Admiral Lord Jellicoe lays one of the four corner stones of the St John's School War Memorial Cairn, 22 January 1918

The personal archive of Ernest Golledge reveals the effect of the First World War on the life of St John’s Boys’ Elementary School in Ealing, of which he was the inspirational headmaster.

Perhaps the first impact of the war was the departure, on 14 November 1914, of one of its masters, enrolled as an instructor in the ‘New Model Army’. The second was an increased number of visitors in uniform. Adept at attracting ‘celebrities’ into the school – he had even persuaded Shackleton to give a talk there – he soon arranged visits by Lieutenant-Commander Norman Holbrook, V.C. – ‘a real schoolboy’s hero, a man of the sea, sunburnt, jolly and breezy’ – and an old friend, an habitué of the nearby Hendon Aerodrome, Lieutenant Louis Noel of the French Flying Corps.

With mounting casualties among old boys, Ernest soon decided to erect a war memorial in the playground, one of the earliest to be raised, and to have some of its stones placed in position by visiting dignitaries. The first of these was the Hon. J.G. Jenkins, late Premier of Australia. Most of the heavy stones had been lifted into place by the boys themselves. A number of wounded soldiers, some with their arms in slings, were on hand to witness the ceremony.

In October 1916, Ernest invited no less a personage than Field Marshal Lord French, commander-in-chief of the British Home Forces, to ‘fix a corner stone on the “Cairn”’. Surprisingly, Lord French was ‘very much inclined to accede to your request’. His visit, postponed till 19 September 1917, despite much badgering from Ernest, lasted a mere ‘quarter of an hour’, during which he pinned the Distinguished Conduct Medal on the chest of a St John’s old boy. Private William Bristow of the Rifle Brigade, whom Ernest described as ‘an average type of boy’, had crawled under German wire entanglement at Armentières to lob a grenade into a crowded trench, and was to spend two and a half years in hospital for his pains.

Princess Louise stands by the unfinished War Memorial. This was probably her first visit to St John's, in 1916

The patriotic Ernest encouraged his boys to invest in the ‘War Loan’, an initiative in which children all over the country were involved. H.R.H. the Princess Louise lent her support and duly visited the school. She returned in the autumn of 1917 with her brother, the Duke of Connaught, who applied ‘a quantity of cement’ to the cairn before unveiling a portrait of Lord Kitchener. In January 1918, it was pointed out in the press that special significance was attached to the four corner stones of the cairn. Three of these had been laid by Lord French, the Duke of Connaught and Lord Jellicoe. Ernest was said to have in mind the Chief of Staff, General Sir William Robertson, to lay the fourth. In the event, it was Haig himself who performed the duty, probably late in 1920.

It is disillusioning to find a far from united home front. Every headmaster was obsessed with attendance figures. With much of the working population away at the front, able-bodied schoolboys were in high demand as workers. As a result, the self-interested tradesmen of Ealing had lured almost a quarter of Ernest’s boys from their classrooms – illegally – and, by December 1916, he was barely managing to hold the school together. A cynical, or pragmatic Mayor had instructed the attendance officer to turn a blind eye to the ‘wholesale employment of boys – as errand boys’, which had eventually reduced the school roll by nearly a quarter.

A lack of sufficient fuel that winter, an exceptionally harsh one, would hardly have helped. On 5 February 1917 the temperature in the unheated classrooms fell below freezing. The only option for the shivering boys was a lesson in ‘Drill’. Ernest caught a ‘severe chill’, as did ‘several of the teachers’ and ‘many of the children’. Such conditions were not just to be endured for a single day, but for weeks on end. ‘No fires in afternoon and no coal although plenty on order. Secretary informed.’ There is little sense of a community pulling together in adversity. Ernest seems almost to have been abandoned by the school managers, the local authority and by the townsfolk in general. Thefts at the school – of an umbrella, coats and Ernest’s own bicycle – were a further irritant.

In addition, there was the general disruption that came from being in a state of war. On 3 October 1917, pupils on their way back to school after dinner were sent home by police because of an air-raid warning, a Zeppelin looming overhead. In January, Ernest logs the endless queuing for provisions in the open air as a cause of increased illness among the children.

The unfolding national tragedy of course added to the sense of gloom. Ernest was intensely proud of the part played by his staff and old boys in the war effort. By the end of the war, no fewer than 475 former pupils had visited St John’s in khaki, an astonishing indication of their loyalty to him and the school. Ernest made active interventions on behalf of his pupils, for example recommending suitable candidates to the newly-formed Royal Flying Corps. He also kept a tally of the school’s ‘War Honours’. These would eventually amount to a Military Cross, three Distinguished Conduct Medals, eight Military Medals and two mentions in dispatches. Ernest preserved the stories of many of them in a scrapbook.

Of all the stories from the war, none is more poignant and striking than that of an old boy, Blake, who visited the school on 3 March 1916. Giving the boys ‘a very interesting account of his experiences in “Suvla Bay”,’ Blake ‘pathetically told how he and another old boy – Keeley – had just been talking about the “old school” when a shell burst over them and when he came to himself (unhurt) he saw poor Keeley lying “blown to pieces”. N.B. both lads were under 18 years of age.’

Blake, whose head must have been ringing from the blast, told the boys that his eye was caught by a piece of paper that was fluttering on the ground in front of him. He had picked it up and examined it. Then he remembered that Kealey (Ernest misspells the name) had had it in his hand when the shell had struck. It was a photograph of the school-yard at St John’s. Blake had brought it with him to show the boys.

Blake was again on parade at the school, as a police constable, on Empire Day 1924, when Princess Louise, by now a firm admirer of Ernest Golledge, presented him with the Police Medal. Bemused, if not reluctant heroes, the poor, undernourished, often lice-infested boys of St John’s School, many of whom had never seen the sea or even been to London, had learned much from their magnificent headmaster about ‘playing the game’.

On Golledge, see also http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/gleanings/ernest-golledge-headmaster-of-st-john’s-school-ealing-and-the-visits-of-the-antarctic-explorers-ernest-shackleton-teddy-evans-and-frank-wild/. For a full account of St John’s School, Ealing, during the First World War, see Rupert Willoughby, A Head of his Time: The Life and Opinions of Ernest Golledge, Reforming Headmaster, 1872 – 1951.

A local historian believes he has discovered the Basingstoke house in which Katherine of Aragon spent a night in 1501, on her way to marry the elder son of Henry VII.

Katherine is known to have passed through the town on her journey from Plymouth. She was the guest of Richard Kingsmill, a prominent Basingstoke citizen.

Kingsmill’s house was on the south side of Winchester Street, most of which he owned. It would have to have been very large, as well as grand, to accommodate Katherine’s entourage. The buildings in Winchester Street today are mostly modern, with none appearing to match the description of a grand Tudor building.

However, Rupert Willoughby believes he has identified the house as the one immediately west of Barclays Bank, which was long ago converted into shops. He discovered it by chance while researching a new history of the town.

He describes his book, Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture, as a quest for the lost Basingstoke, which he believes has been ruined by post-war developers. To his delight and surprise, he discovered that much of the old ‘Top of Town’ had been preserved, including all but one of its historic coaching inns.

He considers the Maidenhead Inn in Winchester Street, first mentioned in 1671, to have been the former Kingsmill house. Large town houses were particularly suitable for conversion into inns and this is known to have happened to Sir James Deane’s house next door – on the site now occupied by Barclays Bank – which became the Angel.

The Maidenhead has added historical interest as the landlady, Mrs Martin, was an acquaintance of Jane Austen. Jane’s father is thought to have been a member of the Hants Club which regularly met there. Mrs Martin organised the Town Hall assemblies that are re-created in her novels.

Mr Willoughby points to evidence of an archway for coaches that has since been filled in. He calls for an urgent investigation by architectural historians, so that the date of the building can be established, and steps taken to ensure that it is properly preserved.

Katherine of Aragon’s marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales, which took place shortly after her visit to Basingstoke, was an event that changed the course of history, as it gave her second husband, Henry VIII, the pretext for his divorce.

The people of Basingstoke are likely to have turned out in large numbers to greet her, though they may not have been impressed by her Spanish entourage. Sir Thomas More was to describe them as ‘undersized, barefoot pygmies’ and ‘refugees from hell’.

Rupert Willoughby’s book, Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture, is available now from all good stockists, priced at £10.99. For more information, see http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/books.

The Brocas monument in Bramley Church. The couple were patrons of Sir John Soane

(The following is a press release dated January 2008)

HISTORIAN FINDS LOST ARCHITECTURAL TREASURE AT SHERBORNE ST JOHN

Lost work by Sir John Soane, one of England’s most influential architects, may have been rediscovered at Sherborne St John – five miles from its original location.

The discovery has been made by historian Rupert Willoughby at Beaurepaire Park, one of Hampshire’s least-known treasures.

Beaurepaire was the seat, from 1353 to 1873, of the Brocas family, whose land stretched continuously from Burghfield Hill to Basingstoke.

Set in glorious parkland and surrounded by a medieval moat, the remains of the eighteenth-century mansion, wrecked by fire during the Second World War, were beautifully restored in the 1960s.

A prominent feature of the property is its moat-bridge entrance – a pair of elaborate wrought-iron gates supported by tall, brick pillars, each surmounted by the Moor’s-head crest of the Brocas family.

The Soane gates at Beaurepaire - formerly at Wokefield

The romantic, often dramatic story of Beaurepaire and the Brocases – including royal visits and a lengthy Civil-War siege when it was defended by the lady of the house – is told by Rupert Willoughby in his book Sherborne St John and the Vyne in the Time of Jane Austen.

It was while researching the book that Mr Willoughby discovered a reference to the construction of the bridge. ‘An old Bramley farmer called William Clift, who was born in 1828, recalls the event in his memoirs. According to Clift, the “large iron gates at the entrance over the moat” were brought from Wokefield Park, on the Brocas estate at Stratfield Mortimer, which had been the family’s favoured residence in the eighteenth century. Clift’s father provided the timber for the bridge. This occurred during his childhood and presumably coincided with the sale of Wokefield in 1839.

‘Soane, the foremost architect of the day and a local boy, brought up in Reading, had worked for Mrs Brocas at Bramley Church. He built the so-called Brocas aisle, completed in 1802, which houses the monument to her late husband.

‘It appeared that the couple had earlier employed him at Wokefield, where he made alterations to the house and designed a new gateway in 1788.’

Mr Willoughby found a drawing for the Wokefield gates in the archives at Sir John Soane’s Museum, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – the architect’s former home which he left to the nation, along with all its contents – and compared them with those at Beaurepaire.

‘The entrance at Wokefield was much wider, so the iron gates are not the same. The brick posts now at Beaurepaire are, however, identical to those in Soane’s drawing, complete with the Moor’s-head crests. Plaques bearing the Brocas arms of a lion rampant are missing, but they may have been damaged in transit or never even executed. Not all the relevant drawings survive. The likelihood that Soane erected these posts at Wokefield in 1788 and that they were transported to Beaurepaire in 1839 is, however, very strong.’

The records show that Soane made nine journeys to Wokefield in 1788 and charged £650 for his services, a substantial sum. Soane was at the height of his profession. In the same year he was appointed architect to the Bank of England. The building was his masterpiece and its demolition in the 1920s has been described as the twentieth century’s ‘greatest architectural crime in the City of London’.

Rupert Willoughby’s book, Sherborne St John and the Vyne in the Time of Jane Austen, is available at all good stockists, priced at £10.99. Sir John Soane’s Museum in London is open throughout the year and admission is free.

Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870)

Commenting on my previous blog, my brother (a keen smoker) writes of Sir Walter Ralegh: ‘I am bewildered as to why he was beheaded. He is a national hero not least for introducing tobacco to this country. I still have a copy of the famous painting of him in Budleigh Salterton just outside the gentlemen’s club on the seafront.’ We were both brought up on Millais’s ‘Boyhood of Ralegh’, which hung in our bedroom in our grandparents’ house in the town, close to Ralegh’s birthplace at Hayes Barton. The same house, which had an enormous library and stained glass windows, and paths made up of pebbles from the beach, had been the residence of Dr Brushfield, the distinguished antiquary, to whose ‘Raleghana’ I owe much of the information in my article.

My brother may enjoy this image of Sir Walter’s tobacco pouch:

http://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=64809&viewType=detailView.

Made of leather, clay, bamboo, wood and silver, it dates from the period of his incarceration in the Tower and is inscribed ‘W.R. 1617’, within a heart. A further inscription reads: ‘Comes meus fuit in illo miserrimo tempore’ (He was my companion during that unhappy time). Ralegh gave the pouch to a friend, Sir Henry Spelman. Thence it passed to Ralph Whitfield of the Barbican and by descent through the Whitfield family until acquired by Sir Richard Wallace. When I visited the Wallace Collection the other day I was disappointed to discover that it is not on display there, but is kept in the Reserve Vault in the basement.

Sir Walter Ralegh and his son Wat, 1602

On the eve of his execution, Sir Walter Ralegh bade farewell to his wife, Bess, at the Abbey Gatehouse at Westminster. She was distraught, and particularly anxious that his body should be given up to her for burial. ‘It is well, dear Bess, that thou mayest dispose of that dead which thou hadst not always the disposing of when alive,’ he said.

Key to West Horsley church

Ralegh went bravely to the scaffold on the morning of 29 October 1618. It took two strokes of the axe to sever his head which, bleeding profusely, was then held up for the inspection of the stunned onlookers. The silence was broken when a clear voice called out from the throng: ‘We have not such another head to be cut off’. It was an expression of the general mood.

Having been ‘showed on both sides of the scaffold’, Ralegh’s head was ‘put into a red leather bag, and his wrought velvet gown thrown over it, which was afterwards conveyed away in a mourning coach of his lady’s’. As she had feared, Bess was to be denied the disposing of her husband’s body. It was buried not at her brother’s church of Beddington in Surrey, as she would have wished, but in St Margaret’s, Westminster, on the south side of the altar.

Filing cabinet marking Ralegh tomb

As for the head, it ‘seems that Bess had it embalmed and kept it with her to her dying day, and after her it came to her son Carew, with whom it was buried’ (A.L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, London 1962, p.319). Bess died in 1647, having lived with Carew, from 1628, in the manor-house at East Horsley in Surrey (which he purchased), and from 1643 in that of neighbouring West Horsley, where he succeeded his uncle, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton (Rowse, pp.329, 330). They also had a house in St Martin’s Lane, Westminster: Carew retired to it late in life, after selling his Surrey estates. He was ‘killed’ in unknown circumstances towards the end of 1666, and buried close to his father in St Margaret’s Church.

However, the parish register of West Horsley records Carew Ralegh’s re-burial in the church there in September 1680. According to the evidence of a young lad who witnessed the event – the son of Sir Edward Nicholas, to whom Carew had sold the estate – he was reunited in the tomb with his father’s head.

The tomb – in a side chapel, surrounded now by splendid monuments to the Nicholas family – is unmarked, but a kindly and well-informed member of the West Horsley Decorative and Fine Arts Society, to whom I lectured the other day, admitted me to the church with a magnificent key and pointed out the position to me, precisely under the front right-hand leg of the filing cabinet in my picture, but occupied until quite recently by a monstrous Victorian organ.

Nicholas monument in West Horsley Church

No.2 Dover Street, Canterbury (second building from right) - scene of Patrick Leigh Fermor's romantic encounter with Nellie Lemar. The city walls are in the distance

The King’s School, Canterbury, in the precincts of the Cathedral, is reputedly the oldest school in the world. Believed to have been founded by St Augustine in 597, it was incorporated by Henry VIII in 1541. Its foundationers are called ‘King’s Scholars’ in his memory.

The stupendous Norman staircase at the King's School, Canterbury - Galpin's in the background

For Patrick Leigh Fermor, who attended the school from 1929 to 1932, there was ‘a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity’ (Time of Gifts, p.15). Paddy boarded in The Grange (now the music department), where his housemaster was Alec Macdonald. Humane and unconventional, Macdonald struggled against the prevailing snobbery, reminding his boys on one occasion that they would all have ‘common’ accents if they ‘lived a hundred yards from here’. I remember that as late as the 1970s, the boys at my own nearby prep school – a ‘feeder’ for King’s – gave short shrift to anyone affecting such an accent.

Though a natural rebel and misfit, Paddy threw himself into school life. It was at Canterbury that he discovered Horace’s Ode 1.9, ‘To Thaliarcus’, famously recited in a mountain-cave in Crete to General Kreipe. However, ‘it was a one-sided love in the end’. Paddy’s downfall was what he described as ‘a bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature … Translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger; as I seem to have been unusually active and restless, the result was chaos’ (Time of Gifts, p.16).

The Old Grange - Patrick Leigh Fermor's boarding house

Inflamed by images of ‘long-necked, wide-eyed pre-Raphaelite girls’, Paddy flirted in desperation with one of the school kitchen-maids, who is described by his contemporary, Alan Watts (In My Own Way, London 1973, p.73), as ‘dowdy’. He then discovered a more deserving object of his gallantries in the person of a grocer’s daughter, one Nellie Lemar, who was ‘the vision of just such a being’.

Paddy describes how his ‘latest wanderings’ had led him ‘beyond the Cattle Market’ to an area of the town – just outside the city walls – that was decidedly on the wrong side of the tracks. Dover Street was – and is still, for it survived the ‘Baedeker Raid’ that devastated much of the surrounding area – made up of creaking jettied buildings of great age and mean Victorian terraced houses that would have been occupied by the very poorest members of the community, interspersed with a sprinkling of disreputable-looking pubs and beer shops. To frequent such an area ‘broke a number of taboos too deep-rooted and well-understood to need any explicit veto’.

A quaint mixture of styles - the farther end of Dover Street

Paddy describes the greengrocer’s shop that Nellie ‘tended for her father’ as ‘a sweet-smelling cave set dimly with flowers and multicoloured fruit and vegetation’. She ‘was twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty … I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent accent. This sudden incongruous worship may have been a bore but she was too good-natured to show it, and perhaps she was puzzled by the verse which came showering in.’

Heading for the shop as often as he could, Paddy was hardly inconspicuous in his black clothes, wing-collar and boater. ‘My footsteps were discreetly dogged, my devices known and after a week, I was caught red-handed – holding Nellie’s hand, that is to say, which is about as far as this suit was ever pressed; we were sitting in the back-shop on upturned apple-baskets – and my schooldays were over.’ An exasperated Alec Macdonald, who regarded Paddy as a persistent troublemaker, had duly sent him to the headmaster and he had been summarily ‘sacked’ (Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, London 2012, pp.20-7).

His expulsion from King’s was a considerable setback for Paddy, who had yet to sit his School Certificate exams. Had he remained at school, he might have ended up at Sandhurst or at Oxford. As it was, he was to embark in December 1933 on the epic journey across Europe that would take him, on foot, to Constantinople and beyond, immortalised in his trilogy, The Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road. Literary history owes much to Nellie Lemar, without whom these books would never have been written.

According to Kelly’s Directory of Kent and Sussex (1927 edition, p.157), the premises of ‘Edward Jn. Lemar, greengro.’, were at no.2, Dover Street. (The Lemars were well entrenched here: I note that a Mrs Emily Mary Lemar was the landlady of the Bee Hive Public House, further down the street at no.52.) I am glad of the opportunity to recognise this literary landmark, pictured above, which today is the Lanna Thai Restaurant. It is otherwise unmarked.

Not a suitable area for well-bred boys

St Andrew's Church, Sherborne St John

There was great consternation in St James’s, Bramley, last winter, when the boiler failed, and doughty congregants were left perishing in the pews. However warm the welcome, church-going became a distinctly uncomfortable experience!

To generations of our ancestors, however, central heating would have seemed an unimaginable luxury. Until the nineteenth century, in the absence of all the comforts and conveniences that we now take for granted, attendance at a country church was almost invariably a penance, if not an ordeal.

Vivid descriptions of Sherborne St John, the neighbouring parish, remind us of the sheer discomfort and, frankly, the squalor of our relatively recent past. In 1827, the lordship of the manor was inherited by Wiggett Chute. The estate had been mismanaged for a century and was, in Wiggett’s view, a blot on the landscape. A typical Victorian reformer, he had a keen sense of responsibility towards his tenants and was determined to sweep away the unwholesome relics of the past. He was to do so very successfully, and was the architect – literally – of the prosperous community of today.

Sherborne St John: not so pretty then

The Sherborne of two hundred years ago was an agricultural settlement perched on a sea of mud, with cattle and horses passing to and fro in areas where they are never seen today. There were open streams across the roads that served as sewers (all drinking water was drawn from back-yard wells). The villagers lived in ancient, dilapidated cottages with thatched roofs and, usually, only one bedroom, although they often had large families. Such cottages were not then regarded as picturesque, but as slums.

Sherborne would have seemed much busier and livelier than today, with most people employed at or close to home. The workshops of the various tradesmen – the carpenter, miller, blacksmith, tailor, shoemaker, brewer and so on – were scenes of noise and activity. The place would have swarmed with children, as there was no school to keep them occupied. It was Wiggett Chute who founded the school at Sherborne St John, on the site of a working farm, directly opposite the church. Much to his outrage, the churchyard had been regularly used as a pasture for sheep.

The medieval church was still intact. It bore no resemblance to the spacious and well-ordered church of today, another of Chute’s creations. The seating was crammed into the original nave and chancel. With a low, lathe-and-plaster ceiling that sounds positively dangerous, the building was stuffy in the summer, and freezing cold in the winter.

Prominent among the interior features were the boxed pews of the ratepayers, which occupied the top end of the nave, on either side of a single, narrow aisle. These were high, narrow and uncomfortable. In some cases, there was barely space to kneel.

Whilst the ratepayers sat bolt upright in their allotted pews, the poor of the parish were segregated to the rear according to their sex. They perched on make-shift seats that were ‘not much better than benches with backs’, females on one side of the aisle, males on the other. Attendance was generally good, probably a majority of the village population. Some of the men had to be accommodated in a gallery at the back. They included the best singers, loosely affiliated into a ‘choir’, accompanied by a band consisting of both wind and stringed instruments. Their music, of the type evoked by Thomas Hardy in his novels, is described as ‘primitive’.

The seating arrangements at St Andrew’s were much the same as in any country church. A bizarre and possibly unique feature, however, was the ‘Esquire’s Pew’. So far forward in the nave that it was almost in the chancel, it is described as ‘a large square room with a ceiling over it’. The Chutes could only see out by standing up and peering through a narrow grill. Remarkably, this was a double-decker pew, as there was an upper gallery, reached by a narrow flight of steps. The overhead pew belonged to their grand neighbours, the Brocases of Beaurepaire, although they no longer used it.

Brocas monument in Bramley Church

The Brocases had long since abandoned St Andrew’s for St James’s, Bramley, where their supremacy was not in dispute. The rival families must at one time have had adjacent pews, but one or other of them must forever have been nudging his pew a little further forward, in an attempt to outrank his rival. Eventually, having crossed the line into the chancel, they must have agreed to a compromise in the form of the double-decker pew, ‘in which arrangement,’ says Wiggett Chute in his memoirs, ‘the Brocas appear to have certainly got the upper hand’.

One wonders what the parishioners had made of it. Needless to say, those sitting immediately behind the pew – apparently these were the servants at the Vyne, well forward of ‘the poor’ and clearly ranking high in the village pecking order – would have had no view at all.

This would not have concerned many of the male congregants, whose attendance was unwilling but a condition of their hiring agreement as labourers on the estate. They were not obliged to stay awake. All along the walls on the men’s side, there were permanent stains that had been made by their greasy heads as they slumbered during years of interminable services.

It is as well that they were clad in their warm peasant’s smocks, as winters were harsher then than they are today, there were no double doors, and a single stove provided the only heating. There were no lights, either, except for the pulpit candles, which the clerk would only light immediately before the sermon. The stove almost invariably smoked, adding to the general discomfort.

Few, if any, took part in the responses. Many were unable to read. The lugubrious parish clerk, Smallbones, was himself barely literate. One of his duties was to call up the children to recite their Catechism, a terrifying ordeal. Otherwise they must have been bored stiff. There was a lot of bad behaviour, and Smallbones was constantly administering discipline with a stick. The worst troublemakers could expect to be beaten with the bell ropes after the service.

The Vyne, seat of the Chute family, where Jane Austen's brother dined every Sunday

Presiding over these strange scenes was the vicar, Jane Austen’s brother James, dressed in his black gown and perhaps with powdered hair. There is no knowing whether he preached a lively sermon. Perhaps, like his father, he kept a collection of his own sermons and used them again and again. They were probably sprinkled with archaisms, uncompromisingly erudite and far above the heads of most of the congregation.

The later nineteenth century was marked by the widespread renovation or even rebuilding of country churches, the removal of boxed pews, the introduction of organs and the composition of lively and inspiring hymns, all of which transformed the experience of going to church. Wiggett Chute was in the vanguard of this movement. James Austen’s son was to sum up his achievement as a landlord: it was, he said a general ‘draining and letting in of air and sunshine to the dark places of the earth’. The reforms of Wiggett Chute exemplify in miniature the general improvement in our lives that we owe to the Victorians.

Rupert Willoughby is the author of Sherborne St John and the Vyne in the Time of Jane Austen. See www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/books.