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Sherborne

A Royal Visit to Sherborne

On the morning of the 1st of June 1950 the boys of Sherborne School settled down to two periods of study before assembling in bright sunshine to await the arrival of the King and Queen, whose visit would mark the four hundredth anniversary of the granting of a royal charter.  The Abbey bells informed the entire town that the royal train had arrived at the station. Their Majesties were met by the Lord Lieutenant who presented the school Governors; they then drove to the school through the crowded and flag decked streets of the town.

With perfect timing the cars carrying the royal party pulled up at the Main Gates at exactly 12.45 p.m. A guard of honour made up of representatives of the navy and army sections of the Combined Cadet Force gave the royal salute and the school band played the National Anthem. The Headmaster, Canon A.R Wallace, was then presented to Their Majesties who inspected the guard and commented on its excellent turn-out.
 
The Royal Standard was broken on the flag-staff as the King and Queen entered the Courts of the school. The boys were lined up on one side and on the other were gathered the masters, their wives and other guests; for a brief moment there was silence but this was followed by cheers while Their Majesties made their way to the Headmaster’s House. After a brief rest they were escorted to the big schoolroom, where they had lunch with the Headmaster and his wife and some eighty senior boys.

Their Majesties then began a tour of the school passing through the Undercroft and Cloisters, where they posed for amateur photographers before entering the Chapel, then on to the Library where they both signed the King’s Book. At the bottom of the Chapel steps the masters and their wives were presented, after which the school dispersed while the King and Queen continued their tour. They visited the Carpenter’s Shop, the Swimming Baths, the Art School, and the Biology Laboratory and stopped to speak to the boys who were carrying on their usual school activities. The tour took in a visit to Westcott House, where they were welcomed by the house master, Mr R. S. Thompson and his wife.

Later in the afternoon the royal party drove down to the Games Fields; leaving their car at the Memorial Gates they went across to watch some of the boys playing cricket and had tea in the Pavilion. They walked back to their car through a line of children from other Sherborne schools. Back in their car they drove slowly to the gates and received the cheers of the school as they left.

The following day a letter was received from Buckingham Palace, thanking the school for their very friendly welcome and saying how greatly the King and Queen had enjoyed their visit.

Sherborne: Edwin Childs (1859-1934)

As the Victorian era was drawing to a close the 20th century was taking its first breaths. The Horseless carriage, the motor car to you and me, was becoming less of a rich man’s novelty and more a viable form of transport. The penny-farthing had evolved into the safety bicycle, there was farm machinery to be kept working and industrial machines to be maintained; this was a good time to be a mechanical engineer.

Six decades earlier things had not been so good. For Charles Childs of Yetminster this meant moving to Deptford in Kent soon after his marriage in 1841 to Harriet King. Their son Charles was born there in 1847 followed by a daughter, Sarah Ann, in 1849. Later the couple moved to the Old Kent Road area, which was then a part of Surrey and where their son, Henry, was born in 1852.

When Charles Childs secured a job maintaining new machinery that had been installed at Willmott’s silk mills in Sherborne he was able to bring his family home. They lived in the Westbury area of the town and had three more children: Temperance in 1855, Albert in 1857 and Edwin in 1859.

The youngest boy, Edwin, inherited his father’s interest in all things mechanical and in his teens he was apprenticed to Joseph Read of Westbury. Read was a general smith, engineer and bell-hanger and through his works came many farm wagons, gigs and broughams (light, four-wheeled horse-drawn carriages) and there was plenty of business to had keeping primitive farm machinery running. Edwin was ideally suited for his placement with Joseph Read and this hands-on experience was supplemented by reading about his chosen trade in books and magazines.

The family was non-conformist. The children with their parents attended the Congregational Church. Edwin was a bell-ringer too, became captain of the Abbey Church bell-ringers and played a trumpet in the town band. In 1884 Edwin married Jane Bown in the Abbey Church at Sherborne and his eight children were all baptised there but he continued his allegiance to non-conformity. Edwin and Jane made a perfect match; she supported and encouraged his driving ambition to make something of himself and shared his enterprising spirit. They set up home in Hound Street, Sherborne and started to save for the future – no easy task on an income of thirty shillings a week.

In 1892 Edwin and Jane bought an ailing business, The Sherborne Coffee Tavern, for a deposit of £50 and a mortgage of £500 advanced by the Foresters Benefit Society.  An odd choice of business for a mechanical engineer but it was a means to an end. At that point in their married life they had four children. Edwin continued to work for Joseph Read and had set up his own workshop and forge behind their cottage, where he carried out small jobs for his friends and kept up to date with his reading, while Jane served endless cups of coffee and innumerable trays of buns at the Tavern.

Two years on and Edwin was ready to launch his own business. The tea and coffee urns, counter, table and chairs went to make way for bicycles, bells, bags, lamps and oil. He commenced trading as a Cycle Agent selling Singers, Rovers, Ormonds, Swifts and Sunbeams. He hired out, repaired and cleaned bicycles and trikes and even taught customers how to ride. His timing was spot-on and after years of hard work he had his own business spurred on by a wave of bicycling enthusiasm that swept the country at the turn of the century.
 
1896 brought the first London to Brighton car rally and the first London Motor Show opened. Locally a Colonel Baxter who lived in Sherborne bought his first car, a Clement Panhard, and became Edwin Childs’ first automobile customer.

Motoring in those early days could be a hazardous experience. The heroic Colonel and his car would venture forth, but more often than not the car would stop and fail to restart somewhere along the planned journey and Edwin would be standing by to rescue the stranded Colonel and his car. Borrowing two strong horses from the Brewery and equipped with a strong rope he would tow the car back to his workshop and sort out the problem.

Bicycle sales increased but Edwin Childs was not a man to rest on his laurels. The windows of the Tavern were knocked out and double doors put in, large enough to facilitate entry of the very first tri-cars, the frames of which were mounted with a single cylinder four-stroke engine with a wicker-work passenger carriage fitted in front. The family’s first car was a tri-car with twin seats. On a Sunday morning, ignoring protests from an anxious mother, Edwin would drive his two youngest children the five miles to Yeovil and he prided himself always to have them back in time for Sunday lunch.

In 1903 the Motor Car Act was passed and came into force on the 1st of January 1904. This increased the speed limit to twenty miles-per-hour and required all drivers to have a licence then costing five shillings. Edwin Childs and his eighteen year-old son Charles were number thirty-nine and forty in the Dorset Licensing Register.

About this time Edwin purchased a plot of land in Long Street and on it he built a garage, the first in Sherborne.  In the 1909 edition of the Handbook of the Motor Union of Great Britain he is listed as: “E.Childs. Repairer. Standing for twenty cars.” Not everyone who could afford one bought one but amongst his early customers were Colonel Baxter; E.A. Ffookes; R.T. Grantham; E.W. Bartlett, and Harry and Reggie Boden.

The car was not welcomed by everyone in Sherborne, for some saw the car as a danger to the town’s ancient heritage. The Church and School watched with distaste the innovation of the dust-raising mechanical carriage.

Edwin was convinced the car was here to stay and began to build a fleet of cars for hire. He already owned a pre-1900 Benz and added a 12 horse-power Vulcan, a 16 horse-power Argyle and a 22 horse-power Darraqu. The Darraqu was an open touring car with leather upholstery and canvas hood and windows, which, with the removal of the hood, could be winched into position by block and tackle. It was much in demand from the hunting fraternity for ferrying to and from various Point-to Point. The Darraqu could be converted into a car for all occasions. It was the ideal limousine for weddings and funerals and was also used for Hunt Balls that were held throughout the county during the hunting season.

Edwin Childs was a good husband, father and employer. He had spent his life working towards a personal ambition and with its fulfilment he found his leisure time and income increased and he now started to work towards his chosen good cause, the Yeatman Hospital; this, in the days when the Welfare State was still a dream of radicals.  Eventually he was made a life governor of the Cottage Hospital. At the beginning of the First World War, he bought, maintained and provided a driver for an ambulance for the Red Cross to carry injured servicemen from the station to some local buildings and houses including Sherborne Castle, Leweston Manor and Chetnole Grange, that had been converted to receive them.

Edwin and Jane Childs had four sons and four daughters. One son served in France another in the Middle East and later the two younger sons were posted to army camps in different parts of the country. During the war there was still hire business to be had and because of the war effort more tractors had to be kept going, Petrol was rationed but people who had cars were using them in the service of their country, and these, too, had to be kept running. Approaching old age Edwin Childs found himself working as long and hard as he ever had at any time in his busy and eventful life. When the war ended the motor car was a fact of life. He died in 1934.

We have placed photographs pf Edwin Childs in the photo gallery.

FOOTNOTE: We have been contacted by Andrew Norwood who says about the Clement Panhard mentioned in the article: “ I am pleased to tell you that 110 plus years later the car is still going strong – although it is as temperamental as it was back in 1900. I own the car and you can find more about it at www.clementpanhard.com under ‘Our Car’ “ Mr Norwood has sent us a photo of the car and we have placed the image in the gallery.

Solved! – the Sherborne Horse-Bone Mystery

Philip Grove and Arnoldo Cortesi came from very different backgrounds and had very different destinies. Cortesi would one day become Rome correspondent of the New York Times; Grove however, put on a uniform for the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917. Yet as boys in 1911 these two men found themselves fellow pupils and friends at Sherborne School. They also shared a passion for the ancient merely because it was old, including fossils that they discovered they could collect from a disused quarry to the north of the town out of school hours.

One day the boys returned from one of their explorations in the quarry with a fragment of bone they claimed to have found on a pile of rubble at the entrance to a cave since quarried away. Cortesi first showed the bone to some other boys who were not interested, but when he attempted to discard the bone in the dayroom fire an older boy called Ross Jefferson intervened and advised Cortesi to show it to the school’s science master, Robert Elliot Steel, first. Steel, who had himself collected mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones from the quarry for the school’s geological collection, could see that the ancient looking bone bore the crude engraving of a horses head, and asked Cortesi to supply a statement about how the bone was found.

The school bursar then passed this certificate on to Joseph Fowler, a master, who in turn donated all his papers about the bone to the Smith Woodward Archives at the Natural History Museum in London. The bone itself was sent to the museum’s curator of geology, Arthur Smith Woodward, for examination. In a paper prepared for the Geological Society in 1914 Smith Woodward described the find as “an apparent Palaeolithic engraving of a hog-maned Mongolian horse”, and at a subsequent meeting his opinion remained unchallenged by members.

The next development in the saga came in 1924 when William Sollas, Professor of Geology at Oxford, wrote a paper in which he expressed the opinion that, to date, finds from known Palaeolithic sites in England lacked evidence of early artwork. Woodward considered that the semi-fossilised condition of the bone proved its Palaeolithic authenticity because such a condition would have been impossible for a modern forger to replicate. Any attempt to do so, he thought, would have resulted in flaking.

Woodward contacted Arnoldo Cortesi, by then writing for the New York Times
in Rome, for an assurance that the find was genuine, since he thought that Sollas suspected that Cortesi had forged the artefact. However, after Grove had been killed at Arras, his mother and brother affirmed that Phillip was adamant the Sherborne “Palaeolithic” horse was genuine.
 
In 1926 Sollas said that his assistant, C J Bayzand, would confirm that the etching on the bone had been copied from the drawing of a horse on a bone found in a cave at Cresswell in Derbyshire without Sollas ever having seen the Sherborne specimen.
 
A group of boys working on the school’s museum collection told Bayzand that the bone was a fake, even claiming that it came from a rubbish tip on the Bristol road.

Woodward did not reply to his charge of forgery, but in a letter to Nature in 1926 Elliot Steel apologised to Bayzand for the hoax the boys in the museum had played on him! He described how the bone had been found and that a group of older boys, jealous of the discovery, concocted and disseminated the forgery story. Sollas never replied to Steel’s letter, but Professor Boyd-Dawkins effectively demolished Sollas’ evidence.

From the 1950’s onwards however, the bone came under much more intense scientific scrutiny and examination. In 1957 Dr Kenneth Oakley conducted a fluorine test, which gave the bone an upper Palaeolithic age. But when was the image of the horse’s head carved onto it?

In 1978 Professor Douglas, who had succeeded Sollas, accused him of neglecting
to notify Woodward that the Sherborne bone was really a fake before Woodward presented his paper to the Geological Society in 1914, in order to discredit him.

Further tests by Dr Anne Sieveking and Dr M Newcomer demonstrated it was possible for the bone to be engraved with a flint, a finding at odds with Smith Woodward’s opinion that it wouldn’t have been possible to inscribe bone without flaking it. In addition, high magnification showed that the image’s etched lines disappeared into fine cracks. This indicated the bone was already degraded before the etching was done. But were the cracks the result of heat or frost? – and when were they formed? Could an artistic Palaeolithic hunter have used an already degraded bone?

It was pointed out that the odds against two boys only ten days at school finding in a large quarry a bone from a horse species long extinct in this country, then engraving a representation of its head on it were so remote as not to merit consideration. DNA analysis however, was considered but thought to be too hit and miss.

If the bone could be identified as coming from the species of horse apparently portrayed on it, then this would be evidence pointing towards a prehistoric age, though this could not prove anything about the age of the image. As this was not possible and as there was some distinction between the muzzle detail of the Sherborne and Cresswell horses, a conclusion of probable forgery was arrived at.

Furthermore, in 1994 high magnification examination of the bone at Cambridge revealed the grooves of the etch-marks to be so fresh that, unless they had been scrubbed clean, they must have been cut in modern times. Radiocarbon dating and chemical analysis did prove the bone to be a mammalian rib – and no older than the 14th century, thus conflicting with the Palaeolithic result from Oakley’s 1957 fluorine test. Evidently the etching was carried out by a modern person using a modern tool.

The probable reconstruction of events is as follows. It was true that Cortesi was a skilled draughtsman who had won a prize for drawing at the school. It was believed therefore, that, with no intent to deceive, he had copied the Cresswell horse onto the bone in the school’s museum, his talent in this regard contributing to its acceptance as genuine. The idea of hoaxing Elliot Steel may have been Ross Jefferson’s, who suggested that the boys should show the bone to Steel. After learning the bone had been sent to the British Museum, the boys decided to confess to Bayzand, but he failed to pass the information on.

Sollas and Bayzand thus dismissed the engraved rib upon the word of two schoolboys without seeing or inspecting the find. So the overall conclusion is that the horse bone was indeed a forgery, and one fooling many scholars and scientists for almost a century.

Incidentally, the school’s museum, around which so much of this drama unfolded, was bombed and gutted during an as yet incomprehensible air raid on Sherborne in 1940, despite being a small country abbey town having no munitions factories, ordnance depots or obvious strategic significance.

Edwin Childs (1859-1934)