2023-2024
July 2024: Highways and Byways: The History of our Footpaths
Our speaker on 8 July 2024 was Bob Evans, a local historian and keen rambler. Bob began his talk by explaining that our footpaths and byways are a direct result of human locomotion through the landscape. Some routes between places have a long history such as the Ridgeway or Icknield Way, Trod’s on the North York Moors, and Abbots Way in Somerset. Later paths that led to water and other places started to become managed from the Middle Ages, but at this time no legal definition existed and so paths could be argued about. Maps are made to show land ownership, so paths are often left out of them. By the mid-18th Century, the country began to transition from an open field structure to enclosed land; maps were updated and, while some paths were recorded, lots were lost.
In the late 19th Century, paths began to become classified and are generally categorised by width and surface. Main Roads (1879) were the widest and best maintained (many became Trunk Roads from 1936); many of the rest had lower status as bridleways at most The ownership of these paths slowly moved to local government, with the larger routes (highways) managed by the district council and the smaller paths (byways and footpaths) by the parish council. Over time – particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century – our paths start to become at risk due to development and growth.
From the mid-19th century, numerous groups (Open Space Society, Peak and Northern Paths Society) start to emerge to seek to protect spaces from being overdeveloped and paths being lost. In the early 20th century, rambling starts and increases the popularity of walking in nature. These groups campaigned for a higher right of access, with the first key piece of legislation, the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, delivering national parks and, for the first time, recording paths. The Oxford area had rambling societies from the 1920s and local champions, notably ‘Colonel’ d’Arcy Dalton. Access was enhanced in 2000 when the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CRoW) delivered the right to roam on mountains, moors, heaths and downs. Thankfully, we enjoy a rich path network in the local area, so take a moment to put on your walking shoes and explore!
June 2024: From the Valleys to the Spires: how the Welsh came to Oxford
Our speaker on 10 June was Sharron Jenkinson to whom we were very grateful for coming at short notice when the original speaker had to pull out due to ill-health.
Economic hardship during the 1920s in Wales was on the increase due to a decline in coal exports after WW1 and cheaper imports from abroad. Pay and conditions continued to decline even for those who still had work, these factors led to strikes and political action. In 1926 the general strike lasted 9 days and the Welsh coal miners’ strike lasted 9 months. This was later followed by a hunger march in 1927 to London from Wales.
It wasn’t long before those facing uncertainty in Wales heard of the job opportunities at Morris Motors, Pressed Steel and MG in Oxford. Welsh migrants in turn told friends and relations to join them and by January 1929, 250 men and boys had been offered work in Cowley. Noting the trend in migration from Wales to Oxford a speculative Welsh builder Frederick Moss arrived in Oxford to take advantage of the increased demand for housing. He was responsible for building numerous estates in the interwar years, including Florence Park which was exclusively for the rental market. Moss later became an Oxford City Councillor and remained a prominent member of the local community.
Amongst the Welsh migrants were former choir members and soon the Cowley Choir was formed. It grew in numbers and reputation becoming the Oxford Welsh Prize Glee Singers (1931) and later the Oxford Welsh Male Voice Choir (1978). Today they continue to be a very active part of the local community and preserve the heritage of the Welsh migrants. The Welsh migrants also had a significant impact on trade unionism and politics in Oxford, by 1937 over 90% of the Cowley workforce were in the TGWU and most shop stewards were migrants. They also influenced the local political scene with Labour becoming a force in Conservative Oxford. There is no doubt the Welsh migrants left a rich and lasting legacy on the City of Spires.
May 2024: Morris’ Motopolis: the motor works and the transformation of Oxford
Simon Wenham was our speaker on 13 May. Morris Motors, founded in Oxford by William Morris in 1912, significantly transformed the city. Morris not only established Oxford as a major car producer in Britain, but his company’s success rippled throughout the city.
The Morris Motors factory in Cowley became a central hub, employing a large portion of the city’s workforce. Associated industries like car body production also sprung up around the factory. This economic boom led to Oxford becoming a leader in British car manufacturing.
William Morris, later known as Lord Nuffield, wasn’t just an industrialist. His wealth funded philanthropic initiatives like the Nuffield College at Oxford University and the Nuffield Health organization. These long-lasting contributions continue to shape the city’s educational and healthcare landscape.
Though Morris Motors merged with Austin in 1952, its legacy lives on. The Mini, still produced at the Cowley plant (now owned by BMW), is a direct descendant of the early Morris Motors vehicles. In short, Morris Motors put Oxford on the map as a car city, brought prosperity to its residents, and left a lasting mark on the city’s social fabric.
April 2024: Tea, Coffee and Chocolate: how the British first fell in love with caffeine
Melanie King gave a lively talk on how our favourite drinks originated outside Great Britain but all arrived on our shores between 1650 and 1657. They had a lasting impact on our diet and societal norms. These beverages were often met with controversy during their early years and much fake news surrounded them – that tea affected marital harmony, coffee affected fertility in men, and excessive chocolate consumption by pregnant mothers might turn their babies brown. Thankfully none of these myths held true.
Tea (Camellia sinensis), an evergreen shrub, is native to East Asia and likely originated in the borderlands of southwestern China and northern India. A Chinese legend says that Emperor Shen Nung accidentally discovered tea when leaves from a nearby plant blew into a pot of boiling water; it is well-documented that tea consumption in China likely goes back thousands of years. In the early 1600s, the British East India Company started bringing it back from Asia and tea was first sold in a London coffeehouse in 1657, although its consumption was limited to the elite (royalty and aristocracy). In 1706 Thomas Twining opened the first dedicated tea shop in London and, by the mid-1700s, falling prices allowed the working class to start enjoying the beverage. By the 1800s the popularity of tea secured it forever as a national drink. Tea remains an important part of British culture enjoyed throughout the day from breakfast to afternoon tea.
Coffee (Coffea or Arabica coffee) is a shrub or small tree native to Africa, Madagascar, South Asia, South-east Asia and Australia. Legend says that it was discovered by an Ethiopian goat herder who noticed how energetic his goats were after eating the berries and decided to try it himself. It was later adopted by monks to help them stay alert during the long hours of prayer. In the late 1500s coffee arrived in Britain via the Dutch East India Company and the first coffee house in England was established in Oxford in 1650. Coffee houses flourished and became centres for enlightenment, where writers, artists and thinkers gathered. By 1700 coffee houses become ingrained in British social life and even faced suspicion from the government because of the political discussions that happened within. Coffee consumption and houses later declined due to government regulations and the growing popularity of tea. Today there are a variety of coffees on offer and specialist coffee houses seem to be growing again in popularity.
Chocolate (Theobroma cacao), a small evergreen tree, is native to the tropical rainforests of the Americas. The cacao pods containing the seeds grow directly from the trunk. Its name meaning ‘food of the gods’ originated in Mesoamerica with the Maya and Aztecs, although their drink was bitter and made from ground cacao beans, cornmeal, chilli peppers and spices. Spanish conquistadors brought the cocoa beans back to Spain and Europeans transformed the bitter spicy beverage into a much sweeter one that might be recognised today. While hot chocolate houses thrived initially, chocolate bars eventually became the more popular form. Chocolate today remains a popular warm, comforting and indulgent drink enjoyed by many.
So, next time you raise a cup, remember the fascinating journeys these drinks have taken!
March 2024: Rose Hill – an Oxford suburb of surprising contrasts and great historical interest
Our speaker, Liz Woolley, began her talk by pointing out that Rose Hill is often thought of as a modern settlement but in fact the area had been occupied throughout the centuries. During the development of the northern part of the estate in 1935, Iron Age ditches and two Roman pottery kilns were discovered. Later in medieval times, this area was mainly surrounded by fields and some forest existed to the south known as ‘The Grove’ (mentioned in the Doomsday Book) and a few oak trees from this grove still survive.
In the 18th century, Rose Hill was a small hamlet between the villages of Iffley and Cowley on the road to London. It was noted as a desirable place to live based on its elevated location overlooking the city of Oxford. In the 19th century, it gained a Methodist Chapel and by this time the ‘King of Prussia’ public house was well established. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Rose Hill Cemetery opened.
In the 20th century after the First World War, there was a clear need for houses in the local area, but the City Council had always been reluctant to get involved in providing housing. This reluctance was overcome by the 1930 Greenwood Act, which empowered local authorities to identify and clear slum areas and replace poor housing with new builds. The growing car industry in Oxford also created a large demand for cheap housing for the working population and, by 1931, there were over 5,000 applications on the City Council’s register for housing.
The City Council responded by building council houses at numerous locations including Rose Hill. The Planning Office took considerable care over the design to ensure the estate had a sensible housing density and pleasant open spaces so that the houses got enough sunlight, as well as the estate having a uniformity of design. The first estate of 145 houses was completed in 1935, while the second part of the estate was mostly finished four years later. The final part of the development of the Rose Hill estate took place after the Second World War when most of the houses were prefabricated due to a shortage of labour and skills in the post-war period.
Today the estate features a primary school, a community centre, allotments and, nearby, the Rivermead Nature Park. It has changed much since its original inception, but still enjoys many of the open spaces and green communal areas established during its development. You can find out more about Rose Hill through the Oxford Preservation Trust’s website, including a historical walk around the area.
February 2024: Tracing your roots: a beginner’s guide to unearthing your UK family history
Genealogy and family history were the subject of our February meeting when James Thorber from the Abingdon Branch of the Berkshire Family History Society came to talk to us about researching your genealogy. He began by explaining the important difference between genealogy and family history: ‘genealogy’ is the creation of your family tree based on available records, whereas ‘family history’ is concerned with placing your ancestors within the historical context of when they lived and what their lives would have been like. In his talk, James concentrated on the former.
There are a number of genealogy websites with multiple record sets you can search (e.g. Ancestry and FindMyPast), some for free and some with a paid subscription. You can build your family tree using the online tools available from such websites, or buy specialist software to use on your computer. James presented his recommended approach to creating your family tree, working backwards from your parents. He advised starting by collating basic genealogy information (birth, marriage and death certificates, and census information) before adding new ‘layers’ of information obtained from other sources such as military records and probate records. However, it’s not always that easy – you may have to work round ‘skeletons in the closet’ while so-called ‘brickwalls’ are common. To help, James offered some useful tips and suggested some potentially useful websites. He concluded his talk by answering a range of questions from the floor.
January 2024: Famous Local Folk – Blue Plaques of South Oxfordshire
The talk on 8 January was not as advertised, the intended speaker being stranded on a narrow boat on the flooded Thames! The Club was very grateful to Marie-Louise Kerr (Curator without a Museum) for coming at short notice to talk about Famous Local Folk – Blue Plaques of South Oxfordshire.
You will find Blue Plaques commemorating people who made an impact locally, nationally or internationally on buildings around the country. Marie-Louise talked about just a few of the people with Blue Plaques in south Oxfordshire – five men and the only local lady as yet with one.
- Judge Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) at Castle Priory House, Wallingford: lawyer and politician who wrote the influential book, The Commentaries on the Laws of England, and was Recorder of Wallingford from 1749 to 1770.
- Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1978) at Winterbrook House, near Wallingford: world-famous author of detective stories, other fiction and plays (e.g. The Mousetrap) who lived with her second husband, the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, at Winterbrook from 1934 to 1976.
- Jehro Tull (1674-1741) at 19A Castle Street, Crowmarsh Gifford: invented a horse-drawn seed drill (described in An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Cultivation) that helped bring about an ‘agricultural revolution’ in England, and who lived at Howberry Farm from 1700 to 1710.
- Samuel Edgar Saunders (1857-1933) at his former premises in Goring: boat-builder and engineer from Streatley who expanded the family business first at Goring and then at South Stoke, before moving to the Isle of Wight where he set up a marine engineering company.
- Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) at Boham’s Farm, Blewbury: author of the classic children’s book, The Wind in the Willows, based on bedtime stories told to his only child Alistair (‘Letters to Mouse’); the family lived in Blewbury from 1910 until 1920, later settling in Pangbourne.
- Cecil Kimber (1885-1945) at The Boundary House pub, Abingdon: motor car designer who worked for William Morris and created the MG marque for sports cars fitted on a modified Morris chassis; he lived with his family at The Boundary House from 1933 to 1938.
There are also unofficial blue plaques such as the one on a wall in Thame Road in Warborough to Theo King (1919-1987), which bears the inscription ‘postmaster, churchwarden, scouter, friend of all in the village, lived & worked here’.
November 2023: Glimpses of the other Oxford through the eyes of a Victorian mission – a 19th century battle for hearts and souls
In this talk, local historian Emily Grieg walked us through the efforts of a Victorian mission to improve the lives of people living in East Oxford. The talk started by explaining the changing national religious landscape and then went deeper to describe how the local religious movements in Oxford attempted to deal with the local population’s living conditions worsening with urban poverty on the rise and housing and sanitation systems not keeping pace with population growth.
East Oxford, the area on which the talk was focused, was also during this time undergoing significant changes and challenges of urbanisation during this period. East Oxford went from fields and farming with small numbers of cottages to significant housing development.
Emily explained how the well-connected Father Richard Meux Benson took over as the parish vicar of Cowley and later formed the Society of St. John the Evangelist known locally as the Cowley Fathers. The Cowley Fathers left a visible legacy on East Oxford in part due to their wealthy benefactors with numerous buildings, including the St John’s Home, SS Mary and John Church as well as several schools in the area.
Conversely, the nonconformist Oxford City Mission (OCM) was very much funded by local people for the people, with donations coming in from ordinary people. The annual reports of the group showed that OCM’s aim was to encourage personal conversion and to tackle the consequences of poverty such as alcohol abuse, which was a common daily struggle for some families faced in East Oxford. Their legacy was less visible than perhaps the Cowley Fathers, but their work was no less important at a difficult time for many.
October 2023: Apples! The myth and mystery of England’s favourite fruit
On 9 October 2023, Tim Healey spoke about Apples! The Myth and Mystery of England’s Favourite Fruit.
Tim Healey is a freelance writer, broadcaster and musician and previously entertained the group with a fascinating talk ‘Pagans and Puritans – the story of May morning in Oxford’ back in April 2021. Tim’s talk this time weaved its way through the many fascinating myths and mysteries surrounding apples.
Through our culture the apple has had a fairly regular presence, how we often associate the apple with Adam and Eve but also how the apple is linked to the place ‘Avalon’ (Island of Apples) featured in Arthurian legend. Apples have often been associated with birth and fertility, and are often considered a lustrous fruit. If you cut an apple in half laterally a five-pointed star will be observed in the centre. Apples have featured in paintings by notable artists such as Raphael and John Everett Millais of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to Rene Magritte and the widely recognised ‘Son of Man’ painting. More recently apples have appeared in A Dish of Apples, a collection of poems by Eden Phillpotts (1921), in the book Cider with Rosie (1959) by Laurie Lee, and in several best-selling songs by the Andrew Sisters.
From a historical perspective, the apple most likely originated from Kazakhstan c. 8000 BC as a wild apple (Malus pumila) and was spread by people travelling via horse as the apple could be consumed by both rider and horse on their journey. In Roman times Cicero urged his fellow Romans to save apple seeds in order to develop new cultivars and, in Roman religion and myth, the goddess Pomona was associated with fruitful abundance and plenty. In 1204 the Pearmain variety of apple was recorded in England as being associated with cider making and some rents were payable in apples and cider to the Church under the Tithe Tax. In 1390 the first apple pie recipe was recorded and later Henry VIII took an interest in developing new cultivars of apples. After an apple fell from a tree in front of Isaac Newton, he developed the theory of gravity and so physics has much to thank apples for! In the early days of settling North America, apples were spread across what would become the United States of America by Johnny Appleseed.
In the modern day, approximately two-thirds of the apples purchased in the UK are grown and imported from outside the UK and apples undergo a number of preservation treatments before being presented to the consumer. The annual tradition of Wassailing, which involves blessing the apple trees in the hope of a good harvest, continues still to this day and those curious to experience this apple rite are highly recommended to check out the annual event in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell. The talk concluded with the notable history of apples in Oxfordshire and the varieties developed in the area such as the Hanwell Souring, the Bampton Fairing and the Blenheim Orange. Tim also highlighted that, if you are interested in owning a rare or Oxford breed of tree, then you can visit Bernwode Fruit Trees at Ludgershall (between Bicester and Aylesbury). Or if you want to view the largest collection of fruit trees in England, then the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale Farm in Faversham, Kent is also well worth a visit.
September 2023: Cemeteries of Oxford: More than a Century of History
On 11th September 2023, Trevor Jackson spoke about the Cemeteries of Oxford: more than a century of history.
Between 2005 and 2017 Trevor was the Registrar and Manager of Oxford City’s cemeteries at Wolvercote, Botley, Rose Hill and Headington. He and his team were also responsible for maintaining the grounds of 11 closed Anglican churches in the city.
In the first half of the 19th century, Oxford’s churchyards were filling up, partly as a result of high mortality from repeated cholera outbreaks, and in 1855 all of them were closed to further burials. In 1848 the Diocese of Oxford opened two new cemeteries, at Osney and in Jericho (St Sepulchre’s), but further outbreaks of cholera in 1849 and 1854 ensured that they also filled rapidly. In 1889 and 1890, Oxford Corporation, as it was then known, purchased land for three municipal cemeteries and in 1894, Wolvercote, Rose Hill and Botley cemeteries opened. Oxford’s fourth cemetery was established after Headington parish was subsumed into Oxford in 1928; an existing burial ground there was extended to make Headington cemetery. All the cemeteries have chapels, with those at Wolvercote, Rose Hill and Botley being of similar design; these three cemeteries also have gate lodges, though these are now private homes. Interments in the four cemeteries since the 1890s total about 58,000, and both Rose Hill and Headington are now closed to new burials.
Oxford’s cemeteries contain many famous people; they are also popular as filming locations. Botley Cemetery is nowadays notable for its large Commonwealth Graves section. Trevor’s talk included numerous stories from his time as cemeteries manager, some sombre, others, perhaps surprisingly, very humorous.