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October, 2013:

Dunn Family

George and Amelia (nee Sherry) Dunn were both born at Cerne Abbas during the 1850’s, this is where they grew-up, married and had their three children. Born in Victoria’s reign they lived through the times of Edward VII and George V and the Great War. They would have followed with interest the events which led to the abdication of Edward VIII. Their long lives stretched into the early years of the reign of George VI and they witnessed some of the darkest days of the Second World War before their deaths in 1942 and 1943.

In 1891 George and Amelia moved from their home in Mill Lane, Cerne Abbas, to the nearby parish of Bradford Peverell, where they spent the rest of their lives. It is not clear what prompted the move that occurred shortly after the death of George’s father. As he neared the end of his life George had the distinction of being the oldest inhabitant of the parish and a few weeks before his death in 1943 George was interviewed by a journalist who found him receiving the attentions of a visiting barber (his nephew.)
 
A year earlier George lost his wife of 64 years, they had married on 27th of December 1877. For the times theirs was not a large family, just three children: William James born towards the end of 1878 (George’s father was James Dunn,) Rebecca Mary was born early in 1882 (Amelia’s mother was Rebecca Sherry,) and Charles George was born during the summer of 1885.

Mr Dunn told the journalist that he started work at the age of nine for one shilling and sixpence a week and remembered his father received seven shillings a week – there were seven in the family. George remembered his father being ‘sacked’ by his employer, a lime burner, for refusing an overtime task (without pay.) For this ‘grave’ offence his father was punished with six days confinement in Dorchester prison. George could remember his father walking the eight miles from Cerne Abbas to the prison attired in a white smock and on the completion of his sentence he walked back in the same white smock.

On the 27th December 1937 George and Amelia celebrated their Diamond Wedding Day Anniversary and received a Royal Greetings telegram from the King and Queen. For over forty years George was captain of the Bradford Peverell bell ringers. He last rang to celebrate the Coronation of King George VI.

At different times George was an Agricultural and General Labourer, a Carter and a Domestic Groom. The 1911 census reveals that Amelia was working as a Midwife.

The tight bond between George and Amelia was broken when Amelia passed away early in 1942 soon after their 64th Wedding Anniversary: George passed away in the second quarter of 1943.

 

Shillingstone Fair

During the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) a Fair at Shillingstone was granted to Sir Brian de Turbeville “on the Vigil, the Feast and the morrow of St. Barnabas” that is the 10th, 11th and 12th of June. The festivities traditionally started on the 9th of June when sprigs of oak leaves covered with gold tinsel and garlands of flowers were distributed and a band went round the village, playing at various points along the way.

In later times the remains of the old village cross became the focal point and here a may-pole was set up; there would be fair-booths with toys and sweets for the children, shooting galleries and coconut shies for the younger men and their young lady friends.  A cacophony of noise would hang over the place; the tooting of tin trumpets, the shrill of penny whistles, the sound of guns and the shouting of peddlers touting their cheap and usually inferior goods.

In the afternoon the villagers, their number swelled by visitors from neighbouring Child Okeford and Okeford Fitzpaine and even some Blandford residents too would dance on the rectory lawn. From the rectory the rector would lead a procession to the may-pole. On the way garlands were distributed, banners raised and drums banged. At the may-pole the villagers joined hands and formed a circle and cheered and danced around the may-pole. Some villagers would repair to the Rectory Barn where there was music – fiddle and flute – to dance to, others would go to the Ox Inn for further revelry until daybreak.
 
Christmas was another time for festivities. The mummers toured the village acting their plays, clothed in close-fitting red and white with a high mitre-like head-dress. Standing stiffly in a row they ‘slew’ each other with white wands and there was also some play with a ‘bull,’ which was a bull’s head that turned right and left with projecting horns and glass eyes. The identity and body of the manipulator who was supposed to be blind was hidden beneath a long skirt. The Bull was led from house to house and room to room leaving a trail of frightened maidens.

William Barnes

Outside St. Peter’s Church in Dorchester there stands a statue to a bearded, venerable looking old man in a frock coat. The monument is to keep alive in the minds of Dorset men and women the memory of a phenomenal fellow Dorsetman born just over 200 years ago. He was William Barnes, a figure who’s achievements would be remarkable by today’s standards, but are made even more so by the fact that he was a farmers boy who came from a humble and wholly rural background. And he became a most learned individual in an age when a large proportion of the population was illiterate.

Barnes was born in a cottage in Bagber, a community in the Blackmore Vale country near Lydlinch in 1801. After an elementary schooling that ended when he was 13, Barnes acquired a position as a solicitor’s clerk. Scholarly by nature, he read widely during these years, gaining some informal tuition from friendly clergymen with the aim of training to become a teacher. This career he embarked upon in 1823 when he went to teach at a small school near the church at Mere in Wiltshire.

In 1831, after becoming Head of the Mere Chantry School, he wrote a series of articles for a publication called Hones Year Book, which included one about a certain custom called Lent-Crocking. This originated as a Roman Catholic tradition where people would go around in an evening throwing crockery shards at front doors.

Following his marriage to a woman called Julie Miles and the births of some of his six children, William moved his family back to Dorset and settled in Dorchester to run a school in the town. During these years his devoted wife slipped easily into the role of acting as his business manager so that Barnes could study for a ten-year Bachelor of Divinity degree. In 1848 he was ordained minister of the Church of England, going on to become a mature graduate of St.John’s college, Cambridge in 1850.

During the years Barnes’ Dorchester school was open it became noted for the unusually high number of pupils for its size who became great men of renown. Not least among these was the famous surgeon and writer Sir Frederick Treves, who fondly recalled the austere figure in black sitting like some grim inquisitor in the high chair, who gave him as his first lesson in dictation the sentence “logic is the right use of exact reasoning.”

Sadly, Julia died from breast cancer in 1852, after which time the school declined, eventually closing in 1862 when Barnes was appointed Rector of Winterbourne Came ( or simply Came) that year. He would remain in this ecumenical position until his death 24 years later.

Like Thomas Hardy, William Barnes was bodily feeble and sickly as a child. But as so often is found in those of a feeble constitution, they possess an intellectual prowness that more than makes up for physical inadequacy. Barnes was a polymath in the most extreme sense of the word. He mastered 65 languages including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Welsh, and oriental languages. He wrote ‘A Philological Grammar,’ which compared over 60 languages, and early on became a poet, publishing three anthologies of verse in the Dorset dialect between 1844 and 1866. In these works Barnes always felt closer to the purer Anglo-Saxon English than to its later forms. Indeed, he spent most of his life campaigning against classical and foreign influences he felt were contaminating the language.

But the Rector of Came was just as interested in modern English, and his verses in this form are often rich in nostalgic rural idyll. Examples of these are ‘Mothers Dreams; The Storm Wind; Musings; Evening and Maidens, and The Wife A-lost.’

Barnes was also a prolific feature article journalist, musician, artist, and lecturer. For instance, he wrote articles for many years for ‘The Gentlemen’s Magazine’ about Dorset history, customs, and the origins of the English language. He wrote pamphlets and articles on the social conditions of the poor, and a philosophy of education was also published. Barnes wrote industrially on technical, scientific and artistic subjects. He toured Wessex, taking pleasure in delivering talks and readings on all manner of subjects well into his 80’s.

The coming of the railways found in Barnes another new interest. The track-laying naturally created cuttings where bedrock was often exposed in the sides. These deep cuttings fired his imagination and fostered a new interest in geology. But like many other natives of a county particularly rich in the vestiges of prehistoric habitation, the Rector was also knowledgeable about archaeology. Doubtless the enormous scope of his interests largely accounted for his popularity.

For the long 34 years of his widower-hood William was a fascinating and stimulating father to his children, who were a great credit to him. During these years the pace of life slowed at the Rectory, where the children of the writer Llewellyn Powys often went for tea. In his youth Thomas Hardy too, was a constant friend and visitor. It was Powys however, who was just one of the people to sum up Barnes’ genius when he wrote: “no-one, not even Hardy, can conjure up more surely the picture of a sweltering hayfield at the time of the Feast of St.Barnabas.”

Barnes once told Edmund Gosse that no critic would have daunted him. He regarded writing as a “refreshment of mind as is music to a man who may play an instrument alone” (Barnes learned to play four instruments.) But George Saintbury, a Hampshire acquaintance, was too wary of offending Barnes’ many admirers to be overly critical of the Rector’s poetry; he simply described it as “domestic, gentle and pastoral.” E.M. Forster said of William Barnes that “to read him is to enter a friendly cottage where a family party was in full swing.” To the Dorset publisher Newman Flower he was a quaint clerk in holy orders, going around Dorchester in black stockings, Quaker garb and a broad-brimmed hat.

What these writers saw in Barnes was a bard of exceptional standing who contrived successfully to portray the joy of simple country life. Yet Barnes’ life was a struggle in some ways. Early in his teaching career he experienced major disappointment when being passed over for the position of Headmaster at Dorchester Grammar School. He was not the kind of un-ambitious character of “woodlands flow’ry gleaded” suggested in one of his hundreds of verses. Rather, he was an over-earnest man following serious past-times and improving with every shining hour. In no small measure it was these traits which bought him his fame as England’s greatest dialect poet and his phenomenal linguistic skill.

His legacy is a portrait of the agrarian life and dialect of Dorset, an idiom of speech which almost died out by his day. The directness and simplicity of his writing hide learnedness and an ear for the music of dialect speech which has never been surpassed. His poem ‘Linden Lea’ was set to music by the Gloucestershire composer Ralph Vaughn Williams.

One achievement of his last years was to become a founder of the Dorset Field Club. This became the steering body for the future establishment of the Dorset County Museum. It is appropriate therefore that Barnes should now stand in effigy outside St.Peter’s, and barely 50 yards from the institution he was partly responsible for bringing to birth. He also served as joint secretary of the Museum for some years.

In 1886 a visitor to Barnes at the Rectory found him on his deathbed. Clad in a red robe like a Cardinal, he died no less picturesquely than he had lived, a spectacle which made his visitor liking him to a dying pope. He lies beneath a memorial cross in the churchyard of St.Peter’s at Winterbourne Came. A second edition of his ‘Glossary of the Dorset Dialect’ was re-printed that year which included the word ‘tutty’ to mean a posy.

It was October when he died, but devout schoolchildren could still find enough flowers to throw into his open grave.