Swindon in the Past Lane

Local MP Robert Buckland, Mayor Ray Ballman and council officials joined those gathered around Swindon’s cenotaph in bitterly cold temperatures and beautiful sunshine to mark Holocaust Day 2012. The ceremony opened with a haunting violin duet played by musicians Debbie and Michael as we were reminded how important music and the arts were to those inside the Nazi death camps. Matt Holland addressed those present to remember the innocent victims of genocide, not only the six million Jews who died during the Second World War but those massacred since in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. By November 1939 the international press had already revealed there was mounting evidence of the plight of Jews in German occupied Poland.  Kept behind barbed wire in huge camps called ‘reservations’ men up to the age of 70 and women up to 55 were made to do 12 hours of forced labour a day with just one thirty minute break.  Children were looked after by the older women where it was reported...

You might think that a young unmarried, childless soldier who died in the carnage of the First World War might be forgotten today.  But more than 95 years later photos of Archie Knee have been published on the internet. In Australia a descendant of his sister Ethel has posted a photo of the young Archie on the Ancestry website. The Local Studies Collection at Swindon Central Library has a further two photos viewable on their flickr website.  Archie appears in a team line up of the 1912-13 Swindon Corinthians Football Club.  More poignantly he is also pictured in the September 1916 edition of the Great Western Railway Magazine among other GWR men who lost their lives in the war that month. Born in Stroud in 1892 Archibald Edward Knee was one of Francis and Rose Knee's eight children.  Francis moved to Swindon and a job as a railway carriage painter in the Works and by the time of the 1901 census the young family was living at 123 Albion Street. On leaving s...

Record numbers joined in a Service of Remembrance at Radnor Street Chapel on November 13.  The service is now in its seventh year and organisers Mark Sutton and Tony Fox said this was the largest attendance to date. Swindon Mayor Councillor Ray Ballman and representatives from Swindon Borough Council were among those who filled the Chapel to capacity while a crowd several deep stood outside. The service was led by Deacon Dennis Sutton and members of St. Mark’s Choir while Fr David McConkey, rector of the Parish of Swindon New Town, supported those singing outside the Chapel. Members of the 18 th Swindon Scouts attended the service, including Edward who told those gathered why wearing a poppy was important to him. At the Commonwealth War Graves Memorial bugler Derek Webb sounded the Last Post and Jim Leonard read from ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon. Wreaths were laid at the Cross of Sacrifice by the Mayor, William du Plooy ex member of the Royal Fleet Air Arm and serving s...

Restoration Man - George Clarke Channel 4’s George Clarke was up in Cumbria visiting a project on a 19 th century church in this week’s episode of ‘Restoration Man’ (Thursday Jan 19). Phil Evans and his partner had paid £128,000 for a dilapidated church in the picturesque village of Gamblesby in the North Pennines. Built in 1868 St John’s had stood empty for eight years when the young couple took on the challenge of converting it into a family home.  The church was built in a mixture of architectural styles and loosely based on the Victorian Gothic Revival.  George took time out from the build to visit the Chapel at Exeter College, Oxford designed by the doyen of Victorian Church architects Scott, but he could have just as easily popped into Swindon to see more examples of the great man’s work. George Gilbert Scott was born on July 13, 1811 at Gawcott, Buckinghamshire, the third son of Rev Thomas Scott and his wife Euphemia Lynch.  Scott moved to London ...

This 1950s aerial view of Swindon takes a broad sweep of Old Town from the junction at Okus Road and Kingshill, along Bath Road and Wood Street to the Goddard Arms Hotel at the top of the photograph. Okus Road takes its name from Okus Farm, which stood at the western end of Swindon Hill and was owned by the Goddard family from the mid 17th century.  The thatched Okus Barn, dating from the same time, survived into the 20th century but was demolished in 1975. Old Swindon Local Board records include a covenant for laying out new streets and sewers at Okus dated 1890 with building dating from around the turn of the 19th century. Kingshill House, former home of the Bowly family, was bought by the Borough and converted into a maternity hospital in the early 1930s.  This aerial view shows additional buildings in the grounds and also in front of neighbouring Victoria hospital. A collection of Nissan hut type structures stand on the site of the present day Savernake Stree...

Taken from the 1773 Andrews & Drury map of North Wiltshire A middle aged woman fends off a violent intruder and one local man had a very close call when a night time burglary didn’t go according to plan in October 1850. Miss Keziah Prior was well known in Lydiard Millicent where she kept a small grocer’s shop.  In 1851 the population of the North Wiltshire village was just 491.  Thomas Sadler farmed at Shaw where the parish boundary met that of Lydiard Tregoze.  John Bewley was at Parkside Farm, the former dower house of the St John family at Lydiard Park while John Hinder was at Parsonage Farm and the wealthy Mary Tuckey at Lower Shaw. Miss Sarah Hawkins was the schoolmistress and Thomas Howard the blacksmith.  There were just four shops in the village.  John Cowley and John Newith are both described as shopkeepers in trade directories of the time, while William Mouldon was a baker and shopkeeper and Keziah Prior ran a small grocer’s shop. ...

There should be champagne corks popping at Swindon Central Library today where the innovative free online image gallery has just notched up 2 million page views. The project was launched on June 22, 2009 with images from the local studies collection of photographs and ephemera.  And before long library visitors were bringing their own photographs to be scanned and added to the online collection.  Today the archive contains some 6,000 images. Among the photographs of local people and Swindon dignitaries is one of the last Lord of the Manor, Fitzroy Pleydell Goddard pictured here with his pet parrot at his home The Lawn. Images of Swindon suffragette Edith New (back row, left) include a photograph taken with members of the Women’s Social and Political Union in prison uniform and newspaper coverage of her attack on 10 Downing Street. Taken at the top of Victoria Street, could this be the oldest Swindon street scene?  The Swindon Advertiser building is on ...

This aerial view of Swindon fifty years ago moves out of the town centre to Stratton St. Margaret.  The photograph is dominated by the car body manufacturer, Pressed Steel factory, a new arrival in the late 1950s. As jobs declined at the railway works, Swindon Corporation set about attracting new industry to the town. Vickers-Armstrong at South Marston, Plessey Co and Marine Mountings at Wroughton were three wartime newcomers who stayed. Pressed Steel relocated to Swindon from the company headquarters at Cowley in Oxford, and was one of the early arrivals on the Parsonage Farm Industrial Estate at Bridge End Road, overlooking the railway tracks. Construction began on the plant in 1955 with production starting in 1956. During the 1960s Pressed Steel produced body parts for the Morris 1100, BMC sports cars and the Triumph 2000. By the summer of 1965 the workforce numbered more than 6,600 with the factory occupying 1,750,000 square feet. Also caught on camera at the...

The Windmill Hill Business Park in West Swindon with its futuristically designed buildings, opened to great acclaim in 1984. The area owes its name to the presence of a windmill in the vicinity, although not the one that stands in the Business Park today, which originally came from Chiseldon. Built in 1823, next to the cemetery on Butts Road, Chiseldon, the mill passed out of use in around 1892.  After that it was used as a stable and for storage purposes, until the St. Martin's Property group began reconstruction at the Windmill Hill site in January 1984. A building more authentic to the area is the former Marsh farmhouse presently used as office accommodation. The 101-acre dairy farm, once part of the Lydiard Park Estate, belonged to the St. John family.  The tithe map apportionments, produced in 1841, record ancient field names such as The Shannells and Picks Mead. Early 19th century Rate Books reveal that William Dore, founder of the ...

Preserved on a few sheets of paper in the Local Studies section are Richard Tarrant's memories of  'Swindon 80 odd years ago' written shortly before his death in 1926 aged 85. "Before you get to the Hermitage at the back of Mason's, there was a very large house, a brick house.  When Kinneir came to Swindon as a solicitor he began his practice there.  Very big house pleasant and beautiful gardens ...," writes Tarrant. Documents held at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham confirm that Henry Kinneir signed a 14 year lease on a "messuage or dwelling house with Stable Gardens Outbuildings Auction Room called Redville House," owned by John William Browne, an attorney and solicitor. The rent was fixed at £100 a year for the first eleven years dropping to £70 for the last three years of the tenancy. An inventory of fixtures and fittings taken in 1858 before Kinneir moved in, extended to the contents of the greenhouse and garde...

Plans for the Medical Fund flagship building had been in the pipeline for a number of years.  The committee paid £999 for a plot of Rolleston estate land when it came on the market in 1885 but it was another six years before construction began. Built in 1891 and opened the following year, Milton Road Baths soon became the hub of the Medical Fund activities. With a grand, glass covered entrance in Faringdon Road, the red brick building was designed by Swindon architect J.J. Smith at a cost of £10,000. Keeping up with the times, the Medical Fund committee installed both Turkish and Russian baths.  The Turkish bath with dry air heated rooms, followed by a full body wash and massage was seen as being ‘of great value as a sanitary and cleansing agent.’  The Russian baths were a variation on this theme, a vapour bath created by the throwing of water on hot stones, followed by a massage that involved being hit with a besom made of birch twigs and leaves. ...

Built in 1862 as a drill hall and armoury for the XI Wiltshire Volunteer Rifle Corps, the cottage hospital building in Swindon’s railway village began life designed for a completely different purpose. However, by the end of the 1860s the pressing need in the railway community was for a hospital.  The armoury was selected as being suitable for conversion and new premises was built for the Rifle Corps in the GWR Park. Accidents in the GWR Works were an everyday occurrence.  A gravestone in St. Mark’s churchyard records the death of 19 year old Frederick James Tucker ‘killed by burst boiler at Swindon works’ on June 18, 1855. A decade later and safety precautions had improved little.  Robert Hanks, 71, a fitter at the works, was crushed to death when a truck he was working under collapsed on top of him. Locomotive Carriage and Wagon Superintendent Joseph Armstrong proposed that the GWR Company pay for the conversion of the armoury property and that additional costs be me...