Swindon in the Past Lane

Innovation was the order of the day at Coleshill when work began on revamping the Earl of Radnor’s home farm.   The previous farmstead had already received the seal of approval from radical politician William Cobbett, who brought rural poverty to the attention of 19 th  century parliament. “I saw also at Coleshill, the most complete farmyard that I ever saw, and I believe there is in all England, many and complete as English farm yards are,” Cobbett wrote on a fact finding ride across southern  England in 1826. “And here, too, there is no misery amongst those who do the work,” Cobbett noted when he stopped off to view the Locust trees the Earl of Radnor had brought from him twenty years previously.  “Here all are comfortable; gaunt hunger here stares no man in the face.” The idea of this efficient, split level farmstead came from the Earl of Radnor’s land agent but it was architect George Lamb who designed the ground breaking farmstead.  ...

In 1966 Wiltshire County Planning Department conducted a survey of rural settlements in the Swindon countryside.  The area of Shaw and Washpool had one general store, a pub and a doctor's surgery.  There was a daily bus service into Swindon, roughly 5 miles away, and the settlement was on mains water and electricity, but had no gas.  The council had granted planning permission for two dwellings, which would increase the population by approximately six people. In the 1970s boundary changes extended the Swindon western limits to include the surrounding farmland up as far as Lydiard Park and the villages of Shaw and Nine Elms.  Factories, schools, shopping centres and thousands of homes were planned for this rural backwater. Shaw resident Mr Bill Selby 75, whose family history in the village stretched back 300 years, was pictured leaning on the village sign. "I think I shall buy a caravan and move away," he told the local press.  "All the green fields wh...

"There've been Odys farming in North Wilts for five hundred years," local resident Harold Ody proudly told Elspeth Huxley when she was writing her book  Gallipot Eyes – a Wiltshire Diary,  about Oaksey village in 1975. With such well established roots, Swindon based Ody family historians have a head start with local parish registers available on microfiche at Swindon Central Library and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham. Early parish records for St Mary's Church at Lydiard Tregoze reveal Richard Ody confirming the appointment of the churchwardens in 1742.  It was his descendant Noah Ody, who with the help of his wife Sarah, populated many of the local farms. Noah and his sons were tenants, at various times during the 19th century, at Hayes Knoll and Bagbury Farms in Purton, Haxmoor in Purton Stoke, Braydon, Marsh, Flaxlands and Glebe Farms in Lydiard Tregoze and Lower Shaw Farm in the parish of Lydiard Millicent.  It was the couple's ...

Today Wick Farmhouse is a substantial six bedroom house overlooking the Prinnels housing development in West Swindon. Once part of the extensive Bolingbroke estate, the former 150 acre dairy farm dates back to the medieval period. Aerial photographs taken in the 1970s clearly show the ridge and furrow pattern of open field farming. During the 19th century Wick Farm was home to Jonas Clarke senior for over 26 years. The Clarke family were pretty unconventional by Victorian social conventions. Although married in his late twenties, Jonas soon began an alliance with a servant girl called Alice Pinnell. Thirty years and seven children later they eventually married at St. Mary's Church, Lydiard Tregoze in 1853, after the death of Jonas' first wife. After Jonas senior's death in 1862 the tenancy at Wick Farm passed to his son, Jonas Clarke junior. A desirable property, the Clarke family obviously wanted to keep their stake in the farm, resulting in a Victorian mystery ...

Nothing much out of the ordinary ever happened in the small Victorian village of Hook, Lydiard Tregoze. Until 1854 when an event occurred that shocked the small community to its foundations. William Wright had only lived in the village a few months. No one knew much about him or Ann Collins, the woman who sometimes lived with him. Wright had served in the navy but after his discharge had adopted a nomadic lifestyle, travelling the country, staying in one place only as long as the work lasted. He told how he met fellow traveller Ann Collins some three years previously. By the summer of 1854 the couple and Ann's young daughter were staying in a lodging house in Wootton Bassett. Wright obtained a job as a blacksmith in nearby Hook where he rented a cottage in the village. However Ann was reluctant to join him and when she did she stayed but a short while. She told him she was going to Lancashire to visit her family but Wright soon discovered she had returned to the lodging...