13 minute read
Local history
LOOKING BACK
by Roger Guttridge
The tale of the runaway rector
There’s nothing like a naughty vicar story to set tongues a-wagging, and the Rev W M Anderson certainly did that, says Roger Guttridge
The rector of Durweston and Bryanston was already low in diarist Julietta Forrester’s estimation, and when he eloped with a parishioner, his reputation went through the floor. “Received a letter from Mrs Oborne saying that Rev W Anderson had gone off on Wednesday with Mrs Axford, Lord Portman’s coachman’s wife,” Julietta noted on January 25, 1912. “There had been talk about them for some time. He said he had loved her for 17 years! It seemed incredible! ”‘I never thought of Mrs A behaving so but Anderson was bad enough for anything! I believed he had sold his soul to Satan over the Durweston Ghost!” This was a reference to Durweston’s headline-making poltergeist, the subject of this column in our October issue. Anderson was among those who took the spooky events of 1894-95 seriously, unlike the sceptical Mrs Forrester. Even before the poltergeist, Julietta – wife of James Forrester, agent for Lord Portman’s Bryanston Estate – was not enamoured with the rector.
Lord Portman was disgusted
After his first service at Bryanston in 1893, Julietta wrote: “I liked his appearance and voice. I wish I had liked his sermon.” In 1895 she complained that Anderson was neglecting the Bryanston half of his flock. And when Durweston and Bryanston played Blandford
Mrs Axford, who left her husband and two daughters in 1912 to elope with the Rev. Anderson, rector of Durweston and Bryanston
at cricket that same year, she commented that “our rector, Mr Anderson, declined to play because he was afraid of the weather!” It appears that God was not on their side either. After Blandford declared their innings at 300 for 9, the Durweston and Bryanston XI were skittled out for 70. Fast forward 17 years to 1912. On February 3, Julietta noted that Lord Portman was “very disgusted” with Anderson ‘after all he had done for him, paying
for him to go abroad etc”. She added: “About two years ago, on hearing “the hostility to the of the intimacy runaway couple was such that a crowd between Anderson and Mrs Axford, Lord threatened to tar P spoke to the and feather them former about it as they waited on but A denied all the platform at Blandford station” the charge.” Anderson’s more charitable parishioners might have forgiven his inability to resist the lure of love but less forgivable was the theft of his curate’s pay packet, and money from the Coal Club fund to finance the elopement. He had also “left his wife,
No welcome in Halifax
Her diary continues: “Axford had spoken to Lord P about a divorce but as he had actually seen his wife off by train when she left him (because people should not say they had parted bad friends or that he had driven her from home!), Lord P told him he had connived at the elopement and therefore would be unable to obtain a divorce. “The two [Anderson and Mrs Axford] had first gone to Halifax to her brother’s but he refused to take them in and where they went then did not appear to be known.” Two years before his death in 2014, Pete Sherry, a grandson of James and Mrs Axford, told me the hostility to the runaway couple was such that a crowd threatened to tar and feather them as they waited on the platform at Blandford station. Pete, of Maperton, near Wincanton, confirmed Julietta’s claim that they were turned away at Halifax and added that they then spent six months at the Pump House in Bath. According to Julietta, Mrs Axford made a brief return to Bryanston hoping to collect the younger of her two daughters, Constance. The child refused to leave. “I suspect Auntie Con hung on to my mother and said she wouldn’t go,” Pete told me. On February 17, Julietta noted her fear that Anderson would continue drawing his rector’s stipend as long as he was ‘let alone’. She added that his ‘unfrocking’ would be costly and had to go through the ‘Court of Arches’.
A quiet end
From Pete Sherry, I learned that after leaving Bath, the elopers went to Montreal, where Anderson eked out a living as an artist. After his death just seven years later, Mrs Axford worked as lady-in-waiting to the Molson family, owners of North America’s oldest brewing company. She eventually returned to England with a substantial pension from Molsons of £7 10s a week. She lived in Worcestershire until her death aged 98. James Axford, a diminutive man of less than 5 feet in height, retired in 1923. He subsequently lived with his
Cuckolded James Axford, a diminutive man of less than 5 feet in height, was Lord Portman’s coachman and known as a fine horseman
elder daughter, Winifred, and her family at West Orchard and later Maperton, where he died in 1936 and was buried in the churchyard in an elm coffin made by his own hand. Pete recalled: ‘He was a terrific horseman and taught me to ride ponies. “He never talked about my grandmother. He was very strict about that and paid a solicitor to make sure she never got in touch with the family. “We used to get dollars from ‘Auntie in Canada’ and I guess that was my grandmother.” After James Axford’s death, his estranged wife was accepted back into the family, being introduced not as Winifred’s mother but as ‘Auntie’. • Roger Guttridge’s book Dorset: Curious and
Surprising includes chapters on The Runaway Rector and
The Durweston Poltergeist.
Victorian steam meets Tudor timber
A steamroller heads towards Abbeylands c1900. Picture from Simon Rae’s book Dorset of 100 Years Ago (1993)
A similar view of Cheap Street and Abbeylands today
The old Tudor building on Cheap Street is far more than meets the eye of the casual shopper, says Roger Guttridge
It’s one of the finest old houses in Sherborne, passed daily by hundreds who rarely give it a second thought or glance. But step inside the half-timbered Abbeylands in Cheap Street and it turns into the Tardis. Not in design, of course - there is nothing even vaguely resembling a space-travelling police box - but in scale. “How many boarders do you have?” I asked housemaster Rhidian McGuire after he explained that Abbeylands is a boarding house for Sherborne School. “Seventy-four.” ‘“eventy-four?” I doubtfully exclaimed, suddenly realising that there must be far more to this building than meets the eye. In fact it stretches back and back and back from Cheap Street, towards the main school buildings. To my architecturally uneducated eyes, the grade II-listed building looks unmistakably Tudor, but the date of 1649 above the front door confused me (the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, died 46 years earlier). That construction date was also the year of Charles I’s execution, and the Commonwealth of England. Troubled times. The Dorset volume of Newman and Pevsner’s classic series on The Buildings of England suggests the dating is not that straightforward; the entrance porch includes features “that one would call Jacobean, and a hoodmould which looks Early Tudor”. “That must surely be reused,’ say Newman and Pevsner, adding that the porch “must have originally belonged to the next-door house”. The Old Shirburnian website provides further illumination, confirming that Abbeylands – so named because it stands within the precinct of Sherborne Abbey – is a combination of two separate properties. It has been in continuous use as a boarding house since 1872, and staff and housemates are celebrating the 150th anniversary this year. Sherborne School originally rented Abbeylands from the descendants of former headmaster John Cutler and bought it in 1921 for £4,187. The Old Shirburnian site also confirms my suspicions of a Tudor connection, adding that the halftimbered frontage on to Cheap Street ‘dates from the late 16th century and has a projecting upper storey and three gables’. The premises were at one time occupied by the Sherborne Coal, Timber, Corn and Cake Company, which was dissolved in 1921. I wonder if the steamroller powering up Cheap Street in this circa 1900 picture was about to pick up some coal from the shop. These days you can only drive down one-way Cheap Street and you’re unlikely to spot a steampowered vehicle. For a few years after 1960 the Old School hall hosted social events such as meetings of the Silver Thread Club.
Declaration of the poll at the Old School, Sturminster Newton, 1910
interview by Laura Hitchcock
LOCAL HISTORY
The gardener with 10,000 pictures
At first glance Barry Cuff may simply be the expert veg-growing BV columnist. But eagle-eyed readers will also have spotted old pictures of Dorset are usually accredited to ‘the Barry Cuff Collection’ - editor Laura finally pinned Barry down to talk about his remarkable archive of almost 10,000 postcards of ‘Old Dorset’.
“Even as a young teen in the 60s, I was always stopping in to Dorset Bookshop in Blandford - or Longmans of Dorchester if I got the chance - to see if I could find a new Dorset book I hadn’t seen yet.” Born in Blandford and raised in Winterborne Whitchurch (where he lived for 30 years), Barry was always a collector; stamps, matchbox labels, cigarette boxes… and he was always fascinated by his beloved Dorset. But in 1974 he received a gift which began his old postcards of Dorset collection.
It began with three albums
“Our elderly neighbour gave me three Edwardian postcard albums, filled with Dorset images, especially from around the Winterbornes. She’d never married, her brothers had died, and she knew I was fascinated by the old pictures, so she handed them on to me. It was fascinating to look through the albums with her – she knew everyone in them. She’d point at a person, raise her eyebrows and whisper “love child” at me… course I didn’t know what that was back then!” Those three albums started Barry on the journey to collate probably the largest existing collection of old postcards of Dorset. He started off by spending his spare time hunting for them in junk shops: “I used to pay 20-30p a card. At 50p I walked away - far too much!”
When postcard collecting became more popular, it was a double-edged sword “all of a sudden there were fairs popping up, and I could go to Bristol, Brighton, Cheltenham, Twickenham… but it did mean the prices went up too!”
Barry Cuff - usually to be found on his allotment in Sturminster Newton - has the largest known collection of postcards of ‘bygone’ Dorset, and an astonishing memory for the pictures and stories they contain image: Courtenay Hitchcock
“She knew everyone in them, and would point at a person, raise her eyebrows and whisper “love child” at me… course I didn’t know what that was back then!” So what is it about postcards?
“It’s not just the photographs themselves, though they’re always the main interest, of course. There are the stories around the photographers too – Nesbitt from Blandford who photographed locally between 1890 and 1920. Chapman who came up from Devon and only photographed Sturminster Newton, Lyme Regis and Wimborne Minster; the late Victorian French brothers who came across the channel to photograph the whole of the south coast; Clarke from Sturminster Newton, who never got his fixing solution right so
LOCAL HISTORY all his postcards are very faded now… And of course the ones which have actually been written on have their own story to tell”
Lost conversations
Many of the postcards were sold for locals and tourists simply to add to their own picture albums in the days before personal photo albums were possible. But many were also sent in the post, giving tantalising glimpses into past conversations (although being England, Barry acknowledges many of the postcard messages are spent discussing the weather…):
“we shall be very pleased to see you Monday next. Come to supper if you can. MRW.” (July 26, 1910)
or - in Mr Mitchell’s case in Shroton - to complain:
“Dear Sir, I do not think your 2 lots of wheat quite good enough for me. If you have anything better would buy them at market price.” (Nov 22nd 1902) I presumed with almost 10,000 images currently in his collection, there must be a state of the art filing system to keep the archive organised and easily accessible? “Well… they’re in albums? I do have individual albums for each of the main towns – Poole, Stur, Weymouth, Portland, Blandford etc. And other albums are grouped by area.” So how does Barry ensure he doesn’t duplicate a postcard when he goes to a fair? “Oh, I remember them, pretty much. I’m not saying doubling up hasn’t happened – probably about 15 times over the years…” Fifteen times he’s duplicated an image, in 50 years of collecting almost 10,000 postcards, based on just his memory? Barry looks nonplussed by my bemusement at this (I have trouble remembering what film I saw last week…) “I just… remember them”.
The day job
Barry’s lifelong career as a Seed Analyst began by accident – introduced to the owner of local
At £40, this is the most expensive postcard Barry has purchased - it was taken by Nesbitt, and is of Lord Portman’s prize cattle
agricultural company Blandford & Webb by the father of a friend, Barry started as a 16-year old, not actually knowing what a seed analyst was. He trained at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge, and has spent his life running a lab, visiting Dorset farms, growing, assessing and certifying seed.
Quickfire questions:
What’s the most expensive postcard you’ve bought?
£40 – it was by Nesbitt, of Lord Portman’s prize cattle (see previous page)
And the one you want to find?
I know there’s one of the Giant’s Head Inn, above the Cerne Giant where the caravan & camping site is now. It showed the landlady standing outside the pub, pre WWI.
Your favourite postcard?
A friend of my father gave me the postcard ‘Post Office, Owermoigne’ – because it’s from him, I treasure it (above)
The saddest?
A card of Spetisbury. The message reads ‘Mr Hunt committed suicide this morning by drowning himself. Awful isn’t it.’ He has been involved in bean breeding, and was responsible for multiplying ancient Spelt and Einkhorn seeds for the Eden Project. Despite passing official retirement age Barry is still working for Sherborne’s Pearce Seeds “who wants to retire?”.
Barry the lawbreaker
Barry was great friends with Rodney Legg, the late campaigner, author and publisher, and joined him on many adventures through the 70s as Rodney led the campaign to restore public access to the army-occupied Lulworth Ranges, including the village of Tyneham (evacuated by the War Office in 1943 and never returned to its former residents). “In 1974 we announced that ‘Tyneham Post Office had reopened’. Rodney took some pictures which we had made into postcards. We opened up all the barbed wire on the Bank Holiday weekend and sold them from the old Tyneham Post Office. Loads of people showed up… as did the Army and the Police…” An unrepentant Barry grins at the memory. Known as the Tyneham Action Group (later known as The 1943 Committee), the campaign eventually resulted in access to ten square miles of land that were also secured from being ploughed or developed.
View the collection
If you’d like a peek into the Barry Cuff Collection, a good place to start would be his books in partnership with author David Burnett. The first (currently not available - worth hunting for) is Lost Dorset: The Villages & Countryside 1880 – 1920, containing 350 photographs chosen from Barry’s remarkable collection, few of which have been published before. This was followed up at the end of last year by Lost Dorset: The Towns. Again, few of the 375 postcards chosen for this book have been published before, and they form a unique portrait of urban Dorset between the invention of the postcard until just after WWI.
