the area in the mid-Victorian period for the Barningham parish magazine.

Examples of the irrelevant, antiquarian, trivial and interesting are as follows (the reader is invited to decide into which category each falls): ‘Vicar of Dibley. Television comedy series condemned in 1994 by the Rev. Alan Clayton, rector of Barningham, as “coarse and offensive”.’; ‘Sunder, George. Listed in the 1673 hearth tax rectors as occupying a Barningham house with one hearth.’; ‘Parrots. Barningham rector the Rev Spencer Gough advertised a pair of small green West African parrots in their cage for sale in 1911, “first reasonable offer accepted”. He had given them to a village jumble sale, but they came back, unsold.’; ‘Johnson, Thomas. Member of a family living at Earby Hall in the 15th century and present with his brother Gerard at the battle of Agincourt in 1415.’; ‘Green Gill. Farmstead near Scargill, first mentioned in the parish registers in 1597. Also recorded as Greengyll and Crangill.’; ‘Croquet. There was a croquet lawn at Barningham Park in Edwardian days’. And so the entries go on, many of them short but other more substantial: a whole column on enclosures; a column and a half on evacuees; 2½ columns on tithes; and 16 columns on the local gentry family, the Milbanks. Some people have stridden the national and even international stage: Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic made a collection on board the RMS Majestic in 1899, raising £3 17s 6d, for the Barningham Church Organ Fund; journalist, broadcaster and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris, grew up ‘in a tiny, cold, stone terraced house’ in the area; and the gardener and broadcaster, Geoffrey Smith and his brother, Alan, judge on TV’s Come Dancing, were both from the village where their father was gardener at Barningham Park.

The ‘Round the World’ of the title refers to a local two-mile ramble through the village which passes two plantations, named Canada and Ladysmith, so this is indeed a rambling parochial book in the best and worst senses of the word. It will be enjoyed and appreciated most by those who know or have known the area. But it also sets an example of how local knowledge and enthusiasm can be communicated to those who might never otherwise open a history book.Edward Royle is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of York. Apart from his general interest in British social and political history since the mid-eighteenth century, he has written several works on the local history of his native Yorkshire and is currently editing a collection of essays entitled Power in the Land, 1542-1920, to mark the centenary of the Ramsden family selling their Huddersfield estate to the borough’s Corporation in 1920.

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By Richard Dudding with Joyce Huddleston, Clare Sargent and Christine Wootton

(Radley History Club with Radley College 2019 iv+192pp ISBN 978-0-9568632-5-6) £15+£3p&p

Radley is a village and parish situated between Abingdon and Oxford beside the River Thames, and here its story is told mainly from the perspective of the lives of the three principal controllers of the Radley manor and estates—Abingdon Abbey, the Stonhouse family and the Bowyer family. These, together with the Docker-Drysdale family, Radley College and a few interim owners, fulfilled the role of the lord of Radley manor. The book shows how in the seventeenth century this feudal position morphed into the squire of the village, who secured his or her leadership status by virtue of wealth and landholding, rather than by manorial law and custom.

Arranged in chronological order, each chapter is prefixed with a national overview of village life in England followed by the particulars of the same story as it unfolded in Radley. Like many historical journeys concerning English villages, the first 500 years is covered in one chapter, due to the sparseness of evidence from before the Reformation, while the latter 500 years to the present day are described in the following six chapters. As the authors state, they have attempted to balance the two half-millennia by ‘milking’ the sources of the first, and being more selective of the sources from the second. Despite this, they have managed to include a substantial amount of material about the manor, estates and village, at the same time linking the facts together in a very readable manner.

Radley did not become a manor in its own right until 1519, when it broke away from the manor of Barton, which had been controlled by the Abbey. Thereafter the text very much centres on the characteristics, careers, marriages and family trees of the flamboyant Stonhouse and Bowyer families, who owned the manorial estates from the latter part of the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. The lives of each owner are explored, giving accounts of their activities, both within Radley and surrounding area and further afield, such as London and abroad. The artificial allocation of regnal numbers on the sometimes confusing family trees is helpful in distinguishing the various members of the family with the same forenames. There are some interesting details of occupations, hours and rates of pay, for Radley’s manorial servants, estate workers, park-keepers and villagers, indicating the dependency of Radley residents on the manor.

The story of the manor’s three main houses, and their construction, outbuildings, and home parks and gardens, are covered, especially for the Hall, which in the 1720s was the last to be built. It was painted by William Turner in the 1780s, and is still standing today as part of the independent school, Radley College. The layout of the rooms within the Hall, their contents and usage are supported by plans, accounts and inventories. The definition of Radley’s settlements, estates and parks, their land use, and change of landholdings, are covered, backed by statistics on numbers of taxpayers, lists of tenants and their acreage held, and by maps and surveys of the estate over the centuries. Farming equipment used and crops produced by the Radley estate are mentioned in probate inventories.

Social historians will be interested in how an English manor transitioned from the feudal age to the post-reformation beginnings of capitalism, and the subtle changes to Radley’s leadership from lord of the manor to squire. The effect of enclosure provides a very good example of the social changes in the development of a village and its use of land. Charts and statistics for Radley show how the size of farms increased, and the numbers of tenants decreased, leading to a subsequent increase in landless labourers. Architectural, furniture and landscape historians are well served by the full descriptions of the houses, internally and externally, and their immediate surroundings. The Stonhouses and the Bowyers participated in local activities. As a member of Abingdon Corporation, John Stonhouse II was involved in riots over the 1686 Abingdon charter, and George Bowyer II lost money in the Bayworth mining debacle of 1812-1814, attempting to build a canal from his neighbouring manor at Sunningwell to the Thames at Sandford. The appointment of the vicar of Radley church gave the lord or squire influence on the moral life of the village though the church was nearer to the Hall than to the village.

To encompass a thousand years of village history in under 200 pages is no mean feat. The authors have succeeded in doing this succinctly and simply within a structure that is accessible to anyone interested in their local village. The book also provides useful information for the historian studying the relationship between an English manor and its village. Radley is an excellent case study for local historians showing how the governance of a village has changed from the feudal age to post-reformation, and the system of agriculture moved from communal sharing to enclosed larger farms. Most of all, this book will suit those interested in the history of all aspects of Radley over the last thousand years, the leading families, their houses, estates, fields and parks, tenant farmers and villagers. It is evident that much well-constructed research has gone in to the writing of this book which makes it a solid source for history students. The authors have a strong affinity with Radley—it is engrossingly written, and should hold the attention of historians and students of the community.Nick Carver is a recent student of local history, with an MSc in English Local History from Oxford University. Over the past five years, he has concentrated on local history in the Abingdon area, including the nearby middle Thames-side villages, such as Radley. He formerly worked as a chartered accountant in the IT industry.

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By Clements Hall Local History Group

(Clements Hall Local History Group 2019 vi+114pp ISBN 978-1-9996655-1-7) £7

The intriguing title of this book relates to the patterns in the brickwork of the houses in South Bank, where shop windows and doors have been bricked up but still leave clues to the existence of the many shops which once served the residents of this area. South Bank is the district of York south of the city walls and bounded on the west by the Knavesmire and the race course and on the east by the river Ouse. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century it was largely undeveloped, but from the 1880s onwards the fields were replaced by rows of small terraced houses to provide accommodation for the workers at the newly established chocolate factories and the railway works. Later, the few large houses with extensive grounds gave way to streets of semi-detached houses or more spacious terraces.

The early terraces of houses which opened straight onto the street often had a shop on each corner, and in some cases shops operated from the front room of a mid-terrace house while the family lived at the back and upstairs. There were originally around 100 small shops in the area, catering for the daily needs of local people: most have disappeared, made unviable by changing patterns of shopping as refrigerators, big supermarkets and online shopping replaced a daily walk to the corner shop for a chat and a few items for that day’s meals.

Shadows in the bricks begins with useful introductory chapters on the history and development of the area, and then moves on to cover the first four streets to be built. The second half of the book describes the streets which were developed from the turn of the century onwards. For each, all the premises which were shops or businesses are described with details of their early history and subsequent use. There are digressions as appropriate on the history of public buildings such as schools, churches, pubs and clubs, and accounts of the larger houses (most long gone) dating from earlier in the nineteenth century before the area was developed, and the families who lived in them.

The book is a joint project by members of the Clements Hall Local History Group who collected the memories of long term residents to build up a picture of life in the area, and of the many shops which helped to create a sense of community. These oral history quotations are helpfully displayed on a pale grey background to make them stand out from the rest of the text. Group members also conducted documentary research in trade directories, official records and newspapers, and were able to compile detailed information about the various shops and their successive shopkeepers in each road. The illustrations are a varied and interesting collection of colour and black and white photographs, although the reproduction of some of the older black and white pictures could have been improved, but the book is attractively produced with good quality paper and generous margins. There is a detailed contents list but no index—an index of street names, buildings and people would have made it easier to find particular entries. A couple of maps showing the development of the area at different dates would have been an interesting and useful addition as there is otherwise only a rather badly reproduced aerial view and a diagram showing the sites of principal buildings.

Carolyn Hammond is a retired local history librarian now living in York, and is joint compiler of several books of old photographs of the Brentford and Chiswick area.

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