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June, 2011:

Hardy’s Wessex – 170 Years On

Jun 24th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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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.

Christopher Bishop – a Dorset Shepherd

Jun 19th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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“My father used to say he’d been at it so long. Fifty-two years, including Sundays he’d a-call it, as shepherd. No holidaying in those days. But he loved it. His family, his dog, and his sheep and lambs, were life to Christopher Bishop.”


The words of Gertrude Burt, talking in 1970 to journalist Maynard Whyte about her father, four years before she died at the age of 91 years.
 
Our story starts and ends just a couple of miles or so from the border with Somerset in the north west of the county where the villages are small and picturesque. It is here that Christopher Bishop was born two years into the reign of Queen Victoria and it is where he grew-up and worked all his life save for a short sojourn at Osmington,  a parish by the sea near to Weymouth and where he buried two of his sons.

Melbury Bubb is a little village of a few cottages, an Elizabethan manor house and a farm. It is here on the 24th of July 1791 that Benjamin Bishop was baptised in the church dedicated to St. Mary. We will have more to say about this delightful church with its interesting old tower, ancient font and windows telling the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins but that is for another time. Benjamin was destined to become an agricultural labourer and along the way, on June 5th in 1815, he married a Somerset girl, Caroline Gard, at St. James church at East Chelborough. There is more to say about this little church as well; here we will just note that it is difficult to find but well worth the seeking out just to see the unusual round east window.

Benjamin and Caroline Bishop had nine children, the last being Christopher, who was born in the early half of 1839 at East Chelborough. Leaving school at the age of ten he probably didn’t have a lot of choice but to become an agricultural labourer. He started his working life scaring birds off the crops on Jericho field at Ryme Intriniseca. The 1851 census tells us this was his lot in life. But things were looking up for him and ten years on, the census records him  being a shepherd at Melbury Osmond,  where he was employed by Mr Thomas Watts, a farmer of 260 acres employing four men, three boys and two women. It is here that Christopher met Jane Hallet, his wife to be.
 
Christopher and Jane married in 1862 and their first child, George, was born at Halstock in 1863. Two more boys, Benjamin and William, arrived while the couple were back at Melbury Osmond in 1870 and 1873; their daughter Gertrude was born at Osmington in 1884. That year the shepherd and his wife were to lose their eldest son. He followed his father into farm work and later he joined the railway and was employed at Nine Elms in London where he contracted typhus and died. George was buried at St. Osmond’s church, Osmington, on the 11th of December 1884.

In 1891 Christopher, his wife Jane and daughter Gertrude were back in the north west of the county at Ryme Intrinseca and visiting them was their son Benjamin then 21 years-old he was a stoker on a ship in the Navy.
 
Gertrude’s brother William was in the Marines. One day he was working on a gun and accidentally thrown backwards into the sea and drowned; it was thought that a chain held him under the water.  He was Gertrude’s favourite. She told Maynard Whyte: “he was so kind and used to pick me up and carry me home if he met me in the village. He was just twenty, I was nine at the time. When the letter came, my mother, who could not read, had to get someone from the village to read it to her. Then she said to me ‘Go down, Gertrude, and tell your father’…I could go again to that spot where I told him and know it. He took it bad as he was the one who could never shed a tear…It’s always worse for them kind, isn’t it?”

At the time of William’s death the family was at Ryme Intrinseca but William was buried on the 9th of November 1892 in St. Osmond’s churchyard at Osmington, where his elder brother lay. His death was a great sorrow to their mother. Jane Bishop passed away in 1895 aged 52 years. Gertrude, then just eleven years old, was left to comfort her father and she “kept house” for him recalling  “no mod-cons for them, a bucket dipped into the well brought up the water.”

Lambing was always in the open field in her father’s day. Gertrude recalled: “they used to thatch the hurdles and put them up for shelter. When we had been up all night with the sheep  in the lambing season, and tired out, I used to see to the lambs and sheep, I used to walk out among them and see they were all right, but they always were all right. Father would not have gone to bed if he’d not have known that. …you get many more sheep lambing on a rough, wet and windy night than on a still, cold frosty one.” The lambs were fat by Easter and the shepherd with his dog would drive them along to Yetminster Station.

Christopher Bishop died in 1908. He would have been 69 and for 52 of those years he had been a shepherd. He spent his last few years living with Gertrude and her husband, who was a gamekeeper. As in the beginning so it was at the end – he liked to sit in the fields and scare the crows away from the young pheasant birds.

Up to the end of his working days he earned no more than eleven shillings a week, but his daughter observed “…you could get a nice big piece of beef for one and six and we had plenty of our own vegetables. Coal was a shilling a hundredweight.” Thinking back, Gertrude said “They were good days..You didn’t have the money…You didn’t have the clothes, but you were far happier…They days were better than they be now, I fancy.”

In paintings and novels the role of shepherd is sometimes romanticised as an idyllic life. True, a shepherd might have commanded a couple of shillings more for his labour than an ordinary agricultural labourer but as Thomas Hardy observed, the shepherd is “a lonely man of which the battle of life had always been sharp with him.”

Pilsdon

Jun 13th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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The parish of Pilsdon is in the west of the county, rubbing shoulders with Devon. Approached by the narrowest of country lanes its quiet and remote location means it is well of the track beaten by the general tourist but one well trodden by walkers. Those who say it is a little place of no significance would be right but we should not deny Pilsdon its brushes with history and celebrity.

Towering over 900 feet above the village is the treeless  Pilsdon Pen, with its wonderful views south to the English Channel and south east across the  Marshwood Vale. Its tiny hamlets, farms and lush pastureland giving the impression that time stands still in these parts.  At the top of the Pen is an Iron Age fort.  Excavations in the 1960’s revealed the banks cover a number of rectangular buildings which enclose and lie over a series of hut circles. There are also the remains of an earlier rampart and a medieval rabbit warren.

The village itself comprises St. Mary’s Church and a 17th century manor house, both now in the ownership of the Anglican Pilsdon Community; furthermore there are some agricultural buildings and a few cottages.

When King Charles II fled the field of battle at Worcester he came this way; elsewhere on the Dorset Ancestors website we tell the story of “When the King Came to Stay” with Colonel Wyndham, who hid the King in his home at Trent and helped him escape the Roundheads pursuing him.

Fired up with the knowledge there was a prize of £1,000 on the King’s head, the Roundheads in hot pursuit stormed into west Dorset and on towards Dorchester. This hapless bunch learnt that the King had not come this way at all but was holed up with the Wyndham family disguised as a woman. They turned around and headed back west to Pilsdon and more specifically the manor house of the Royalist High Court Judge, Sir Hugh Wyndham, uncle of Colonel Wyndham.

Believing the King to be hiding in the house they burst in on the family, ordering Sir Hugh, his Lady, his daughters and his servants into the hall, while they ransacked the house searching every room, wardrobe and cupboard, turning over every one of the ladies pretty gowns as they went in vain about their business oblivious of the fact they were in the wrong house.  By all accounts Sir Hugh was not afraid to voice in colourful language his opinion of the intruders.

One writer in the early 20th century prophetically described Pilsdon as a retreat. The Pilsdon Community set up here in 1958; it is an Anglican organisation living quietly here and providing a welcome retreat for the weary soul to rest, take stock and recharge. They own the 17th century manor house.

In 1983 St. Mary’s church was declared redundant and a year later it was purchased by The Pilsdon Community. Now independent it is no longer a parish church but it is a house of God where prayer and worship continues daily. The 13th century church dedicated to St Mary was rebuilt in 1830, restored in 1875 and more recently was restored again after fire damage, it still retains some of the features from the earlier medieval church.

The poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived at Racedown Farm for a time. For the full story of their time in the area, read our article ‘Wordsworth at Racedown,’ which can be found in the Pilsdon category.

Family History and the Gregorian Calendar

Jun 8th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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As many people by now will be aware, public interest in family history has increased greatly over the past decade. Genealogy can be a discipline with an almost forensic dimension to it, yet unravelling the complexities of one’s family tree is not an exact science or an easy task. It can lead up many blind alleys or to dead ends. Apart from contingencies such as absent, incomplete – or illegible – parish records there is one very significant pitfall, which the beginner just setting out is unlikely to be aware of.

There is something peculiarly unique about the year 1751 – it was only nine months and seven days long. Strange as it seems, New Years Day has not always been on January 1st. In fact from 1190 to 1752 the New Year began not on January 1st but on March the 25th! From 1190 to 1752 England was using the Julian Calendar devised by Julius Caesar, which was set to run from March 25th (Lady Day) to the last day of the year, the following March 24th. In this calendar the tropical year is approximately 365.25 days, making an error of 1 day in 128 years.

Under an edict issued by the Council of Trent Pope Gregory XIII addressed this error by reforming the Julian Calendar so that the tropical year equalled 365+ 97/400 days or 365.2425 days. The new system named after him also meant that it took 3,300 years for the tropical year to shift a day with respect to the Gregorian Calendar. However, in 1752 Lord Chesterfield passed a bill in Parliament enacting the change over to Pope Gregory’s calendar, which ever since would logically set the first day of each year at January 1st. Since 1752 had to begin on this day, 1751 ended on December 31st – not the following March 24th!

What then are the implications of this change for genealogical or title research? It means that any date from the 1st of January to the 25th of March before 1751 has to have another year added to it. For example, the 11th of January, 9th of February or 23rd of March 1780 would actually be in 1751 for today’s purposes under Gregorian system. Before 1752 the progression of any year’s months commenced in March, so the 29th of April in 1709 would actually be June 29th 1709, not April 29th.

Again, if a document gives a date in any year prior to 1752 written as the ninth day of the tenth month 1736, the month should be reckoned as starting in March, so in this example the month is not (today’s) October, but the December of that time when the document was written. At this point it may be pertinent to remind ourselves that the name “December” (meaning the tenth month) is a hangover from the time when it was just that under the more attenuated Julian Calendar.

Now suppose that a family member or genealogical researcher wants to find the date of baptism, marriages or burial of a Dorset ancestor in a parish register (though this would apply to anywhere else in the country). From what as gone before there is clearly no need for any conversion calculation if the date in question is after 1752 as both past and present are Gregorian and are therefore “in sync”. However, any date before Lord Chesterfield’s parliamentary act of that year which adopted the Gregorian Calendar will not be “in sync” with the present. If a parish register entry for the right person sought indicates that he or she was born on, for example, February the 5th 1649, then to conform to the Gregorian Calendar one year must be added, making the revised date February the 5th 1650.

On the continent and some other countries the further back in time one could go before conversion from the old to the new calendars becomes necessary would be that much greater, since beyond these shores use of the Julian Calendar was abandoned during the latter 16th century. Since family documents dating from before this period are likely to be rare or non-existent the Julian-Gregorian anomaly is a problem mostly confined to British genealogical research.

Since 1752 a number of improvements in the methods and efficiency of record keeping and conservation have inevitably been made. In 1801 the ten-yearly population census was begun in England and Wales, though until 1841 names were not collected, and that year’s census results were unreliable or, because they were only recorded in pencil, often illegible. For the 1851 census another seven pieces of information were required, and further improvements followed in 1891. In 1837 civil registration began in England and Wales, although it did not become a legal requirement until 1874. Since 1538 the Church of England had compiled parish registers, though few of the earliest of these records have survived. However, these records are very uncomprehensive, as they only record church responsibilities, i.e. the baptisms (not births), marriages, and burials (not deaths) of parish natives. Before 1538 there was no official system for recording the events in people’s lives.

It can be seen then that conversion from a written date to the Gregorian date will be necessary for parish records before 1752, but would not concern any national census dates.

Sturminster Newton in the 19th Century

Jun 2nd, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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A few weeks before his death in 1908 at the age of 97 years, Robert Young, a tailor of Sturminster Newton, decided to write down his memories of life in the town and we are fortunate that his manuscript has survived. Robert tells of trade with Newfoundland, of weavers and button makers, witchcraft and superstitions, education, law and order and, furthermore, mention of William Barnes’ father.

Robert Young was born on the 30th of September 1810 and baptised in St. Mary’s church at Sturminster Newton on the 2nd of November 1810. He was the son of a Marnhull man, James Young, and a Sturminster woman, Mary Collins, who were married in 1799. We know Robert had three brothers and a sister all baptised at Sturminster Newton.  Robert married Charlotte Foot at Okeford Fitzpaine on the 28th of May 1834, where the couple lived with their four children at the time of the 1841 census.  By 1851 we know from the census the couple were living at Bridge Street, Sturminster Newton and Robert Young was a Master Tailor. We think Charlotte died in 1858 and Robert married again sometime between 1871 and 1881; his second wife was ten years his junior and named Caroline.  In 1861 Robert Young was described in the census as a “tailor and woollen draper employing two men.”

Robert’s earliest memory was of a public dinner held in Gough’s Field to celebrate the peace of 1815. It was followed by sports and later marksmen shot at an effigy of Napoleon which was then burned on a bonfire.

Robert went to a school run by Sarah Adams in a cottage next door to the old Methodist chapel. Her husband Abel was a preacher whose activities were not appreciated by all members of the local clergy. On one occasion Abel was summoned by the Vicar of Marnhull for preaching in an unlicensed cottage. Abel attended court wearing his best Sunday coat and told the chairman of the bench that his authority for preaching was the Bible. The Vicar of Sturminster supported him and the case was dismissed. When permission was withheld for Methodist boys to enter the school the same Vicar of Sturminster declared that it was a free school for the children of the poor, Methodist or not. This, we think, would have been a reference to the National school built in 1817. We notice that in 1891 Robert and his wife Caroline had a widower, James Adams, living with them.

According to Robert many of the young men of the town worked for two local merchants, ship owners engaged in the Poole Newfoundland trade. There were wool dyers in the town, probably engaged with the production of broad cloth of which Hutchins comments: “Mr Thomas Colbourne, banker and merchant, financed spinners and weavers who made a cloth known as swan skin used by the Newfoundlanders. The cloth was stretched on racks in the open fields. Buttons, the ring button and the sugar loaf, were also made by numbers of women and children in Sturminster.” A Mr. Mitchel had a soap and tallow candle factory and each year made large Christmas candles for his customers.
 
Near the old Market House stood two rows of butchers’ stalls and Robert tells us that many of the butchers also attended Poole market, starting off on Wednesday evening and arriving in Poole in the early hours of Thursday. Having sold their meat to the ship captains they set off for home at 10 o’clock at night trusting their horses to carry them safely home, while they slept. Butter was also sent to Poole as well as young calves to be shipped on to Portsmouth. Others were driven for six days on the road to London.

We learn a lot from Robert about wages and the cost of commodities. Labourers toiled from six in the morning ‘till six at night for 6/- (six shillings) a week; a married man got an extra 1/-. Butter was 7/6 for a dozen pounds. Tea was 6/- a pound but roasted and pounded beans were used as a drink. Bread was mixed wheat and barley.

Goods were transported in broad-wheeled wagons drawn by a team of horses  often bearing a frame of bells;  the carter sat on a smaller horse with a brass-mounted whip. Other goods were moved on pack-horses over roads which were rough and uneven.

Fights were frequent, particularly on market and fair days. Robert recalls one occasion when a “corpulent young farmer fought with a tall wiry butcher. Both had stripped to the waist in Gough’s Close. The young farmer died and the butcher was sentenced to a year’s hard labour for manslaughter.” At that time the Sturminster Magistrates Court was at the back of the Swan Stable yard in a long room over the stabling.

While they awaited trial, the town constables had to take the prisoners to a public house and keep guard over them or take them home with them to their own homes, much to the discomfort of their families. Robert comments “it is not pleasant work to sit with a handcuffed man at night, or to turn your children out of their beds to make room for a burglar…” Robert continues: “I know of a case where a small tradesman had a prisoner in his charge for eight days and nights; an extra man was employed to guard him at night so that the tradesman had a little rest.”

In his manuscript Robert includes a description of a public flogging:  “it was a degrading spectacle to witness the poor man stripped to the waist, his hands fashioned to a frame fixed on a wagon, his naked back streaming with blood, whilst amongst the crowd of witnesses were women fainting and screaming.”

Witchcraft was still a potent force in the minds of many people who were known to have sent or even walked to Shepton Mallet (in Somerset) to consult a cunning man in whom they had faith, when they believed they had been “overlooked;”  so strong was the belief in some people it would unbalance their minds. Robert comments: “Thanks to more enlightened education, to many valuable lectures, to the railways, to a better knowledge of the world…the nightmare of witchcraft has died out.”

Robert paints a sorry picture of the Sturminster Workhouse near the churchyard, “the business of the parish was conducted in a large kitchen” he tells us. It seems the Overseers were kept very busy providing relieve to the poor.

 
About St. Mary’s Church we learn that in the early part of the 19th century it had two galleries that were removed during Robert’s lifetime. The violins and bass viol and the bass singers sat in front, behind them the tenors and, in a corner at the back, the two women trebles. An old singer used to give out the psalm to be sung and in a “loud flourish pitch the key of the time.”  The boys used to sit each side of the middle aisle on small stools which, when not in use, were hooked up outside the pews. “In winter we found it very cold, especially for the feet, since there was neither matting nor warming flues”.
 
Among the mixed congregation that sat in the lower gallery of the church was an individual “remarkable for his venerable appearance in his old fashioned brown coat that had done good service for many years”. He was talking about an old labourer who lived in a humble cottage, the father of our Dorset poet – William Barnes.

This first hand memory of fighting, public punishment, long hours of work for little pay, charity and poor relief all formed part of life here as everywhere in the countryside. Particular to Sturminster Newton was its cider mill, where pigs gathered to eat the refuse and the ditch running behind the Rows into which all kind of slops were thrown. When the refuse from the old tan pits was emptied it was sold off in large cakes for a penny to be burnt on the fire.

 
We can take from Robert Young’s manuscript that at the end of his life he was encouraged by the rising standard of living and the growing humanity.  In particular he comments on the greater kindness shown to horses and the benefits of transport of animals by rail. In the place of five or six dens of ruin “we have a savings bank, two highly respectable commercial banks, and two good schools. In place of three deliveries of letters a week, we now have three daily.”

Seemingly out of place, Robert Young’s manuscript sits at the Dorset History Centre in a box containing personal and business papers relating to the Mansel-Pleydell family of Whatcombe House in the parish of Winterborne Whitchurch.  John Clavell Mansel-Pleydell Esq.  B.A., J.P., and D.L., F.G.S., F.L.S., (1817-1902) of Whatcombe,  was President of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club. The manuscript is in a bundle of documents concerning the Revd. James Mitchel, who married Margaretta Morton-Pleydell. Possibly our Master Tailor was a friend of Mitchel or perhaps he was the family tailor.