Beautiful Days: An Incomplete and Personal History of British Music Festivals (2): The Twenty-First Century – A Picture Essay

 By the millennium, music festivals had become transformed from an expression of the counter-culture to a mainstream leisure activity. In the UK, and worldwide, the number and range of festivals grew exponentially. Prior to 2020, when the coronavirus silenced live music, there was a festival to suit practically any taste. In this article, rather than attempt to describe the huge range of events that make up the contemporary music festival scene, I will offer a picture essay, using photographs from my own experiences as an avid festival attendee over the past twenty years. 

 

Welcoming sign at Beautiful Days 2013

As I related in my previous article, festivals ‘grew up’ during the 1990s. Legislation and changing expectations helped to civilise what had previously been an edgy, carnivalesque experience. People who would not previously have considered it now wanted to go to a festival, and the age range of festival-goers expanded as the pioneer generation grew older. In 2005, 649 festivals took place in the UK, nearly half of which had been established since 2000. Around 30% were outdoor events and a quarter were folk festivals. While some festivals fall by the wayside, and the music press periodically speculates that the festival market has become saturated, there is no sign of festivals disappearing. In 2019, over 1,000 events were listed on efestivals.com. It has been stated that festivals bring £1.76bn in value to the British economy each year, supporting 85,000 jobs. A few years ago, an academic with nothing better to do attempted a typology of music festivals, coming up with seventeen types, and he would probably have to add a few more to his list today.

 

During the first few years of the new century, my festival-going was limited to my annual pilgrimage to Fairport Convention’s Cropredy festival, but as soon as our kids were old enough to look after themselves, my wife and I became festival obsessives. We have been to at least one festival every year since 2005, and often two or three. For us, the music comes first, and we choose festivals on the basis of their genres and line-ups. We have our favourites, all straddling the boundary of folk and rock. Cropredy remains a stalwart, along with festivals organised by other folk-rock bands: Beautiful Days, run by the Levellers and the Big Session, by Oysterband. Wickham festival in Hampshire taps into the same market and we have been there several times. Others we have been to include Wallingford Bunkfest, Shrewsbury Folk festival, Bearded Theory (at Catton Hall, Derbyshire), Solfest (Silloth in Cumbria) and Glasgow’s Celtic Connections. And in 2013 we returned to Glastonbury for the first time since 1986, with our children, now grown up, and their partners as well.

 

My enjoyment of a festival is a function of four factors:

•        The line-up (first and foremost)
•       The weather (for ‘greenfield’ festivals)
•       The organisation (parking, camping or accommodation, toilets and showers, food and drink, rules and regulations, etc)
•       The ambience (the sum of the first three factors, along with how the audience responds to the festival).

In the remainder of this article, I will attempt to capture the ambience of some of the festivals I have attended over the past twenty years. I hope that the following collection of photographs and comments will help you to get a flavour of music festivals as I have experienced them.

 

SETTINGS

 

Part of the massive site at Glastonbury 2013, when around 175,000 people attended. The festival takes up a considerable area of Michael Eavis's Somerest dairy farm

Beautiful Days, run by the Levellers at Escott Park, near Exeter, also takes place on a rural "greenfield" site, but with a more modest capacity of 17,500

A view of the village of Cropredy during the annual Fairport's Cropredy Convention festival. While a greenfield festival, the site is adjacent to the village, and many villagers are involved in the festival

There is a strange symbiotic relationship between music festivals and country estates, dating back to the Beaulieu Jazz festival in the 1950s. Several festivals (including Beautiful Days) are set in the grounds of country houses. Here, Arley Hall in Cheshire hosts a small festival in 2008

Greenfield festivals often seek to create a 'village fete' atmosphere. The Big Session festival of 2009 (run by Oysterband) was a good example. However, not all was as it seemed: this village fete was actually in the heart of the city of Leicester, in the grounds of the de Montfort Hall.

STAGES

The famous Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 2013. On stage is Elvis Costello, whom I saw headline Glastonbury 1984

Stages can be hired for all purposes. This is the main stage at Bearded Theory 2015, at Catton Hall, Derbyshire

The one and only stage at Cropredy 2017. In deference to the increasing age of the audience, the arena becomes filled with neat rows of camping chairs

Many festivals take place partly or wholly in marquees. An interesting setting is "Dogs in Space", an informal stage-cum-chill-out area at Solfest (Silloth, Cumbria) in 2013

 

AMENITIES

One of only two shower blocks at Glastonbury 2013, a total of 24 shower heads for the entire audience. I have fond memories of the same shower block in the 1980s, when it was both unisex and open-plan

Many festivals cater for families and children. Beautiful Days has a very family-friendly reputation

Festval toilets have improved markedly since the early days. While Glastonbury retains some 'long-drop' toilets, most festivals feature ranks of portaloos. Or one could try the straw-bale urinals at Solfest, with added views of the Southern Upland hills.

The Healing field at Glastonbury caters for all kinds of need

 

In a sanitised echo of the New Age Travelers' use of old buses and vans to travel from festival to festival, a teas shop in a Routemaster bus plies the festival circuit, seen here at Wickham 2012

 

PERFORMERS

Most large festivals have big screens to enable artists to be seen easily. Here, Liam Gallagher opens Glastonbury 2013 on the 'Other Stage'

 

Alternatively, a small festival enables fans to get closer to their heroes, in this case John Jones of Oysterband

The professional security staff at Beautiful Days 2012 are singularly unimpressed by the antics of Bellowhead's Benji Kirkpatrick

Achieving audience participation from a large festival crowd is not easy, but Gerry Colvin manages it with aplomb at Cropredy 2009

Musical legends: Simon Nicholl and Richard Thompson at Cropredy 2017...

...Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull at Beautiful Days 2012...

...and on the big screen at Cropredy, Robert Plant (2008)...

...Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens: 2009)...

...Petula Clarke (2017)...

...and Brian Wilson and Al Jardine (once of the Beach Boys: 2018)

If it's your festival, you'd better turn up. Ian Telfer of Oysterband makes it onto the stage at the Big Session 2010, despite having a leg in a cast

Folk festivals are often plagued with Morris dancers. Wallingford Bunkfest, 2005

While many of the artists playing at the festivals I attend are "pale stale males", there are exceptions. Salsa Celtica at Wickham festival, 2010...

...and at the same festival, Kid Creole and the Coconuts...

...Eliza Carthy at Wickham 2017...

...while Sweden's Goat brought an exotic look to the West Holt stage at Glastonbury 2013

 

AUDIENCES

An appreciative crowd at Beautiful Days 2010

 

Festivals can be an opportunity to get together with family and friends. Beautiful Days 2013

There are few more stoical than British greenfield festival attendees, who often suffer from summer weather. This gentleman at Cropredy 2008 is well-prepared for keeping his valuables dry

Romance is often in the air. Beautiful Days 2012...

...and again...

...and love by the security fence, Glastonbury 2013

Attending Leeds or Reading festival has become a teenage rite of passage. A seventeen-year-old sets off for Leeds in 2010 - most of of supplies pressed on her by her solicitous parents were either lost or returned unused. Note the Cropredy 1993 sweat shirt

THE FUTURE OF FESTIVALS?

Salsa Celtica play at Celtic Connections in Glasgow in February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus put an end to festivals for the year. As I write, Britain is at the peak of the 'second wave' of the virus, with no hint of when festivals may resume. Like many other areas of the economy, festivals have been battered by the virus, and it remains to be seen how many will survive to welcome returning audiences.

 

 

The Pulsfords of Wellington and Bermondsey

 

In a previous article, I traced the involvement of my father’s family, the Pulsfords, with the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In this ‘prequel’, I attempt to trace my forebears from rural Somerset to Victorian London in the first half of the nineteenth century.

 

Pulsford is an unusual surname, often mispronounced and misspelt, and its rarity should make putting together my family’s history easier. However the Pulsfords have had a long history of religious dissent, which predates my family’s espousal of Swedenborgianism. Prior to 1837, there was no legal obligation for births and deaths of those from dissenting faiths to be recorded, and many were not. The family tree that I have drawn up has therefore had to be derived from the incomplete and sometimes ambiguous records that do exist, and is perhaps better regarded as a hypothesis than the definitive truth.

 

Wellington, Somerset in the mid-nineteenth century

Pulsford is clearly derived from a place name (a ford by a pool), but there is no town or village named Pulsford in the UK. Enter it into Google Maps and you will be directed to Pulsford Lodge, a modern care home in the Somerset village of Wivelscombe. Close examination of nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps reveals a handful of farms in the West Country named Pulsford. There are Higher and Lower Pulsford, adjacent farms in the rural parish of Teignbridge, west of Newton Abbot in Devon, and others in the evocatively named parishes of Puddington and Cruwys Marchand, in deep countryside west of Tiverton, in mid-Devon. The 1841 census lists just 202 Pulsfords, including children, in England and Wales. 34 are in Devon and 59 in Somerset. The large majority live in an area straddling the Devon-Somerset border, between Wellington in Somerset to the east, Tiverton to the south, and the North Devon towns of Barnstaple and Porlock. Wivelscombe, where Pulsford Lodge Care Home is situated, lies within this area.

 

The area of north Devon and Somerset where most Pulsfords were living in the early 19th century

At the same time, 45 Pulsfords were living in London in 1841, and it is clear that members of the clan were forsaking the countryside for the metropolis, to escape rural poverty or to seek new opportunities in the largest and richest city in the world. Pulsfords were settled in London by the mid-eighteenth century. Most prominent were Robert Pulsford (d 1835) and his son William (1772-1833), who were wine merchants, had an interest in a Jamaican plantation worked by slaves, and acquired extensive land holdings in the Home Counties. They lived in fashionable areas of the West End. Despite this, they were Dissenters and Whigs in politics. William’s son, another Robert (1814-1888), was Whig M.P. for Hereford from 1841-1847 and had the rare distinction of having a ship named after him – a 350 ton clipper commemorating his role as a leading maritime insurance broker. In the 1860s, Robert bought an estate centred around Pitt House, Chudleigh Knighton, near Newton Abbot – presumably reflecting his family’s origins in that area.

 

From Wellington to Bermondsey

My ancestors appear to have originated from Wellington in Somerset. Wellington is a small market town, south west of Taunton. From the late eighteenth century into the nineteenth it achieved a measure of prosperity through the establishment of a woollen clothing industry centred around two large mills on the northern outskirts of the town. At the same time there were pockets of poverty. Daniel Defoe in 1724 reported being beset by beggars when entering the town, possibly at Rockwell Green, known as Rogues Green in the eighteenth century. The parish church, dedicated to St John the Baptist, dates from 1178, but dissenting religion also has a long history in the town, with the Presbyterians (later Independents and subsequently Congregationalists) having a presence from 1689 and Baptists and Quakers also active by the late seventeenth century.

 

Our story begins (according to my hypothesis) with the marriage of William Pulsford and Elizabeth Twose in the parish church in July 1760. I know nothing about William’s occupation or where he and his family actually lived. They appear to have baptised at least nine children in the parish church, but subsequently took up dissenting religion. William and Elizabeth and at least three of their children apparently moved to London from Wellington in the 1790s, and lived at a much less exalted level than Robert and William the wine merchants and slave owners, settling south of the Thames in Bermondsey. We don’t know why they settled there, but if they believed that the streets would be paved with gold, they were sadly mistaken. Bermondsey was a determinedly working-class area and for much of the nineteenth century it was one of the poorest parts of London. Although south of the river, it was not strictly a suburb, as most inhabitants worked in the area. It was a place of mainly small-scale industries. At the time, cargo ships sailed right up to London Bridge and the riverside was lined with wharves and warehouses. Industries made use of the raw materials brought into the docks and it was particularly known for tanning and leather working. At the turn of the nineteenth century there was still countryside to the south of the built-up area bordering the Thames, but as the century wore on, population increase led to the whole parish being covered with residential and commercial development. In the 1890s, Charles Booth’s economic map of London has Bermondsey containing even more areas of poverty than the East End.

 

My speculative and partial Pulsford Family Tree!

So this was the unpromising place that the Pulsfords found themselves in. There are no records of William or Elizabeth in London, but while we know nothing of their parents’ lives, some of William and Elizabeth’s children do appear in contemporary records. We will move on to trace their families the best we can – but not in age order.

 

Elizabeth and Hannah Pulsford

Elizabeth (b 1769) and Hannah (b 1779) both married artisans. We know of their families through the retrospective registrations of their children’s births at Dr. Williams Library, Cripplegate, the main repository of birth and death records for London dissenters prior to the introduction of universal registration in 1837. The sisters signed each other’s entries as witnesses.

 

Elizabeth married a tailor, Henry Morgan and lived in the early 19th century in Camberwell, at the time gradually growing from a farming village into an affluent suburb. They had at least five children, the eldest, Henry, becoming a tailor like his father and George becoming a carpenter. 

 

At the birth of their first child in Southwark in 1806, Hannah’s husband Thomas Beavers was a “writing instrument maker”, but by 1811 when son Edmund was born, the family was living in Bermondsey New Road (now Jamaica Road) and Thomas was a dentist. At the time, dentistry was an unregulated trade rather than a modern profession, and Thomas will have likely undertaken an apprenticeship. The family soon moved over the river to Great Windmill Street in the West End (now home of the Windmill theatre). His clientele was likely to be the well-off residents of the local Georgian squares and terraces, but he and his family would have fitted in better with other residents of the street, who were mostly tradespeople providing food and services to their betters. Hannah Beavers died quite young and Thomas married again. Edmund Beavers became a dentist in his turn and younger sons also seem to have taken up medical occupations.

 

William Pulsford (junior) and his children John and Elizabeth

This part of the tale is particularly speculative, but here goes. According to my hypothesis, William and Elizabeth’s eldest son was William junior, born in 1765. He marries Elizabeth Morrish in 1788 in Wellington and they have several children. William and Elizabeth junior probably do not move to London, but are likely to be the parents of brother and sister John (1789 – 1844) and Elizabeth (or Mary: 1791 – 1874), who are living in Bermondsey in the early nineteenth century. John is married to Jane Greedy – Greedy, like Pulsford, is a name found in the Wellington area. Elizabeth never marries but lives long enough to appear in later census returns, her place of birth given as Wellington.

 

John Pulsford was a shoemaker. He registered the births of his children at the Ebenezer Independent Chapel on Neckinger Road, Bermondsey, near to his home on Dockhead. A son, William Henry, dies aged four, but John junior (1815 – 1866) and Mary Ann Jane Elizabeth (known as Jane: 1825 – 1907) are recorded in later census returns. Jane Pulsford senior may have died giving birth to her daughter. John senior died in 1844 and was buried in Long Lane cemetery, attached to the Ebenezer Independent Chapel.

 

John junior takes up the family trade, describing himself as a “master bootmaker”. His wife Mary (surname unknown) was also born in Wellington, showing that the family retained links to their Somerset roots. They lived near their father, first on a street named Hickman’s Folly and then round the corner on Parkers Row. This part of Bermondsey was – literally – Dickensian. Just to the north, bordering the Thames, was Jacob’s Island, one of London’s most notorious slums (or rookeries, as they were known at the time). In his 1838 novel Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens makes it the location of the murderer Bill Sikes’s lair, where he eventually meets his end. Dickens’s description of Jacob’s Island is evocative:

Crazy wood galleries common to the backs of half-a-dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it, as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch (Oliver Twist, chapter 50).

 

Jacob’s Island was a local hotspot in the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854, which may have had consequences for John Pulsford’s family. He and Mary had at least eleven children, four of whom died in early childhood, including Jane in 1854 – perhaps a cholera victim?

 

The part of Bermondsey where John Pulsford and his son lived. John senior lived on Dockhead and John junior on Hickman's Folly and later Parker's Row. To the north of Hickman's Folly was Jacob's Island

Jacob's Island in the 1840s

John junior died in 1866, aged 51. His widow Mary and her surviving unmarried children moved to Drummond Road, in a slightly more salubrious area of Bermondsey, and the family remained there for the rest of their lives, Mary dying there at the ripe old age of 90 in 1908. William, a clerk, died in 1877 aged 32, but in 1911 the remaining four unmarried daughters still occupied the house. The eldest, Emma, kept house while her sisters supported themselves with home working; Myra as an envelope stamper, Martha as a canvas bag sewer and Clara as a law copyist.

 

John senior’s sister Elizabeth, and his daughter Mary Ann Jane Elizabeth (Jane) come across as rather troubled souls. For over twenty years they lived together in rooms in tenement buildings in Walworth or Camberwell, moving frequently. In 1851 Jane, aged 25, describes herself as a “school mistress and house owner”, while her aunt Elizabeth is said to be “supported by friends”. This is the only time that either women records an occupation. They are still together in 1871, variously described as having no occupation, or as annuitants. Presumably they were financially supported by other members of the family. Elizabeth (sometimes named as Mary in the records) dies in 1874. Jane does not appear in the 1881 census, but in 1891 she is an inmate of Camberwell workhouse, and is still there at her death in 1907.

 

Edward Pulsford, Cordwainer – My Great-Great-Great Grandfather

Edward Pulsford was born in Wellington in 1774, and by the mid-1790s was living on Bermondsey New Road. He described himself as a cordwainer, an old-fashioned and distinguished title that signified that he made shoes from scratch, as distinct from a cobbler, who merely repaired them. He married Hannah, son of Thomas and Rebekah Marsom, of Newington, an area south-west of Bermondsey, now better known as Elephant and Castle. Thomas Marsom was a biscuit maker, a trade that was not uncommon in the area, with manufacturers working with flour shipped into the docks. In the 1850s, the well-known firm of Peek Frean (inventors of the garibaldi biscuit) established their headquarters on Dockhead, in Bermondsey, near to where John Pulsford the bootmaker had lived.

 

Edward and Hannah Pulsford had four children that we know of, and may well have had others. They did not bother to register the births of their children and we only know of those who retrospectively registered their own or their children’s births at Dr. Williams Dissenting Library. We do not know when Hannah died, but Edward was living in Hoxton by the 1820s and died there in 1840.

 

Edward and Hannah’s daughter Rebekah was born in 1797 and married George Purdy, a whitesmith, and they had five children while living on Chancery Lane in the City of London. The family disappears from the record prior to the 1841 census and they may well have emigrated – but we don’t know where.

 

Another daughter, Hannah, was born in 1804 and married Charles Ruddick, a warehouseman. They also lived in the City of London. At that time, the City’s role as a commercial centre often meant physically passing on goods, and it was dotted with warehouses. Charles and Hannah had four children; one of their daughters, another Hannah, seems to have established a small book-binding business, employing her brother Charles.

 

Thomas Marsom Pulsford was born in 1808. We don’t know his profession – the relevant entry in the 1841 census is illegible; in 1851 he did not record an occupation and he died in 1853, aged 45. He married Eliza Allen of Bishopsgate and they had at least seven children. They moved frequently, living in Bethnal Green and later at various addresses in Holborn. Their last address, Great Saffron Hill (near Farringdon station), eerily bookends John Pulsford junior’s residence near the Dickensian rookery of Jacob’s Island. The Saffron Hill area was another notorious rookery, and in Oliver Twist was Bill Sikes’s abode before his escape to Jacob’s Island. Great Saffron Hill itself was a street of shops and small tradesmen, the poorer areas being backstreet courts lined with tenement blocks housing destitute and criminal types, and many immigrants from Ireland. Thomas Marsom and his family may have lived there due to their own poverty, but interestingly, it was a short walk from the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem chapel on Cross Street – was Thomas an early member of the New Church?’’

 

I have not traced the subsequent lives of all of Thomas and Eliza’s children, but their sons took up trades; Thomas junior becoming a blacksmith and Edward and Daniel for a time working for a “spinal instrument maker”.

 

Edward Pulsford, Map Engraver – My Great-Great Grandfather

Edward the cordwainer’s youngest son was born in 1813 in Newington. He married Martha Adcock (who had been born in New York), and in 1841 the couple were living in Clerkenwell and Edward was an engraver. Their eldest son, George Marsom had just been born. By 1851, Edward was recorded as being a “map engraver” and the family had moved to Islington, at the time a recently developed and middle-class area. He could afford a live-in servant, 18-year-old Jane Johnson. There were now five children; George Marsom being joined by Martha (b 1843); my great-grandfather Edward Miall (b 1844); William Knibb (b 1846) and Jessy (b 1850).

 

It is at this point that this article overlaps with my previous article entitled “Preslands and Pulsfords in the Early Days of the New Jerusalem Church”. Edward Pulsford the map engraver was the first member of the family known to follow Swedenborgianism (though note my speculations about his brother, Thomas Marsom). In my previous article I also highlighted Edward’s commemoration of two of his dissenting heroes in the names of his younger sons, Edward Miall and William Knibb Pulsford. The family was closely associated with the New Church established in 1844 at Argyle Square, Bloomsbury. George Marsom and Edward Miall both became map engravers in their turn, almost certainly apprenticed to their father and youngest son William Knibb may have been as well, though there are no surviving records of his occupation and he died at the age of 22. The subsequent careers of George Marsom and Rev. Edward Miall Pulsford were outlined in my previous article. Martha married Rev. John Presland, who was minister of Argyle Square church for many years. Jessy married David Colville, a music publisher; gave birth to two sons, Leonard and Bernard and lived out her long life in Edmonton, north London, dying at the age of 85 in 1935.

 

Conclusion

In this article I have endeavoured to trace the history of my father’s family from their presumed origins in rural Somerset in the mid-18^th century to settling in London by the 19^th century. What conclusions have I reached from undertaking this journey?

 

First, as I have been reminding us throughout this article, the narrative I have created is speculative and partial. Drawing up the family tree has been like completing a “join the dots” picture with half the dots missing. I have had to make assumptions that individuals whose births are recorded in one place are the same as those later recorded elsewhere, and that individuals are related to each other in certain ways. The sketchy nature of the records undoubtedly mean that some individuals have been left out as their lives were not recorded. It has also not been possible to identify links between my family and other Pulsfords living in London (or in Somerset) during the period covered by this article.

 

Second, there is the strong thread of religious dissent that runs through the family. This has of course made my task harder, due to the lack of opportunities at the time for dissenters to record births and deaths. Why dissent was so ingrained in the Pulsford clan is unclear. We also do not know for sure which denominations the Pulsfords adhered to, but Independent (Congregationalist) churches recur, as well as the Swedenborgian New Church.

 

Finally, the (male) Pulsfords were artisans. Along with three shoemakers (was this the original William Pulsford’s profession as well?), the family tree includes smiths, bookbinders, primitive dentists and instrument makers. While some branches spread across the river from its Bermondsey base to the City and the East End, the family remained resolutely working class and only Edward Pulsford the map engraver became affluent enough to afford a live-in servant. Achieving upward social mobility was as difficult in the nineteenth century as it is today, and if Edward had not been my great-great grandfather I might be an East End cockney!

 

Sorces Used

Genealogical information avalable at The Genealogist.co.uk  and FreeReg

 
Historic Odnance Survey maps available at Old Maps

Cary's 1775 and 1837 Maps of  London 

Newspaper articles available at The British Newspaper Archive 

Ross C & Clark J (2011) London: The Illustrated History. London: Penguin 

Hinton Waldrist 2: A Post-Enclosure English Village

Parliamentary Enclosure comes to Hinton Waldrist

One day in 1761, Phipps Weston, a cleric from Fifield, Avery Turrell, a gentleman of Stanford, Robert Hall, a gentleman of Buckland, Robert Jenner, a yeoman from Maysey Hampton and William Stephens, a gentleman from Kemscott, met together at Hinton Waldrist. They were the Commissioners appointed to implement the Parliamentary Act passed that year to enclose Hinton’s open arable fields, common pastures and meadows. Their work changed the lives of the villagers for ever and created the parish as it appears today.

The present ford at Duxford has only been there since the late 19th century - an example of how the parish of Hinton Waldrist has changed, despite it's timeless appearance

Enclosure was about dividing up the commonly-farmed fields and allocating specific portions of land to individuals. It aimed to give each land proprietor an equivalent acreage to their previous allocation  under the open-field system. A survey of the land showed that there was just over 1700 acres to be disposed of. By far the largest amount, 900 acres, went to the Lord of the Manor, the Reverend John Loder. He also received a further 400 acres or so in glebe lands, as he was also rector of the parish. The remaining land, just over 355 acres, was divided between 18 copyhold tenants, whose leases entitled them to hold land for their lifetime and often the lifetime of another generation of their family. The table below gives their names and the amount of land they received. Acreages ranged from 56 for Mary Curtis to just one for Henry Southby.

Commissioners were generally directed to allocate better land, and land nearer their homes, to smaller proprietors, on the reasonable grounds that larger proprietors had more wealth and resources and could bear the costs of poorer and more distant land. The enclosure map that would have been drawn up to show all the allocations has unfortunately been lost, but the diagram below, based on a reconstruction of the map by Jasmine Hawse, shows that the copyholders did indeed have land close to the village itself, or to the hamlet of Duxford, if that was where they lived. However, this meant that in most cases they were allocated one type of land (arable or pasture) and had to make their own decisions regarding whether to use that land for crops or animals, or both. And some villagers who did not lease land but who had enjoyed pasture rights on the commons lost those rights, pushing them further into poverty.

Approximate land allocations following the 1761 enclosure award. The smaller proprietors generally received land nearer to their dwellings in the village, or Duxford hamlet. The glebe lands were spread around the margins of the parish

In some parishes, parliamentary enclosure radically changed the appearance of the landscape, with new straight roads and hedges breaking up the former open vistas. This did not happen to such an extent in Hinton Waldrist. The commissioners ordered only a couple of short and narrow new roads, so the parish’s road layout today is much as it was prior to enclosure. In some parishes enclosure was done with the aim of converting large areas of arable land to pasture, creating a landscape of small, rectangular grass fields, often still retaining undulations of rig and furrow. This did not happen in Hinton, as the land was (and remains) prime arable land. Finally, while new hedges were ordered, particularly in the north of the parish, to demark the copyholders’ plots, much of the south of the parish, which was largely allocated to the Rev Loder, remained unhedged, to facilitate ploughing and reaping the corn.

We do not know how the villagers adapted to the new way of life, or whether enclosure achieved its stated aim of making farming in Hinton more efficient. But fast-forward one hundred years to 1861 and the pattern of land proprietorship in the village was very different. Copyhold tenancy had been phased out as copyholders died and that year’s census showed there were just five large farms in the whole parish, set out in the table below.

Farm	Farmer	Acreage	Labourers
			Men	Women	Boys
Manor Farm	Henry Peacock	618	26	8	9
Glebe Farm	William Gingell	380	18	5	4
Grange Farm	David Lloyd	380	11	4	5
Wales (Duxford) Farm	John Castle	400	18	-	2
Duxford Ferry Farm	William Rose	66	3	1	1

Manor farm was the ‘home farm’ of the lord of the manor, and as the name suggests, Glebe farm was the property of the Rector, at that time, the Rev William Jephson. The owner of Grange farm, David Lloyd, was a doctor and brother-in-law of the then Squire, John Loder-Symonds. The table also shows that a total of 215 men, women and boys were employed as labourers on Hinton’s farms, a high proportion of the parish’s total population of 329 souls. (Two other farms are named in the 1861 census and appear in the south of the parish on the 1876 1:2500 Ordnance Survey map: Welmore farm and the unpromisingly named Starveall farm. Both were subsumed within one or other of the five big farms and the farmhouses were occupied by labourers).

Manor farm, rebuilt in the 19th century, is an imposing building, as befits the 'home farm' of the lord of the manor

The 1861 census also shows that just one of the surnames of the copyhold farmers allocated land in 1761 appears in the parish one hundred years later (Absalom – twelve people of that name are living in the parish, in two families of farm labourers). Hinton had metamorphosed from a parish of small yeoman and tenant farmers to one where farming was taking place on an industrial scale. The nature of arable farming had changed too: there is now no hint of rig and furrow in the arable fields.

Hinton Manor in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries: the Loder Squires

The Loder dynasty held the manor of Hinton for over two hundred years, from the late 17^th to the early 20^th centuries. As we saw in my previous article, the squire who ordered the enclosure of the parish was the Rev John Loder (1725-1805), who was also rector of the parish and Master of the Berkshire Hunt. His heir was his daughter Maria (1775-1820). In 1796 she married Robert Symonds, fourth son of a Herefordshire landowner, a Church of England deacon and a hunting partner of her father. It is reported that at first her father disapproved of the match, but Symonds won him over with a gift of a fine hunting dog. In 1801, the 76-year-old Rev Loder gave Symonds, who by now had taken holy orders, the rectorship of Hinton, in succession to himself.

Rev Symonds was said to take his clerical duties lightly, being more concerned with hunting. The same year as he was offered the rectorship of Hinton, he was also given by a benefactor a substantial living in Herefordshire, a hundred miles away. When the bishop objected to his appointment, on the reasonable grounds that Symonds could not live in Berkshire and maintain a parish in Herefordshire, Symonds breezily replied that he could hunt on Saturday and ride to his parish on Sunday morning in time to take the service. In the event, he only kept that parish for a year, before being formally instituted to the parish of Hinton Waldrist in 1802. Nicholas Davenport, in his entertaining history of Hinton Manor, remarked that, “Together, the two sporting parsons [Rev John Loder and Rev Robert Symonds] managed the Old Berkshire hounds, swearing hard on weekdays, and preaching hard on Sundays”.

Rev Loder died in 1805, aged 80 and Robert Symonds became Squire of Hinton Manor as well as Rector. During the 19^th Century the manor house was altered and expanded, encouraged by the boom in manorial incomes triggered by the passing of the Corn Laws in 1815. The repeal of those laws in 1848 was an early cause of the decline of the English country houses, as over time, cheaper foreign imports undermined their incomes from agricultural land.

Robert Symonds died in 1836 and the Manor passed to his son, John Loder Symonds, who, as a teetotaller, was responsible for Hinton having no public house. He and his wife had no children, and following his death in 1875, the manor passed to a cousin, Captain Frederick Cleave Symonds, an army officer who took the name Loder-Symonds and came to live at Hinton Manor (and wrote about his forebears in a history of the Old Berkshire Hunt). He and his wife had two daughters and five sons, all of whom became military officers, with, as we will see, tragic consequences.

Daily Life in Hinton Waldrist in the 19^th Century

We can call on two literary sources, one indirect and the other direct, for insights into daily life in Hinton during the latter half of the 19^th century. The indirect source is Flora Thompson’s classic trilogy, “Lark Rise to Candelford”, an account of her childhood in the agricultural parish of Cottisford, about thirty miles north-east of Hinton, and very similar in its population size and make-up. Thompson’s biographer, Richard Mabey, describes Lark Rise to Candleford as a mixture of memoir, social history and fiction, and some of her tales of village characters are doubtless embellished, but her overall account of a farming community of poor agricultural labourers and their masters in the depressed 1880s rings true and provides a model for Hinton Waldrist at that time.

All the “components” of a rural parish are present in Flora Thompson’s books. The parish has its manor house, dominated by the rather indolent Squire and his snobbish mother, who is desperate to maintain her social position despite the manor’s shrinking income, while her son strolls around the estate with a shotgun and a pair of spaniels, or sings “negro songs”, accompanying himself on his banjo. The elderly Rector preaches high Toryism from the pulpit, exhorting his labouring parishioners to accept their impoverished lot as God’s will, while his busybody daughter offers friendship and charity to the labourers’ wives (without much by way of thanks). The parish’s only farmer largely directs operations from his substantial farmhouse, leaving supervision of the men to his bailiff, and is confident that he is a good employer despite paying a labourer just ten shillings a week, as he gives them a feast at harvest time and a joint of meat at Chistmas, and does not tell them how to vote. Another important figure is the landlord of the only inn, liked by his customers for his fine ale and for tolerating his customers buying just one half pint each evening. The village schoolmistress does her best with youngsters whose ambitions stretch little further than working in the fields or joining the army (the boys), or going into service for a few years before marriage (the girls) while hoping to be invited to tea at the manor house. In the third book, Candleford Green, Laura, now fourteen, goes to work in the post office in a nearby village and we meet the formidable postmistress, Dorcas Lane, who also owns the village blacksmith’s shop, and the hard but respectful smiths.

The families headed by agricultural labourers who make up the bulk of the population of the parish are treated fondly in Thompson’s account, if sometimes a little archly. The husbands rise early to walk to the farm and their day’s work in the arable fields. When they return, they tend to the family pig or work in their garden or allotment, growing vegetables to supplement the family diet. Then in the evening they convene at the inn for their nightly half pint, an argument about politics and a round of songs. Their wives clean the house, prepare the meals, do the laundry and raise large families of children, and attempt to make ends meet and keep a civilised household on their husbands’ meagre wages. In their scant leisure time they gossip or read 'penny dreadful' novels. Some older women, who are either single or whose families have left home, also work in the fields, but not at the same time as the men.

All these characters can be found in Hinton Waldrist at this time. In 1891 (the year after Flora Thompson left Cottisford) the squire was Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds, then aged 44. At that time he and his wife Elizabeth had six children. The Rector was Rev Frederick Harper, 39 and unmarried, who lived in the rectory with his sister and elderly mother. The schoolmaster was 26 year old Walter Ansell, who lived with his wife and four children in the school cottage. There was a postmistress and shopkeeper, 66 year old Elizabeth Smith. The blacksmith, whose shop was a few doors from the post office, was Frederick Ayris, who took on the business when his father Thomas retired. The parish’s farmers at that time were Henry Chandler (Manor farm), Henry Temple (Duxford farm), Elizabeth Hobbs (Duxford Ferry farm), Joseph Potts (Grange farm) and Daniel Tarrant (Glebe farm). There was even a businessman, George Batts, a butter factor who employed a number of villagers and lived in Glebe Cottage, which, despite its name, was an imposing residence. None of the above-named were born in the parish, and many of the labourers, servants, carters and tradesmen who made up the rest of the population of 301 (including large numbers of children) were also “incomers”, often from nearby parishes: the pattern in the 19^th century was for people to move around relatively frequently, though usually within a relatively small area.

Many of Hinton's formerly important buildings are still standing, though none now have their original function - all are private residences. Here we see the rectory...

...the post office and general store...

...the blacksmith's shop...

...and the school

Thompson also describes the occasional set-piece village festivals, such as the harvest feast and the May Queen parade. Doubtless, these also happened in Hinton. A piece in Jackson’s Oxford Journal of 7^th June 1856 describes a celebration to mark the end of the Crimean War:

‘On Thursday the 29^th ult, the public holiday was celebrated in the old English style, in the parish of Hinton Waldrist. The proceedings commenced with divine service in the parish church, after which the whole parish, young and old, to the number of about 400, sat down to a hot dinner of beef and plum pudding, prepared for them in a barn, which had been most tastefully decorated with flags, flowers and evergreens for the occasion. In the evening there was a band of music and a dance on the village green. With other rustic sports, such as running in sacks, and at dark some excellent fireworks; after which God Save the Queen was sung in the open air by the assembled people, and the proceedings of the day terminated with the Evening Hymn’.

The more direct literary source for life in 19^th century Hinton is a fine coffee-table book titled A Village Lost and Found and authored by Brian May and Elena Vidal. It includes reproductions and commentaries on a set of stereoscopic photographs, produced in the 1850s by the photographer T.R. Williams. The set in question depicts scenes from an unnamed rural village, which detective work revealed to be Hinton Waldrist. It appears that Williams spent some of his childhood in Hinton, explaining his choice of location. Although posed and stylised, the sixty images offer a (literal) snapshot of life in Hinton at that time. Brian May, when not occupied by his day job as lead guitarist of Queen, collects such sets, which were hugely popular during the early years of photography.

The set begins, conventionally enough, at the Manor house, with several views of the house and grounds. We meet the Squire, John Loder-Symonds, inevitably carrying his shotgun. The second largest house in the village was the rectory and it is shown with the church in the background, and just a glimpse of the then rector, Rev William Jephson. We also see the village blacksmith outside his shop and a former schoolmistress, now retired. Then follow a number of pictures of farm labourers at work, taken at harvest time, with reaping, loading the corn onto wagons and making hay ricks, and even loading the dung cart. There is a picture of village women ‘gleaning’ – gathering for their own use stray ears of corn left behind after the crop had been harvested.

Several pictures depict scenes around the village and some of the actual villagers make cameo appearances, chatting, drawing water from their wells, looking after their pigs, tending their gardens, and so on. Some of the names correspond to those in the 1851 census, including John Sims, Dick Carter, Joe Bennett and Jane Edmunds. Unsurprisingly, the photographer has chosen to depict the more picturesque cottages, those situated along the high street and the road that heads north from it towards the church. These are all two-storey, thatched and are set in relatively extensive gardens. They were probably once the dwellings of the 18^th century copyhold farmers; the 1761 enclosure schedule tells us that Thomas Dew, Henry Richards and Edward Church lived on the high street and Edward Richards, Richard Humphris and John Absalom lived on the road leading to the church. Many of the cottages shown in the pictures still stand, much altered and gentrified. A terrace of smaller cottages stretched down the lane that ran south from the blacksmith’s shop (now Lamb Road), but these were probably too mean for a photograph set that would have been mainly sold to middle class town dwellers. At the same time, the one picture taken within a cottage shows it scantly furnished and with rough bare walls – just a hint of how poor the circumstances of many of the villagers would have been.

Some of the cottages depicted in Williams's photos still exist, altered and updated. The rear of this cottage is shown in a view entitled "Maria Carson's Washing Day". It is now known as St Giles's Cottage. It is likely to have once been the dwelling of a copyhold tenant farmer

'The Row' on Lamb road was added to in the early twentieth century

Another aspect of Hinton that was depicted in the photographs, but that has now been lost, is the small port at Duxford Ferry Farm. In the 19^th century the river Thames was widened and a weir was constructed to ensure that the water was deep enough for cargo barges to pass through, and the farm, situated on the south bank of the river, had a quay, from where farm produce could be shipped to Oxford and beyond, and coal and other village essentials brought in. The farm also kept a ferry boat and travellers could be rowed across the river. Later in the 19^th century, the natural loop of the Thames that has Duxford at its southern extent was “bypassed” by the construction of a canal known as the Cut. This took water from the Duxford loop and meant that the port could no longer function. Duxford Ferry farm fell into disrepair and was later demolished – the site is now overgrown and just a few stones remain. The ford that gave the hamlet and farm their name was restored and can still be crossed when the river is low.

The ford at Duxford is now a picturesque spot. It was rebuilt in the late 19th century

Hinton Waldrist moves into the Twentieth Century

“All the time, boys were being born or growing up in the parish, expecting to follow the plough all their lives, or at most, to do a little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know them and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the church…is engraved with their names” (Flora Thompson, Lark Rise).

The plaque commemorating Hinton’s World War One dead lists fourteen names. Four of them are from the same family. They are all of them sons of the Squire, Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds. To compound the tragedy, one of his daughters also died in the war, killed when the ship taking her and her husband to a war posting in Africa was torpedoed. See here for a web page that tells the war stories of the Loder-Symonds family.

Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds’ wife also died in 1918 and the Squire himself died in 1923, aged 77. His heir was his one surviving son, naval captain (later Vice Admiral) Frederick Parland Loder-Symonds One of his sons was to be killed in action in World War Two, as was one of Flora Thompson’s sons. But the long squirearchy of the Loder-Symonds in Hinton Waldrist was drawing to a close. In the mid-1930s Frederick Parland Loder-Symonds sold Hinton Manor and its estates to Nicholas Davenport (1893-1979), an economist, journalist and financier and author of the aforementioned history of Hinton Manor. He lived in the manor house until his death and his widow Olga, a former film actress and painter, continued to live there until her death in 2008.

Nicholas and Olga Davenport at Hinton Manor

This is the nearest a casual visitor can get to Hinton Manor today

The agricultural way of life continued up to and beyond the Second World War. In the 1930s, a farm labourer’s wages were thirty shillings a week, a modest improvement on the ten shillings a week paid in the 1880s. Hinton village only gained piped water from mains in 1947, finally releasing villagers from having to draw water from their wells and using earth closets in huts in their gardens. This, and the coming of electricity (gas has still to reach the village), marked the beginning of its gentrification.

Today, the fields surrounding Hinton village are still intensively farmed, with arable and dairy farming alongside market gardening, but the mechanisation of agriculture means that only a tiny handful of villagers work on the land. The village is more affluent than it has ever been, as it is largely a dormitory for professionals working in neighbouring towns. At the same time, there is less community infrastructure. The village school closed down in 1966 and the shop and post office closed in the 1990s. The parish church is now part of a group of seven churches under a single parson and services are held monthly. The only reason that Hinton has not lost its inn is that it did not have one in the first place. Many of the extensive allotments, a feature of the village since Victorian times, are disused and one wonders how long it will be before more executive houses are built on them. Hinton Waldrist is still a peaceful and enchanting place, and many of its old buildings survive, but its pictorial chronicler T.R. Williams would find little that he would recognise in the parish today.

The rather neglected allotments in the centre of the village give witness to the passing of the rural way of life for the majority of today's residents

Sources used:
Genealogical information avalable at The Genealogist.co.uk 
Historic Ordnance Survey maps available at Old Maps
New Landscapes: Enclosure in Berkshire Berkshire Record Office

Davenport N (1978) The Honour of St Valery: The Story of an English Manor House. London: Scolar Press
Hawse, J.S. (1968) Hinton Waldrist through the Centuries. Unpublished typescript.
Loder-Symonds F.C. & Crowdy P (1905) A History of the old Berks Hunt from 1760 to 1904: with a chapter on early foxhunting.

Mabey R (2014) Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford. London: Allen Lane

May B & Vidal E (2009) A Village Lost and Found. London: Francis Lincoln Limited

Thompson F (1944) Lark Rise to Candelford. Oxford: Oxford University Press