A personal history

In 1986 my husband moved to Swindon. After several years of unemployment, he left me and our two young children living in the coastal town in Pembrokeshire where he had grown up and where there was no work, to try his luck in Swindon.

We were so desperate as a family that he came not to paid employment, but as a volunteer with Swindon Cyrenians, a charitable organisation that worked with homeless people.  

The Swindon Cyrenians hostel was based in four terrace houses at the bottom of Farnsby Street while several of the volunteers were accommodated in a property in the railway village at No 1 Oxford Street.

A settlement in Old Swindon dates back millennia but New Swindon, the former industrial complex at the bottom of the hill, is barely 178 years old, and the town itself continues to this day to be a work in progress.

Farnsby Street today looks very different even to the place Steve came to in 1986. The four houses, all that remained of the Victorian street, stood in what is now a space in front of the multi storey car park and have since been demolished.

So, who lived in Farnsby Street and 1 Oxford Street in the 1880s, a hundred years before we moved to Swindon?

Building in Oxford Street in the railway village dates from 1853-4. Number one is an example of an eight roomed property and constituted four tenements built to house four families. The average occupancy of the properties in Oxford Street in the 1850s was 11 people per house although the census of 1881 reveals those living in No 1 far exceeded that number.

[Henry] Thomas Evans 37, a factory labourer and his wife Eliza and their six children aged between 13 and a year old.

Eighty-one-year-old Nancy Lee [Ley].

Edward Caffell, 36, another factory labourer, his wife Eliza and their eleven-year-old son.

Edward Humphries, 29, employed as a railway shunter, his wife and their three children, Mary 6, Evan 4 and two-month-old Rosa E.

Homes in Farnsby Street appear on the 1881 census. Development had begun in 1879 with work continuing into the 1880s when Charles Bishop and his then business partner Job Day were engaged in the development of the extensive Rolleston Estate. The four properties in Farnsby Street reveal more multi occupancy homes in 1881.

Mary Patterson and her widowed sister Margaret Alum lived at number one with several boarders. Dan W. Carter 27, a railway clerk, Edmund S. Jones 15, an apprentice engineer and James Spagnolette 20, an articled engineer. Fourteen-year-old Florence Hubert worked as a general servant looking after the household.

Edward Shaw 39, an auctioneer, lived at number 2 with his wife Martha and an eight-year-old niece.

Mary Rogers 49 and her sister Lydia lived at number 3, sharing the property with Samuel Tarrant 48, a railway clerk and Irving Armstrong 18, an articled pupil engineer.

Two young couples lived at number 4 – Charles Fouracre 37, a railway engine fitter and his wife Rhoda and William G. Dawkin 25, a housepainter, his wife Emily and their three-year-old son.

Accommodation in Swindon then, as in the 1980s and even up to the present day, was at a premium.

But then Steve knew nothing of the history of Swindon, nor the significance of his arrival in 1986. On what became known in the town as Black Wednesday he witnessed the closure of the railway works. He heard the Works hooter sound for the last time and watched hundreds and hundreds of men pour out of the Works entrance, many of whom would, like him, enter the ranks of the unemployed.

Fortunately for my family the voluntary job at the Cyrenian hostel led to a paid job for Steve and in 1987 we followed him here to a home in Park South.

I’ve been writing about Swindon’s history and the extraordinary people who have lived here ever since.

Farnsby Street c1964 published courtesy of Local Studies, Swindon Central Library.

For more stories visit the Radnor Street Cemetery blog, for link see above.