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Dorchester

Dorchester – 1887 Visit of The Prince of Wales

This engraving was made from a photograph taken by Dorchester’s pre-eminent photographer of his day, Walter Pouncy. It was taken on the 2nd of June 1887 when the Prince of Wales visited Dorchester. There is a full report of the event in the editorial section and can be found in the Dorchester Category.

This engraving was made from a photograph taken by Dorchester’s pre-eminent photographer of his day, Walter Pouncy. It was taken on the 2nd of June 1887 when the Prince of Wales visited Dorchester. There is a full report of the event in the editorial section and can be found in the Dorchester Category.

John Hicks – Architect

Early in the 19th century, following a century of decline and neglect a program of church building and restoration was embarked upon on a scale not seen before or since. Nationally, between the turn of the century and 1850 two thousand new churches were built and building continued at this pace until 1870. Dorset played its part in this revival with Ferry and Crickmay taking the major part of the projects here, but this was to change in 1850 when a new man arrived in Dorchester and quickly established himself as an ecclesiastical architect.

John Hicks was born in Totnes in Devon; he was the son of John and Frances Hicks. His father was a clergyman and schoolmaster. John Champion Hicks uprooted his family from Devon and moved to Rangeworthy in South Gloucestershire, where he was appointed vicar. His son, John, who had received a good education and was a classical scholar, started an architectural practice in Bristol in 1837. Not much is known of his time there or where he trained, but we do know he designed and built two churches and had restored another by 1848.
 
It was John’s older brother, James, who first moved to Dorset. In 1837 he was curate at Piddletrenthide and became vicar there in 1845, a post he held for forty years. It was probably James who encouraged John to move to Dorset after his marriage at Rangeworthy in 1850 to Amelia Coley. We know from the 1851 census that John and Amelia were living at the Manor House at Piddletrenthide. ‘John Hicks: Architect’ is listed in a directory for 1852/3, which shows him at 39 South Street, Dorchester. He and his wife lived above the office, next door to William Barnes’ school.

Commissions came into the office for vicarages in Dorchester and Lyme Regis, a school and school house at Long Bredy and church restoration work at Piddletrenthide. But it was his work in 1859 at Rampisham that really established him in Dorset as an ecclesiastical architect; here he added a nave and side aisle. After Rampisham there was a steady flow of commissions and he built or restored nearly thirty Dorset churches before his death in 1869.

On 11th of July 1856 John Hicks took on the son of a local builder. He was articled to Hicks for three years and because of his youth this was extended for a further year. In the summer of 1860 the young man entered John Hicks’ employment as a paid assistant but left in 1862 before going to London to gain more experience and to pursue a career in writing. He returned to Dorchester and was again Hicks’ assistant from 1867 until his death in 1869: he was, of course, Thomas Hardy.

For those of us outside of the world of architecture and from this distance in time John Hicks is, without doubt, Dorset’s best known Victorian architect. However, our memory of him may have less to do with his work and more to do with his association with Hardy.

By all accounts John Hicks was a “genial, well-educated, straight dealing man” who was much liked. His work was generally admired and appreciated.  Unusually for such a prominent man we have not been able to find an obituary to him in the Dorset County Chronicle, other than a simple death notice: ‘February 12th at Dorchester, in his 54th year, Mr John Hicks, Architect’.

Thomas Hardy dedicated his poem ‘The Abbey Mason’ to him and Florence Hardy noted in 1927 that Thomas Hardy had commented that “if he had his life over again he would prefer to be a small architect in a county town, like Mr Hicks at Dorchester.”

Maiden Castle

Maiden Castle Ramparts

Maiden Castle Ramparts

Maiden Castle: a Condensed History

It is probably impossible to exaggerate the sovereign status of Maiden Castle among the 80 known defended prehistoric hillforts in Dorset alone, or to play down its importance in the heyday of this type of site throughout England as a whole. Yet this fortified hill is of no great elevation, being plainly visible from the air as an extensive kidney-shaped enclosure girded about by three great tiered embankments or ramparts with interstitial ditches. From ground level however, this amazing site, barely two miles south west of Dorchester town centre, may appear only as a great linear embankment or ridge.

To re-trace Maiden Castle’s evolution from its earliest antiquity we have to regress some six thousand years to the time of the first farmer’s arrival in England. At that time the Maiden hill would probably have appeared as a plain insignificant low elevation on the tract of lowland between the river Frome to the north and the coastal ridge to the south. It is further likely that the site and its immediate environment was well wooded in those days, or until the agricultural immigrants arrived.

These immigrants were settlers of the New Stone Age (Neolithic) from continental Europe. Finding the hill a favourable location for establishing a communal base, the hill and the surrounding land were clear-felled and the eastern end (knoll) was enclosed by a discontinuous bank and double line of ditches, creating the feature known to archaeologists as a causewayed enclosure. This had an area of about 20 acres, but very little activity took place within it at first. Later the enclosure seems to have served a charnel function for the ritual disposal of the dead, as the deposition of a considerable amount of human and animal bone with some pottery took place in the ditches and pits.

There is then evidence that the site went out of use in the later Neolithic. Following this the bank was razed and partly overlain by the construction of a type of monument unknown from anywhere else outside Dorset. This was an extremely elongated mound known as a bank barrow, which in the Maiden Castle example is 545 metres (1790 feet) long and was found to contain a mutilated burial at one end. This suggests that the bank barrow may have originally been a long barrow, which for some possibly ritualistic reason was greatly extended.

For until the early first millennium BC it appears that Maiden Castle seems to have been a place serving an almost exclusively ritual or funerary function. There is no evidence for any continuation or extension of habitation within the enclosure from the late Neolithic and into the Bronze Age. The only feature to be added during this period being a round barrow, which could well be contemporary with the barrow to be seen in the ploughed field to the north-west.

It has therefore been supposed that towards the end of the Neolithic around 2000 BC the focus of settlement shifted towards Poundbury Camp, the other major prehistoric site near Dorchester, or else into the Frome valley. Certainly during the Bronze Age the land around Maiden Castle was divided up for agriculture by means of lynchets and field systems. This has been taken to indicate increasing pressure on the land from population growth, though there is no evidence that the hilltop itself was ever brought into cultivation.

By the Mid Bronze Age some land became exhausted from over cultivation. A Revival of Maiden Castle as a focus of occupation then appears to take place around the same time, for a bank was constructed from north to south down the middle of the hill, segregating the Neolithic enclosure from the western half. There is some indication that the latter was then used for ranching or grazing sheep. High-caste burials evidently continued locally, as the dividing bank is associated with the appearance of more round barrows.

One of the popular misconceptions about hillforts is that they were wholly an innovation of the Iron Age peoples, and so had no precursors in the earlier period. But it is now recognised that many of these fortified hills had their origin in the Bronze Age, although they were unlikely to have been fully revetted at this time.

The arrival of the Iron Age in Britain is usually taken at around 700 BC, when a new wave of settlers from the continent arrived in southern England. At Maiden Castle possible pressure of population forced the new immigrants to bring the hilltop into use as a place to live and not just for stock-keeping or religious functions. A single rampart was constructed at the east end, using the line of the much earlier Neolithic enclosure bank almost entirely, with a ditch and double portal entrance retained throughout later modifications. This enclosed about 16 acres, but was later enlarged to 47 acres to take in
the west knoll. With this enlargement the original defences were strengthened and double entrances protected by outworks constructed at each end. At the east entrance two defended corridors were also designated.

Many hut dwellings were constructed, but from around 200 BC some abandonment of the site for smaller settlements outside seems to have taken place, for some of the defences were eroded and some huts collapsed. Then in about 150 BC the main rampart was doubled, additional lines of defence were built, and the outworks around the east entrance were greatly increased in complexity. Though curiously, the ramparts on the south side were never finished properly. Here they are of the type called ‘glacis’ i.e. the counter scarp of the bank sloped straight down into the ditch. But by the Mid Iron Age settlement within the enclosure was well organised, with areas for living, religion and animal husbandry.

Between 100 and 75 BC the site underwent another major reconstruction. The inner rampart was modified and the outer ones strengthened. (Initially these ramparts were of the box type, i.e. they were revetted by timber on both sides.) The inner gates were left unaltered, but both entrances were completely re-modelled with greater depth and complexity. This persistent reinforcing of the ramparts has been interpreted as an expression of civic pride or as a defence against rival tribes beyond the hill or, ultimately, the Romans.

But the arrival of the Romans in the area was a whole century in the future when Maiden Castle was at its peak, though anticipation of a Roman invasion could have been rife by the early 1st century. Nevertheless the threat seems to have prompted last minute fortifications at the entranceways in readiness, but to no avail. The threat became a brutal reality in 45 AD when a cohort of the 2nd Legion under the command of Vespasian (a future emperor) laid siege to the hillfort at the east entrance. Despite the complexity of the interlocking outworks, the Roman’s superior arsenal and tactics easily surmounted the obstacles.

Those survivors from among the many slain in the ensuing conflict are thought to have abandoned the site for settlements below, as their way of life in primitive timber hovels would have been out of keeping with the Roman way. After the conquest of the hill a square, roofed shrine with accompanying priest house was built in the north-central part of the enclosure.

With this temple the retraceable history of Maiden Castle is concluded and then lost for another 19 centuries. In the 1930 the eminent archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler undertook his famous excavation of the east entrance area and revealed to the world the grizzly fate of the hillfort’s defenders. He excavated a cemetery of the fallen, many showing broken bones and in one instance the skeleton of a man with the Roman ballista-bolt which killed him still embedded in his spine! The finding of mounds of ammunition showed that the defenders had collected pebbles from Chesil Bank to use as sling stones.

Interestingly, it has been said that Wheeler, in concentrating on the late Iron Age and Roman phases of the hill’s history, disturbed the causewayed enclosure without having any idea of what it was or that it was there – in other words he discovered it by accident.

More recently in 1985 and 1986 new excavations were undertaken with the aim of extending Wheeler’s trenches to extract new data. But in conclusion it can be said that much about the earlier part of the Maiden Castle story is based on flimsy evidence, and is therefore not above re-appraisal should more information be forthcoming in the future.

Kingston Maurward Manor

Kingston Maurward Manor. Photo by Chris Downer, please click on the image for more about the photographer

Kingston Maurward Manor. Photo by Chris Downer, please click on the image for more about the photographer

Kingston Maurward Manor

Kingston Maurward Manor. Photo by Mike Searle, please click on image for more about the photographer.

Kingston Maurward Manor. Photo by Mike Searle, please click on image for more about the photographer.

Kingston Maurward Manor – A Tale of Two Houses

One of Dorset’s Elizabethan gems is Kingston Maurward Manor, a rare E-plan house, of which only Parnham, Chantmarle and Anderson Manor bear some comparison. But the latter had their origins some one hundred years later than the manor at Maurward, so making its ground plan unique for the Dorset of its century.

It was in about 1597 that Christopher Grey, a descendant of a county family who had married into the Maurward family some two centuries earlier when they inherited the estate named after them, built the house in Maurward Park that would become known as The Old Manor. Little information about the building of this house has been handed down, and virtually nothing is known about where the Greys had been living up until then. However, it has been noted that a particular architectural detail of the house – window mullions with moulded bases – also occurs in Wolfeton House near Dorchester, suggesting that the same mason had been employed on both houses.

Angel Grey, grandson of Christopher, then built an extension onto the south-east side of the Old Manor early in the 17th century, though his reason for doing so is not exactly known. Three quarters of a century later in 1700 George Pitt married Laura Grey, a descendant of Angel, and they commissioned the building of a new house on a site across the park from the manor. This is now Kingston Maurward House.

Structurally, the attic of the Old Manor comprises eight great A-frames and some of these still bear numbers carved into them by the Tudor carpenters. The joists supporting the first and second floors are 15” x 15” oak beams. The house is entered through the middle wing of the west front, where the screens passage would originally have been. The Great Hall would have been off to the right with the Great Kitchen opposite, occupying the north wing of the ‘E’.

More recently the foundations of what appears to have been a staircase tower once occupying the space between the Tudor house and the Grey extension were discovered, though nothing else remains of the original tower today. Of course, there must have once been a means of access to the upper storeys which was later destroyed. As it happened Angel Grey, the builder of the 17th century extension, was a staunch Royalist, and it has been supposed that the destruction of the staircase occurred during the Civil War by a troop of local Roundheads, perhaps in an attempt to render the upper floors of the house uninhabitable.

By the time the new house built by Pitt in 1700 was completed the Old Manor had become subordinate and largely un-maintained as the estate then passed through other owners. Dorset County Council eventually bought this house in 1947 and converted it into five private residences for council tenants, but by the late 1950’s it had again fallen into disuse. By 1947 however, the new house had become the home of the county’s agricultural and horticultural college.

After the Old Manor had fallen derelict the County Council, with the support of the agricultural college, came to an agreement to have the building demolished, a decision which led to a public outcry. For a while nothing was done, but then a chance meeting at a London party between the manager of a Bedfordshire plastics company and the secretary of The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings proved to be the critical fulcrum.

Rohan Sturdy had a sound personal reason for being enthused by what he heard about Maurward Old Manor from the SPAB secretary. He belonged to a scion of the Sturdys of Trigon near Wareham and accordingly felt his roots to lie in Dorset.
Sturdy was then living in Bedfordshire to be near his business, but in 1962 Dorset County Council leased the manor to him at a peppercorn rent, in return for an obligation on his part to restore it. For the next six years until 1968 contractors were at work on restoring the house almost every day. Sturdy’s daughter, who had a second home at Lulworth, also threw herself into this labour of love, taking on an assistant supervisory role.

Upon completion a grateful County Council even granted Sturdy a freehold on the property, though the businessman never lived there himself; neither did his son, a farmer in Gloucestershire, when in turn the house was bequeathed to him. For the next decade the house would be sub-let to tenants before being privately sold to the predecessors of the present owners.

During its years of dereliction the Old Manor suffered extensive deterioration in its structure and ground management. When the work of restoration began most of the windows had lost their glass and floors had collapsed from being infested with death watch beetle. Outside, the peace of the grounds was disturbed by the sound of clucking and crowing from henhouses on an adjoining chicken farm.

In his restoration, sturdy incorporated imitations and fittings from other houses. For example, restoration of some of the panelling was modelled on original panelling in Stinsford Church. The 17th century stairway tower was restored, recycling masonry from a demolished Tudor house in Weymouth, while the re-installed spiral staircase, which comes into use on the 1st floor, is said to have been made from the timber of a single oak grown on the Trigon estate. Another staircase was brought from Haddon Hall in Suffolk and installed in a new hall built into the space formerly occupied by the screens passage and part of the Great Kitchen. Sturdy also converted much of what had been the Great Hall into an L-shaped drawing room in which the original Tudor fireplace was re-exposed after removing eight layers of lathe and plaster.

The remaining space – actually the ground floor of the north wing – is now a spacious comfortable dining room. The new kitchen was installed between the drawing room and the large room occupying most of the ground floor space in the Greys extension wing. Access to the drawing room is through an imposing archway that Sturdy called ‘Angels arch’. He further re-inforced some of the original oak beams with girders or steel cradles and installed several bathrooms.

Under the present owners the voluminous and long-deserted attics have been modernised, and one has been converted into a luxurious bed sitting room. Maurward Old Manor is now in the formative years of a new life as a guesthouse, with three superb bed-and-breakfast suites installed on the 1st floor. For one of these suites a custom designed and made four-poster bed in Elizabethan style was commissioned, reproducing the family crest of the Maurwards on one side and that of the Greys on the other. Rusting glazing bars in the windows have been replaced with ones made of stainless steel, and in the garden an Elizabethan yew hedge has been planted.

The Old Kingston Maurward Manor is therefore effectively an “Elizabethan” manor built in the 1960’s! And on inspection it would be hard to imagine a reproduction more faithful to the original anywhere. Under the present owners devoted labours it has been given a new lease of life, and one in which it is earning a living for itself. The Old Manor is indeed a credit to Maurward Park.

Matthew Chubb of Dorchester

In the early years of the 17th century the wealthiest man in the prosperous trading town of Dorchester was Matthew Chubb. During his lifetime he held all the important offices of the borough and for a time he was the Member of Parliament for the town. He was enterprising and hard working, though not altogether a self-made man. Much of his wealth was inherited and his journey along the path too riches was helped by marrying well – twice. He was the kind of man who craved the acquaintance of his social superiors, even though financially he had the better of them. Arguably, he was a generous man but his charity was usually self-serving; he liked his good works to be visible and acknowledged.

Matthew was the son of John and Agnes Chubb. John came from Misterton near Crewkerne in Somerset and he married Agnes, the daughter of John Corbyn, a prominent member of Dorchester society. Matthew was born in 1548 and shortly after his birth the family moved to Dorchester where John prospered and quickly established himself, becoming a member of The Corporation and the Town Steward by 1555. There is evidence that John Corbyn conveyed property to John Chubb and in due time this property passed to Matthew.

In the 1560’s Matthew set up a school in Dorchester but abandoned the project when The Corporation sponsored a Free School. He became a scrivener, drawing up wills and conveyances and he appears to have had some negotiating skills, he lent money and was a goldsmith. Like his father he became a member of The Corporation and was himself appointed Town Steward in 1583. He was sent to Exeter by The Corporation to lobby and negotiate for Dorchester to keep the Assizes. In 1601 he became Member of Parliament for the town and was re-elected in 1604, though, on this occasion claimed his health was not up to the job but his colleagues still re-elected him. Actually, Matthew was in good health throughout this period and we are left to assume that it did not suit him to have to be away in London so much.

Towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I and the early years of the reign of James I he was the most important member of The Corporation but his influence began to wane once the Reverend John White arrived in the town in 1606. It seems Matthew Chubb had quite liberal views and he frequently disagreed with some of the ideas the minister was promoting to his congregation at Holy Trinity. After the great fire of 1613, which destroyed much of the town, many people were convinced they were being punished for their loose morals; congregations grew in all three Dorchester parishes following the fire.

John White was a moderate puritan, though clearly not moderate enough for Matthew Chubb. At one point things between the two men reached such a low ebb that the layman preferred to walk the lanes to Fordington to say his prayers and hear a sermon. It was generally believed that Chubb was behind the anonymous pamphlets distributed in Dorchester suggesting all manner of impropriety on the part of the minister, whose popularity was in the ascendancy.

On November 12th, 1613 Matthew Chubb was authorised by King James I to loan £1,000 towards the rebuilding of Dorchester after the great fire. He and his wife rebuilt the George Inn and endowed an almshouse for women.

Matthew Chubb died in 1617.  His widow, Margaret, died in 1628, when their only son and the heir to their fortune was Matthew Chubb Junior but at the time of his mother’s death he was still under age. Margaret Chubb made a will on April 18th 1625 leaving all her lands and property to Robert Coker on the condition that Joan, his second daughter, married her boy. Robert Coker was a goldsmith who had been a good friend of Matthew Chubb Sr. Matthew and Joan married but Matthew passed away in 1632 and on the January 23rd 1633 Joan Chubb conveyed the property back to her parents, Robert and Martha Coker.

William Barnes Statue

Photo of the unveiling on the 7th of October 1886 of the statue of William Barnes outside of St. Peter’s Church, Dorchester, The bronze statue is the work of sculptor Roscoe Mullins.

Photo of the unveiling on the 4th of February 1889 of the statue of William Barnes outside of St. Peter’s Church, Dorchester, The bronze statue is the work of sculptor Roscoe Mullins.

Hardy’s Wessex – 170 Years On

The 2nd of June 1990 dawned as a day of great moment for the people of Dorchester. The county town was festooned with bunting, and there was a carnival atmosphere, for that week Dorchester and its county were observing and celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Dorset’s greatest son in the world of words: Thomas Hardy.

It is not the intention here to present yet another potted chronological discourse on Hardy’s life and works. For that one can refer to any one of about a dozen exhaustive biographies currently in print. Instead, this is a speculative account of how the great man would find his patch of native soil today, and to contrast his Dorset with today’s Dorset. Were Hardy to come back today, would he soon need counselling for culture shock? This is perhaps more than just idle speculation, because as elsewhere so much has changed in society, economics, the environment and infrastructure since the innocent carefree days of the 1920’s when a bed-ridden Hardy took his last breath during a stormy January night.

Hardy’s birth-cottage at Bockhampton has of course been pickled in aspic for posterity, but Max Gate, the home he later built for himself near Dorchester, had a virgin beginning. When the author first moved into the rather oppressive redbrick house in the latter 19th century it stood almost in the middle of nowhere, a new dwelling place on a blank field. The fringe of Dorchester then maintained a respectable distance, but the march of time has put paid to Max Gate’s isolation. Today the house, now in the care of the National Trust, became hemmed in some 30 years ago by an estate of modern housing. Not far to the north the green belt country which once separated the author from his county town has since been torn asunder by the course of the town’s southern bypass.

Max Gate was soon besieged by admirers collecting souvenirs from the garden or hoping to catch a glimpse of the author at work. To ensure his privacy, one of the first things Hardy did at his self-styled home was to plant saplings out in the front, one of which he had tenderly reared in a pot on his windowsill while he was living at Wimborne. By the night he died they were noble in-closing trees darkening the rooms, but which waved their branches in farewell in the January gale when the old man died.

The author of ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ would at least be pleased to see that the Max Gate trees have of course been protected and preserved, but over the years many other trees and hedgerows countywide would have succumbed to disease, neglect, vandalism or development. The manageable farm holdings of Hardy’s day have fallen prey to the post-war industrialisation of arable agriculture, with its powered machinery such as combine harvesters and suction milking machines, laying off milkmaids from milking sheds and the many who once harvested the crops with scythes and slaked their thirst with cider swigged from stoneware flagons brought onto the field. They were the agrarians who needed no pesticides, herbicides or artificial fertilisers; they would never know the meaning of BSE, CJD, Scarpie, Wine Lakes, Butter Mountains or paperwork from Brussels.

From Max Gate, Hardy could look towards his ancestral parish of Stinsford. It was here in St. Michael’s Church that his parents met and fell in love while playing together in the Church band. Thomas Hardy Sr. was a fine violinist, an instrument his famous son also took up when he too joined the family band. At that time St. Michael’s had high-backed pews and a minstrel’s gallery where the band played during the services. The gallery has long since been removed to accommodate the organ and the pews too, have been replaced by single seats. (Note: New gallery and organ installed in 1996 – see Parish Church article.)

At the time of Hardy’s death there were still some communities in the remoter parts of the county without electricity. Electrification did not come to Whitchurch Canonicorum in the Marshwood Vale, for instance, until the 1920’s. Today every village, if not every home can tap into the national grid, so releasing its share of CO2 to the global warming debate. In the days of Hardy’s youth such energy profligacy would not have been possible, and the highly efficient insulating effect of thatching would have made the typical Dorset cottage of the early 19th century a very low emission home!

Furthermore, it would have been (almost) zero-emission in waste. Those were the days when dustbins were for dust – or the cinders raked from the previous night’s fire. Vegetable peelings from the kitchen would likely have paled into insignificance the number of food containers left over from the simple purchases at the village corner shop. And if Hardy were alive today he would surely look back with nostalgia on the days when so much more food was produced and consumed locally.

But even living in his own time the author could never have imagined or even dreamed that within 60 years of his death people would be forced to travel several miles by bus or car to shop at an out-of-town multi-national hypermarket taking up the space of two football pitches. Similarly that he would witness a rash of takeaways blighting the green urban fringes to dish out fast meals of convenience, or a countryside blighted by power pylons, phone masts, vulgar advertising hoardings or distracting road signs. Besides the visual pollution the author would have been shocked by the elevated decibels of noise as well.

Another great change, this time in the landscape of the county, which would likely have appalled the writer was the commercial afforrestation of the heaths. Hardy had long been captivated by the mystic, enchanted atmosphere of his Egdon Heath at dawn and dusk. So much so that he once invited the Cheltenham-born composer Gustav Holst to visit and get a feel for the heath with the intention of capturing its essence in a composition. Back at work in Gloucestershire Holst’s score became his popular orchestral tone-poem ‘Egdon Heath.’ This heath retains something of its primordial atmosphere today; sadly though, the economic imperative of needing to replace timber stocks after the First World War became paramount, and other heath land was to disappear under conifer plantation managed by the Forestry Commission within the last decade of Hardy’s life.

Compared with Hardy’s day it might be thought that today’s Dorset is a place more selfish, uncaring and destitute of moral rectitude. Certainly during the late 19th century a remarkable evangelical revival was underway, turning people’s thoughts back to the wise council of the scriptures as a guide in their daily lives. The reward for this observance was a prosperity that grew and blossomed in a climate of public order and deference to authority. Yet  Hardy’s later friend and fellow county-man, Newman Flower, could write in ‘Just as it Happened’ that as late as the 1890’s people were being thrown into Poole Harbour at election time, gamekeepers were being shot at in woods, and horsemen were being ambushed by robbers “of Dick Turpin order” on the highways.

It would however, not entirely be correct to think that the comparison between the Dorset Hardy knew and the Dorset as we know it concerns two distinct sets of conditions with no margin for overlap. From what has gone before, a definite conclusion emerges. It is that the socio-economic changes which have culminated in the “shock of the new” making the England of the 1990’s and now the 21st century what it is had already begun in Hardy’s lifetime. This is because he could bear witness to the negative effects of the aftermath of the Great War, which began to appear incrementally in society in the decade following the armistice. And it did not stop at the decline of morals and the advance of electrification, petrol-driven vehicles and telecommunications. Hardy still lived to see the first five years of radio broadcasting and even the first lowly beginning of television transmission.

But overall technology was still at a comparatively primitive level in Victorian England, and hi-tech was virtually unknown. Bearing this in mind it may come as no surprise to some that it was only gradually that Hardy overcame an inherent predisposition to technophobia. He balked at the new technology and revolution in travel brought about by motor cars when they arrived, declaring that legs were in our gift for walking on, not to wrap up in a fur to operate pedals! Even the telephone became an object of suspicion. Years went by before he used the telephone installed at Max Gate, and only then was his resistance broken when a lifelong friend rang “Dorchester 43” one day and insisted on speaking to him personally. Once this rubicon was crossed, however, he was ever after faithful to the invention.

In conclusion it is perhaps best to say that, on balance, the changes in Dorset over the past 170 years have been an inevitable double-edged sword of the bad and the good, of both progressive and retrograde steps.