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April, 2012:

Joseph Clark (1834-1926)

Apr 30th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Artist in Oils

In 1857 Joseph Clark submitted his first picture for the Royal AcademyExhibition, entitled The Sick Child; it was accepted. He exhibited regularly atthe Royal Academy and at the Royal Institution until a few years before hisdeath. In 1876 he was awarded a bronze medal at the Centenary Exhibition at Philadelphia. Then, in 1877 his painting Early Promise was purchased for the nation and a further painting Mother’s Darling was purchased for the nation in 1885; both paintings are held by the Tate. His first painting offered at auction realised £4.17s.6d, a high price for the time and his paintings continue to command good prices when they come up at auction today.

He was the son of a draper and calico bleacher, born at Cerne Abbas on the 4th of July 1834. His early education was at a Dame school, these small privateschools usually run by an elderly woman who taught the children to read and write before they were old enough to work. He was then enrolled at the Dorchester school run by William Barnes. A book has survived in which the young Joseph detailed various workings of geometrical problems and précis of lectures given by Barnes on divinity, English and Roman history, geography and geology.  He developed an interest and aptitude for art, which was encouraged by Barnes.
 
Following the death of his father the family fortunes declined and he was removed from Barnes’ school to be apprenticed to a chemist at St. Neot’s in Huntingdonshire. He was not happy in his new position and returned to Cerne Abbas where he joined his mother, Susan, and his two older sisters, Mary and Emma, and their family servant, Jane Seard. Meanwhile, the family business had been taken on by his older brother William who had added a tailoring establishment.

The boy’s burning ambition was to go to London to continue his art studies and in this he received help from an unexpected quarter. His brother had employed a cutter to work in his tailoring shop; the man had come from London and he was a cultured individual who was familiar with the London art galleries and exhibitions. Having seen some of Joseph’s paintings he encouraged Mrs Clark to let Joseph go to London to further an artistic career.

On his arrival in London he wasted no time, immediately enrolling as a pupil at the school ran by James Leigh, located in Newman Street, which is just off Oxford Street. The school later became known as Heatherley’s; it still exists today. From Leigh’s school he progressed to the Royal Academy School then situated in the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square.

By 1861 Joseph had been joined by his mother and the family servant, Jane. They all lived together at 25 Belle Vue Villas, Sussex Road, Islington, London. Thecensus confirms he had established himself as an ‘Artist in Oils.’

The next decade was a time of sorrow and happiness for Joseph. Early in 1866 his mother passed away having reached 76 years, her death being recorded inChristchurch. Towards the end of 1868 Joseph married Annie Jones, who was almost half his age. Her father was a Woolstapler from Winchester in Hampshire.

 
These two events suggest Joseph may have moved away from London for a while but by 1871 he was back in London, living at Arthur Road, Islington, with his young family and the faithful family servant, Jane. Jane Seard was now 60 and was assisted in her duties in the Clark household by a fourteen year-old girl, Emma Mills. A decade later we find Joseph and Annie Clark and their eleven year-old daughter, Annie, at 396 Holloway Castle, Islington. The couple enjoy the services of an elderly nurse and a young servant girl.

Then in 1891, after a space of fourteen years, the sound of young children can be heard again in the house. There are two more daughters and a son: Elsie was born in 1884; Wilfred in 1886 and Margaret in 1888. A 21 year-old governess, Harriet Eusor, was employed as well as a 23 year-old servant girl. Joseph Clark never seems to have needed an excuse to move house but his move to 23, Grosvenor Gardens, Hampstead, suggests more room was needed for his growing family and confirms he was a successful artist.

In 1901 we find Joseph and Annie with their four children at ‘Wenouree,’ Pinne Rd., Harrow-on-the-Hill. Their eldest daughter is teaching music and their son, Wilfred, is a Clerk to a Grain Broker. Joseph and Annie’s house moving continues but they stay, for now, north west of the metropolis and in 1911 they are in Uxbridge with two of their girls: Annie, who is still teaching music and the piano, and Margaret who is teaching at a private school.

Joseph Clarke died aged 92 years. He died on his birthday at Ramsgate in Kent, his death being registered in the Thanet district. Perhaps he had tired of north London and decided the Kent coast would be a nice place to live out his last years.

Like his parents, Joseph was a life-long member of the New Church, sometimes known as Swedenborgians. He served his church well as a Sunday school teacher and Church deacon as well as being a member of the Committee of Management.
In all his paintings he showed a feeling for family affection. All hispaintings express a love of family domesticity and portrayed moments of ordinary mans difficulties, sorrows and joys in his everyday existence. Many ofhis paintings had Barnes’ style captions, such as: Jeanes Wedden Day in Mornen (1879);  Farmer’s Woldest Dater (1908) and Wedden Morn (1909).
 
He spent most of his life away from Dorset but he had with him those views and memories which had been so familiar to him in his youth and are suggested in many of his paintings.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893 – 1978 )

Apr 25th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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During the early years of the 20th century the village of Chaldon Herring attracted a stream of talented people from the artistic and literary worlds: the magnet was Theodore Powys who had given up farming in Norfolk and returned to Dorset to write.

Theodore Powys was a withdrawn melancholy character who, until this point, had not enjoyed great success as a writer but this did not stop a host of young poets, writers and artists warming to him. One after another they were drawn like pilgrims to this remote Dorset parish, some of them making the village their home.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was enchanted by the village and fell under the Powys spell. Born on the 6th of December 1893 in Devon and baptised Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner she was the daughter of schoolmaster, George Townsend Warner and Nora Huddleston Warren. Sylvia was tall and slim in stature and bespectacled.

At the age of 20 she moved to London to study music and was one of the editors of the study Tudor Church Music. Her interest in writing poetry, short stories and novels trumped her interest and undoubted talent for music. In 1926 her first novel ‘Lolly Willowes’ was published, followed by ‘Mr Fortune’s Maggot’ the following year.

It was 1922 when Sylvia made her first journey to Chaldon Herring. Her friend, a former pupil of her father’s, Stephen Tomlin the sculptor, suggested she meet Theodore Powys. It was in his house during 1927 while enjoying huge celebrity as the best selling author of Lolly Willowes that Sylvia was introduced to the poet Valentine Ackland. Ackland, an assumed name, was twelve years her junior but that did not stop the two women starting a love affair that was to last a life time, ending in 1969 when Valentine died from breast cancer.

In 1930 Sylvia bought the cottage opposite ‘The Sailor’s Return’ public house and this is where the lovers lived until 1937, when they moved to a riverside cottage in another little Dorset village, Frome Vauchurch. The Chaldon Cottage was rented out and was destroyed by a direct hit from a German bomb during the war.

In 1933 Sylvia and Valentine published a joint book of poems ‘Whether a Dove or Seagull,’ a collection of love poems.  They were both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and Valentine was a contributor to left-wing papers, including The Daily Worker. It was during the 1930’s that Sylvia’s short stories were first accepted by The New Yorker;  all told the magazine published nearly 150 of her stories.

The couple spent most of their time together in Dorset. They attended the American Writer’s Conference in New York in 1939, returning home shortly after Britain declared war on Germany. Sylvia continued to write during the war publishing an anthology of short stories The Cat’s Cradle Book in 1940 and A Garland of Straw’ in 1943. She was a member of the Women’s Volunteer Service and helped set-up centres for people evacuated from the cities.

Sylvia’s relationship with her mother was a difficult one, they were never close. Her father died in 1916 and her mother remarried. Soon after the war ended her mother’s health deteriorated into senility; as the only child she had to take responsibility for her mother until she died in 1950. During this time her lover, Valentine, had rekindled an earlier affair with an American woman Elizabeth Wade White, returning to Sylvia in 1949. Sylvia continued to write during this unhappy period, notably The Corner That Held Them, published in 1948. After all these tribulations the following years were uneventful. During this period Sylvia wrote several books including a biography of the novelist T.H. White.

In the thirties cross-dressing women and lesbian affairs were viewed as a titillating curiosity. In the years of austerity that followed the war they were viewed rather differently and their left-wing tendencies and lesbian lifestyle resulted in publishers becoming less supportive.

In 1967 Valentine was told she had breast cancer and battled with it for two years, she died in 1969. Sylvia was then in her seventies, a time when there was renewed interest in her writing, especially from the growing feminist movement. In 1973 she published a book of poems by her lover under the title: The Nature of the Moment.

Sylvia Townsend Warner lived out her days with her cats in the little cottage on the banks of the River Frome at Frome Vauchurch. She died there on May Day 1978, Sylvia and Valentine’s ashes are buried in Chaldon Herring’s churchyard.

About Durweston

Apr 17th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Three miles north west of Blandford on the A350 road to Shaftesbury a left turn onto the A356 takes the traveller onto an old stone bridge across the river Stour. About a quarter of a mile further west is the village of Durweston.

It is thought that the name derives from the tun or farmstead of a man called Durwes; alternatively, it comes from dwrwys meaning “deep water.” The setting for this village is an embayment in the chalk downs and the willow-bordered Stour, which near a mill takes a broad sweep off towards the west end of the parish, where the escarpment of Hod Hill dominates the further bank at some distance.

The bridge was designed and built in greensand ashlars for the Portman family by Joseph Towsey in 1795, who provided it with triangular cutwaters and refuges. At that time the Portman estate included the land between the high ground and the water meadows, but this is recent history. Like most parishes in Dorset the Durweston area was inhabited much earlier: in about 1800 BC when two tribal chiefs or aristocrats of the Bronze Age Wessex Culture were buried beneath round barrows still to be seen in the parish. During the following Iron Age the focus of local settlement would have shifted into the defended enclosure of Hod Hill, later conquered and occupied by the Romans, who used the south east corner of the rampart to form two sides of a marching camp. Evidence of a warmer climate in southern England in the 11th century is suggested by the Domesday survey in 1086, which recorded three acres of vineyards at Durweston and surveyed three parcels of land under the name Durvinestone.

The Lord of Durweston in 1316 was Brian de Gouiz, but later the Manor sequentially came into the possession of the Fitz-Payne, Poyning, Percey and Kitcon families and thence to the Cokes. On the death of Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester in 1753 it was purchased by Julines Beckford, who’s son Peter sold it to Henry William Portman in 1774.

The present Church of St. Nicholas was originally the parish church of Knighton before that parish and Durweston were integrated in 1381 (Durweston’s own Church once stood by the water mill, where today only some foundation stones remain.) The earliest recorded Rector was Will de Aylesbury, the incumbent in 1309. Although the tower is original the central nave and rear chancel had to be restored in 1846 after a survey found the structure to be so badly decayed as to present a risk to safety. The restoration work, which is in revived Gothic early English and Perpendicular styles, was financed by Lord Portman and re-incorporated fragments of the older fabric in places.

Two sculptures by Don Potter created in 1991 of St. Nicholas and a Madonna and Child can be seen on the south side of the tower, but the parapet and the interior of the church also display some lively gargoyles. Purbeck Marble was used to make the font, which is the oldest feature of the church. During the restoration of 1846 another sculpture was rediscovered under an east window and re-set above the inside of the south door. It commemorates St. Eloi (Latin: Eligious) as a patron saint farriers. The relief shows Eloi as a monkish figure (who’s head has been lost) at a blacksmith’s forge, shoeing the detached leg of a horse, which stands to the right on its other three legs, beside its rider as they await the completion of the work. The Portman family plot, and one of the oldest gravestones in Dorset, that of Mary Cocks (1690-1759) are situated near the south-west corner of the tower, which has six bells.

The nearby water meadows probably date from medieval times and were created to cultivate an early crop of grass for over-wintering the local farm’s livestock. Strip lynchets on the downsides are the remains of medieval cultivation terraces. Sheep and arable farming were also important, wheat and barley being the main cereals (these have now been supplemented or superceded by peas, flax and oilseed rape.) Older industries have been milling (on the Stour,) agricultural machinery and oddly, steel fabrication.

When the railway was laid nearby in the 19th century, the village was served by Stourpaine and Durweston Halt. Between 1848 and 1875 Durweston was the home of Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an outspoken Rector appalled by the rural poverty of the time. Osborne therefore campaigned for the repeal of the Corn Laws, a stance which brought him into conflict with George Banks, then Dorset’s Conservative MP who was upholding the Laws in Parliament. Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, was a friend of Osborne’s and spent some time with him in Durweston, while he held a brief position as a curate at nearby Pimperne.

Up until World War, 2 Durweston was part of the Bryanstone estate, when the entire village and its farmland belonged to the Portmans. In 1951 however the estate passed to the Crown. The present manor in Bryanstone Park is a red brick Regency mansion designed by Norman Shaw for the 2nd Viscount Portman. The building stands on a knoll in the centre of the great park and the main entrance is an imposing 18th century structure.

Until the 1960’s it was noted that Durweston had about three shops, a school, a post office, reading room, carpenter, joiner, and a pottery. The village also possessed a filling station. The dwellings of Durweston typically include some picturesque cottages some with hollyhock and jasmine in their front gardens. Typically the cottages have walls of flint, brick or cob, with brick chimneys and thatched roofs. Dairy House is a more recent building with a 19th century brick cottage nucleus. Most of the approximately 160 homes in the village however are probably 18th century or later.

By the end of the decade however, a much-publicised decline had set in. There is an excellent first-hand account of this contraction by a man from Wimborne who bought up the post office-cum-shop as a lightweight early-retirement-due-to-health occupation in the early 1970’s. He could testify that there were then the two other shops, the steel fabricator works, the school, filling station, two farms employing local men, and nearly twenty well-kept allotments, supplying rich and poor alike with a wealth of fresh fruit and vegetables. There were, he adds, many plumbers, chimney sweeps and general handymen.

Yet by the time this gentleman had sold up the business some years later to return to the vibrancy of town life the shops, filling station and steel fabricators had closed, the farm livestock had gone, and the farm was employing just two men. The school kept going, but only by bussing in children from other places. And those allotments? – they “grew” new homes in their places; as is the way of today, beyond the affordability of new generation villagers.

Little wonder then that Durweston folk spoke of the days when allotments flourished and everyone supported or took part in the village show. They spoke of when football and cricket teams played regularly, when there was a youth club, and when a barn and reading room were available for village activities such as dances, skittles, competitions and meetings. Previously, with no village hall or pub, group meetings had to be held in member’s homes.

Sometime when it was at its lowest ebb it was said of Durweston that it was “not a village, which impresses with any beauty of architecture.” But now the tide has turned and Durweston is growing again. A purpose-built village hall was opened in 2003 and the playing field was recently extended to include a tennis court. Yet at the 2001 census a population of only 489 was recorded – thirty fewer than in 1851, since when, and until at least the end of the 19th century, the population is likely to have risen still higher.

Today the parish is a Conservation Area of archaeological importance and with Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. But a large proportion of the revival, as in so many other rural communities, is made up of new, if restricted, commuter or holiday homes at the expense of former social amenities and community spirit.

Frome St. Quintin

Apr 7th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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The parish of Frome St. Quintin is about seven miles north of Dorchester in the Frome valley and comprises a little over one thousand acres. In the Doomsday survey this place is recorded as Litelfrome, meaning little estate by the Frome. Then, it was owned by Queen Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror, but by the end of the 12th century the Earls of Gloucester were lords paramount and granted or leased it to one of King Richard the Lionheart’s most trusted and powerful barons, Herbert de St. Quintin. Other families who were later lords of the manor here are the Marmions, Fitzhughs, Dacres, Hardy and by the 19th century it was a part of the Ilchester estate.  During the reign of Henry III a fair was granted to the parish to be held on the 1st of May and the 16th July, a tradition that died out in 1800.

Frome House, 150 yards west of the church, has  on the porch the name and date: George Baker 1782; he added the three sided porch with its Roman Doric columns.

The church is dedicated to St. Mary and stands in the corner of a field a little apart from the village which, it is said, was originally built around the church but the Black Death took so many lives, only the church remained.
 
The main entrance to the church is through a porch on the south side of the building; this was added during the 15th century. The oldest part of the church is from the 12th century and is found in the doorway leading into the vestry under the unusually short embattled tower, which dates from the 14th century and is home to two bells. The bells are said to be by Thomas Bilbie of Cullompton, dated 1782 and another by the Salisbury foundry. The nave and chancel under a barrel roof are 13th century and the chancel arch was rebuilt at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

The font dates from the early 13th century. It is octagonal with a cylindrical stem and chamfered base. The medieval altar is of polished marble and bears five recent crosses. The window above it, depicting the Nativity and the carving of The Last Supper, are Victorian. The oil lamps are worthy of mention. The church was restored in 1881 and 1889 at a cost of £500, paid for by the rector and parishioners. A new pulpit, lectern, and reredos of alabaster and Caen stone have been added. St Mary’s can seat 100: the average population in the parish in Victorian times was 150 and the 2001 census records 157 people living in the parish.

There is a brass in the chancel ‘To Jude Collant 1684.’ In the nave is a monument ‘To George Baker 1803 and Hannah Baker 1806’; ‘To Sarah Knight and Jeremiah Hayne, the mother and brother of Hannah Baker’; and another ‘To Thomas Bridge 1793 and Mary Devenish 1833.’ In the tower there is the inscription: ‘To Henry…. 1620.’

In the churchyard are table tombs ‘to Mary, wife of William Ria.le, dated 1694’; ‘To John Hopkins 1734’ and another ‘To John Shepherd 1793’. There is a 17th century headstone to Robert Pilliard and another dated 1687 remembering Elizabeth, daughter of Matthew. Other weather beaten memorials decline to share with us the names of those departed whose remains they stand sentry over.

Thomas Morton Colson 1833-1908

Apr 2nd, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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The Revd. John Morton Colson and his wife Julia had a daughter and a son; a small family for the early 19th century. We might have expected their daughter, Julia, to marry and have a family and their son to follow his father, grandfather and great grandfather into the church. It was their daughter who championed the Christian cause and spent her life doing good works and helping others, but what did their son, Thomas, make of his life? (See our story Miss Julia Colson of Swanage in the Swanage Category.)

It was clear from an early age that Thomas was not going to take up an ecclesiastical vocation. Early in 1851 when the census was taken we know this small family was all together at the family home in Swanage. Thomas is described as a midshipman. Thomas’ father died in 1863 and his mother passed away two years later.
 
We have not found Thomas in the 1861 census but we do know he married Sarah Wardley early in 1861 at Islington in London. Sarah was from Suffolk but in 1851 at the age of 15 she was working as a servant in a coffee house at 15 South Street, St. Marylebone, London; it seems Thomas did not hold with convention and married below his station.
 
Thomas and Sarah named their first child Louisa Story, Story being a reference to the maiden name of Thomas’ mother. The child was born at Poplar in London in the first-half of 1864. The couple named their second child, Julia, again after Thomas’ mother; the birth was registered at Mile End Old Town, London in 1867. We believe the couple had at least one other child that did not survive infancy.

A year later their third child, another daughter, Florence Maude was born at Netherbury in Dorset. Then in Somerset in 1869 Sarah delivered a son who was named after his father, Thomas Morton Colson. A year later another daughter, Mary, was born at Creech. These events suggest something of a turning point in the fortunes of Thomas and Sarah. The 1871 census shows the couple living at Creech St. Michael, Somerset. Thomas is described as a landowner – no occupation. Here in Somerset Thomas and Sarah benefited from the help of two servant girls but it seems they did not stay long in Somerset. By the first quarter of 1872 Thomas had moved his family back to Dorset and they were living in Radipole near Weymouth. It is here that their next child Robert Worgan Morton Colson was born.

We do not know how long they stayed in Dorset but by 1881 the family had moved to Linkenholt in Hampshire. The census for that year reveals that Thomas is a Farmer Landowner occupying 1030 acres and employing thirteen men, eleven lads and two women. All of the children are with their parents and in education except their eldest, Louisa, who is a pupil at a boarding school at Littlehampton.

A decade later we find the family back in London at 3, Adam Street, St. Martin-in-the-Fields where they own a small hotel run by Sarah who is described as a Hotel Keeper; she is assisted by daughters Louisa and Florence. Thomas Junior is an Electric Engineering Student; Mary is a clerk in an envelope addressing office and Robert is a clerk in a stained glass works and their father is working as a clerk in a newspaper office. Ten years on and we find Thomas and Sarah still running their hotel; with them is their daughter Mary who works as a clerk. Judging by the guests registered at the hotel in the 1891 and 1901 census returns the hotel was not a tremendous success.

Thomas Morton Colson was baptised at St. Mary’s, Piddlehinton, on the 10th of April 1833. His death was registered in the first quarter of 1908 at Wandsworth, London; he was 75. Three years later we find his widow on her own, a lodger at 24, Sydney Road, Richmond, Surrey: she is said to have “small private means.”  Sarah’s death was registered early in 1913 at Chelsea, London, she was 73 years old.

Thomas Morton Colson appears to be a man who did not play by the rules and conventions of the day. We wonder what his father, who for forty years was the Rector of St. Peter’s, Dorchester, would have made of his son’s journey through life. Marrying for love his entrepreneurial spirit was, perhaps, kick started by an inheritance that does not seem to have grown under his guardianship.