Dorset Ancestors Rotating Header Image

February, 2012:

Frome Vauchurch

Feb 24th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
Comments are off for this post

Situated on the River Frome close to Maiden Newton and about eight miles north-west of the county town of Dorchester is Frome Vauchurch. This small parish comprising just 641 acres of mainly agricultural land is in the Hundred of Tollerford.  A few of the cottages that make-up the village date from the 17th century.

The parish church, which some say is dedicated to St. Francis, consists of chancel and nave with a south porch and dates from the 12th century. It is built from local rubble and flint with freestone dressing; the roof is tiled. The one bell is dated 1631 and thought to be by one of the Purdues, the font dates from the late 12th century and the pulpit is early 17th century.

Monuments in the churchyard include: to Mary Bridle 1709; to William Goare 1660 and Mary, wife of William Goare Jun. 1695.

In 1937 the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner Valentine Ackland came to the village and moved into a cottage by the river where they lived for the rest of their lives.

Thomas Hardy – the Time-Torn Man

Feb 20th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
Comments are off for this post

We see that the following book is still on the shelves of bookshops. We reviewed the book on our earlier site, when it first appeared. For the benefit of new readers we thought it might be helpful to publish our review again.

BOOK REVIEW

Thomas Hardy: the Time-Torn Man

Claire Tomalin

 

 Regular visitors to this site will likely have heard of the recent publication of Thomas Hardy: the Time-Torn Man, the latest addition to some dozen or so biographies of Dorset’s literary giant currently in and out of print, which includes Robert Gittings’ Hardy The Younger/Elder and several others. Author Claire Tomalin’s career as a journalist includes the literary editorship of the New Statesman and Sunday Times. As a biographer her impressive tally of seven previous titles includes Katherine Mansfield: a Secret Life; Jane Austen: a Life, and Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self. This last book was the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year winner. Claire Tomalin is the wife of the well-known playwright and author Michael Frayn.

Time-Torn Man opens with a nine-page prologue in which we are plunged
at once into the melodramatic death-bed scenario of Hardy’s estranged first wife Emma. The author therefore has employed the presentational device of fixing the reader’s interest and attention by taking a time of tragedy in her subject’s later life before regressing to his genealogical beginnings and then working back up to and beyond the fulcrum or start point. Claire Tomalin thus throws light on how the couple’s matrimonial tragedy led to how the opening scenario came to be.

Tomalin is also at pains to explode the widespread myth that her subject was entirely a dour and melancholic recluse, striking a good balance with plenty of references to the social and sunny side of his nature, his partying, joking, and gaiety of his youth, active participation in local productions of his stories, etc. She further reveals the extent to which the author was a “man for ladies”, but does not neglect to mention both his kindness and unkindness towards his first wife Emma.

Of course Hardy’s childhood, architectural apprenticeship and numerous visits to and living seasons spent in London are well-documented. And the narrative is as notable for pointing out what might have been in the subject’s life, as for what actually did happen. Naturally, Hardy’s many works are given extensive coverage in the order of their writing, and Claire Tomalin writes at length upon the inspiration for them, and includes many transcriptions of verse-excerpts, sapped from the author’s romances and other circumstances. There is for instance much fine detail about the adverse critical and public reception to Jude the Obscure, though the biographer could also have included the detail that the book was publicly burnt.

While many of Hardy’s literary (and musical) contemporaries, friends and associates appear in the narrative, such as Browning, Wilde, Thackeray, Kipling, Rider Haggard, P T Lawrence, J M Barrie and Tennyson; even Elgar and Gustav Holst, I was surprised and a little disappointed to find several notable omissions. For example, that of Dorchester-born Court Surgeon and writer Frederick Treves, a lifelong friend from early youth; Dorset-born publisher and author Newman Flower, who befriended Hardy from about 1914 onwards, and once took him out on a picnic, and local composer Frederick Boyton Smith, who collaborated with Hardy in setting a number of his verses as songs. Also found wanting was the incidence of a visit to Max Gate by William Watkins, founder of the Society of Dorset Men in London, who died during the night after leaving Hardy that evening.

Thomas Hardy: Time-Torn Man comes as a two-inch thick, standard size hardback of 380 pages (not including another 105 pages of index and bibliography, etc).  At the front there is a reproduction of a map of Dorchester and district as a double-pagespread and, more centrally placed, 33 monochrome photographs and sketches in two insertions within the text. The text itself is arranged in three parts or sections based upon ranges of years, corresponding with childhood/youth, middle years and later years, from the earliest (1840) up to 1928.

Published by Penguin-Viking

The Parish of Almer with the Hamlet of Mapperton

Feb 13th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
Comments are off for this post

Six miles west of Wimborne on the road to Dorchester is the parish of Almer with the small hamlet of Mapperton (not to be confused with the parish of that name in the west of the county.) The landscape here is flat, exposed and uncluttered, except for a rich-man’s folly towering into view from the adjacent Charborough Park with its seven mile wall enclosing the estate and connecting its prestigious gates.

Named after what was in earlier times an eel pond found to the south east of the village on the River Winterbourne, this place was known in Saxon Times as Aelmere and at the beginning of the 13th century it was recorded as Almere. There is no reference to Almere in the Domesday Book; Hutchins surmises that it might have been surveyed as Winterbourne, its ancient name.
 
Standing near the Charborough wall and signposted by a row of trees through which the Elizabethan Almer Manor can be viewed, is the small parish church dedicated to St. Mary. In the churchyard is the stump of an ancient preaching cross.

The embattled tower of the church dates from the 14th century and you enter the building through a heavy Norman doorway. The north aisle dates from the same period.  The nave is early 18th century; Pevsner says probably by the Bastard Brothers of Blandford. The chancel was rebuilt in the 19th century.

The font of Purbeck marble dates from the 13th century. Some of the stained glass is of the early 17th century and by European craftsmen; there are memorial windows to Revd V.R. Carter and C. Torkington.

John Willis – Penman of East Orchard

Feb 3rd, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
Comments are off for this post

In the churchyard at Iwerne Minster, under a memorial stone, lie the remains of John Willis, gentleman of East Orchard. He died on the 23rd of April 1760, in his sixty-third year. Described as a man of “unblemished integrity” he was the master of Orchard school for thirty years and one of the eminent writing masters of his day, attracting to this quite part of Dorset scholars from Europe and the dominions.
 
His skills with the pen and his ability to pass on these skills earned him a considerable fortune. His copies were said to be equal, if not superior to copper plates. His Will reveals he had estates, land and tenements in several parishes including East Orchard, Iwerne Minster and Compton Abbas, which earned him a substantial annual rental income. On his death it was his brother Robert and his nephew John who inherited the income from all his accumulated wealth.

According to Hutchins he was “a native of Child Okeford” and Hutchins went on to describe him as one of the most eminent writing masters in Dorset and possibly the kingdom. Apparently, by study and application Willis trained himself to a level of perfection in this art that was recognised internationally.

A contemporary of Willis, William Massey, had this to say about him; “he was a fine penman, but never published anything from the rolling-press except a few single copies, for the use of his own school, engraved by Mr George Bickham and Mr Thorogood… As this gentleman never had the small pox, it is reported that he had a strong notion or opinion, that if he came to London, he should have it; on which account he could not be prevailed upon to see that famous city, though he had a strong inclination to it.”

In the quite churchyard at Iwerne Minster, on his memorial stone are included the words:

“Envy be dumb, great Willis scorns thy spite.
Thou must allow that he alone could write.
Most distant regions celebrate his fame,
The world concurs to eternize his name.
In all things equal to the best of men,
But had himself no equal with the pen.”