Landowner - Abingdon on Thames Town Council

The Blacknall monument in St Nicolas Church

The Blacknall family

The sixteenth century was a period of economic upheaval which provided great opportunities to the able and ambitious. The Blacknall family is a case in point, moving in four generations from obscurity in a Buckinghamshire village into the landed gentry of the same county. On the way, their activities were highly beneficial to Abingdon, providing the town with industry and employment and helping it to recover from the shock of the dissolution of its Abbey and the abolition of its guilds.

William Blacknall was from a family long settled in Wing, Buckinghamshire. By 1545, when his son was born, he had married and moved to Hambleden, near Henley, and it was probably there that he acquired the knowledge of milling that he would later put to good use.

In 1548, John Wellesbourne, leaseholder under the Crown of the Abbey site in Abingdon, died. He had done nothing to develop the site, and the fulling mill that had operated there had been allowed to decay. The body that administered the properties of the dissolved abbeys was the Court of Augmentations, and this, through its Berkshire agent Roger Amyce, was responsible for the town’s well-being. It is not clear whether Blacknall took the initiative or whether Amyce invited him, but Blacknall now came to Abingdon to take over the mills. The two men would work closely together.

The Court of Augmentations arranged a series of back-to-back deals whereby Blacknall ended up with effective ownership of the Abbey site and the fulling and corn mills. He also gained control of the waters that powered the mills and monopoly rights of fishing in them. Blacknall and Amyce jointly tested the arrangement in a court case, and it was confirmed in great detail in the municipal charter that was granted to Abingdon in 1556.

The court did not provide money but Blacknall was able to set up a consortium to raise the capital he needed. His greatest talent seems to have been in putting together finance for expanding his affairs. Once he had obtained the Abbey site, he raised money on it from within his family and bought an interest in mills at Sheepbridge near Swallowfield where he went to live for three or four years. Swallowfield was a Wiltshire enclave in Berkshire, south of Reading. For many years thereafter Blacknall was ‘a miller of Swallowfield’ in legal documents, although in fact he returned to Abingdon, becoming active in municipal affairs and serving twice as mayor. By the time he died in 1585 he was a rich man, with property in various parts of Berkshire and neighbouring counties.

Blacknall’s son, William jnr (1545-1614), continued on his father’s path, managing his milling and fishing interests and purchasing more property. He married a member of the Ayshcombe family of Lyford, local gentry, which added to his money-raising abilities. The family was now moving decisively up the social scale. William jnr’s son, John, born in 1583, married a daughter of the Blagraves of Bulmershe, a gentry family high in the Berkshire pecking order. He studied at Oxford and read law at the Middle Temple, but would not demean himself by practising. He continued to acquire ever more land, but industrial management held no interest for him; as soon as his father died in 1613, the Abbey mills were sold off. He and his wife both died in the plague of 1625 – they have a memorial in St Nicolas church – leaving two young daughters, one of whom followed them soon after. The survivor, Mary, sole heiress to a fortune of £16,000, was married to the son and heir of Sir Edmund Verney of Middle Claydon, Bucks. She has an article of her own on this website.

© AAAHS and contributors 2017

Thomas Duffield

Thomas Duffield, Abingdon’s MP from 1832 to 1844, was born in 1782 at Syston, Lincolnshire, second son of Michael Duffield. The family moved in 1805 to a new seat at Sunninghill, Berkshire. Thomas seems to have been intended for an academic career; he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1800, and in 1807 gained his MA and took up a fellowship at Merton. However, his ambitions were for a higher station in life. Emily Frances Elwes was the only child of George Elwes of Marcham Park, and sole heiress to a fortune said to be of almost a million pounds. Her father might reasonably have hoped for Emily to marry into the nobility, but in 1810 she and Thomas eloped and were married at Gretna Green. The elopement was widely and sensationally reported in the newspapers.

When George Elwes died in 1821 Thomas became the owner of Marcham Park, which he rebuilt and modernised. An interest in politics developed slowly; in 1825 he publicly supported the Tory candidate for one of the Berkshire county seats. In 1826, Abingdon Conservatives, who included most of the Corporation, invited him to stand against their incumbent, the Liberal John Maberly, but he decided that Maberly was too well entrenched and withdrew.

Nonetheless, he continued to be active in public affairs and to nurse the constituency. He was High Sheriff of Berkshire in 1827. He donated very generously to local social and charitable funds, and subscribed £100 of the £1700 cost of widening Abingdon Bridge in 1829, the largest contribution by any individual. He was a signatory to the 1831 Berkshire petition, where some 150 of the most prominent residents of the county publicised their opposition to the proposed parliamentary reforms and extension of the franchise.

In 1832, Maberly became bankrupt and had to flee abroad to avoid the debtor’s prison. Duffield was the obvious man to succeed him and had the support of most members of the Corporation. The Liberal candidate, Thomas Bowles of Milton Hill, was supported by ‘some of the gentry and nearly all the respectable tradesmen’ but withdrew, hinting at large-scale bribery by the wealthy Duffield with which he could not compete. He was replaced as candidate by a son of Maberly without local connections. Duffield won the seat by 157 votes against 43. He became as entrenched in Abingdon as Maberly had been, and was returned unopposed at the elections of 1835, 1837 and 1841.

Duffield was never an active parliamentarian and there is no record of him speaking in the House of Commons. His main political interest was in agricultural matters. He strongly opposed repeal of the Corn Laws. However, he also worked hard in support of local interests and, in particular, helped to defeat an early attempt in the Berkshire Quarter Sessions to close the Abingdon gaol and remove the convicts there to Reading. The Corporation trooped in a body to Marcham Park to thank him.

It may have seemed that Duffield would hold the Abingdon seat for a very long time, but in 1844 he unexpectedly resigned and was replaced by another Conservative, Frederick Thesiger. The Abingdon Corporation, nearly all Conservatives, manipulated the election so that it was impossible for the Liberals to field a candidate, and Thesiger walked over.

Thesiger was solicitor-general, and had lost his seat at Woodstock because the Duke of Marlborough wanted it for his son. The coup at Abingdon came about because the government needed to keep his services. It was speculated, probably rightly, that Duffield had received a payoff of £7500 or thereabouts from the Treasury.

Duffield’s motives remain a mystery – he plainly didn’t need the money – but it is possible that he was simply tired of parliamentary duties and anxious to spend more time with his young second wife and their growing family. His first wife, Emily, had died in 1835 after bearing ten children, eight of whom survived infancy. In 1838, he married Augusta Elizabeth Rushbrooke, daughter of a fellow-MP. His oldest son had died tragically in a shooting accident in 1833 at the age of twenty, and a daughter at the same age in 1841. Augusta died in 1846, probably after the birth of their fifth child.

In the summer of 1847, Duffield left Marcham Park and moved with his younger children to a new home, the Castle Priory in Wallingford. He continued active in public affairs, and was soon made High Steward of the town. He died in 1854.

© AAAHS and contributors 2016

Sir Ralph Glyn

Ralph George Campbell Glyn was probably Abingdon’s longest serving MP, holding the seat from 1924 to 1953. He was born in 1885; his father was Bishop of Peterborough and his mother a daughter of the eighth Duke of Argyll. Intended for the army, he was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst and commissioned in 1904 into the Rifle Brigade. He seems from the start to have gravitated to headquarters and staff rather than regimental duties. In 1910 he transferred to reserve status, managing to combine staff work at the War Office with helping to reorganise the Conservative Party and unsuccessfully contesting various Scottish constituencies.

During the First World War he participated in a military-diplomatic mission to Russia and to allies and neutrals in the Balkans. He served as a staff officer in the Dardanelles campaign and in Egypt and later in France. He finished with the rank of major, a Military Cross, three mentions in dispatches, the Légion d’Honneur, the Imperial Russian Order of St Anne, the Serbian Order of the White Eagle and the American Distinguished Service Medal.

In the post-war election he was finally successful in entering the House of Commons as member for Clackmannan and East Stirlingshire, but lost the seat in 1922. The Abingdon division of North Berkshire, as it was officially known, was a very extensive and still largely rural constituency. He first contested it in 1923 losing by 254 votes, but won it in the following year with a majority of over 4000. He then held it for almost thirty years.

Glyn was assiduous as a constituency MP, supporting and appearing at local events and communicating well with his electorate through regular articles in the Wallingford-based Berks and Oxon Advertiser. He became High Steward of Wallingford in 1933. In Abingdon, he was an active governor of Abingdon School for many years and latterly vice-chairman of the governing body, but his greatest contribution to the town was in his support for the civic society, the Friends of Abingdon. He was among the founders of the society in 1944 and its president from 1945 until his death. He was particularly effective as a fund raiser, and obtained over several years a total of £5000 from the Pilgrim Trust which made possible the acquisition and renovation of the Checker and Long Gallery. In 1952, he was active in the campaign to save Fitzharris House from demolition, but this was ultimately unsuccessful.

Glyn lived in Ardington and later near Farnborough where his almost 2000 acres on the Berkshire Downs were said to make him the largest landowner in the Commons. As a parliamentarian, he was always ready to support agricultural interests, with a particular emphasis on sheep farming and horse breeding. In 1928 he introduced the private member’s bill that eventually reorganised racecourse gambling and set up the tote, a publicly owned system that diverted betting profits to the benefit of the sport. But he was a businessman as well as a farmer, holding a number of industrial directorships.

In the Commons, Glyn was always his own man and never a party hack. It was entirely consistent with his independent views that he welcomed the formation of a ‘national’ coalition government to deal with the financial crisis of 1931, and he became parliamentary private secretary to the Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. This was the nearest he ever got to a government, as against a parliamentary, position. The parliamentary record, Hansard, shows him to have been an active debater with a wide range of interests. He was made a baronet in 1934.

One of his interests, no doubt stemming from his military experience, was in foreign affairs, and sometimes he would make his own visits to trouble spots and, if he felt it necessary, criticise government policies. In the 1925 dispute over the fate of Mosul he went to Constantinople and wrote home supporting the Turkish case over the British. In 1938 he made an ostensibly private trip to the Balkans and had talks with the Hungarian prime minister. He favoured the League of Nations and disarmament.

After the Second World War, Glyn was a leading member of the Commons Committee on Estimates which monitored government expenditure. He became its chairman in 1951. His greatest disagreement with his own party was over transport policy. Although a director of one of the ‘big four’ railway companies, he supported nationalisation in 1948 and opposed privatisation of road haulage in 1953. He argued that all transport should be centrally managed and rail and road be allowed to cross-subsidise each other. Whatever differences he may have had with his party whips, his support among North Berkshire voters remained firm throughout his tenure of the seat: he was unopposed in 1931 and 1935, and had majorities approaching 5000 in each of the post-war elections

In 1952 Glyn indicated a wish to retire. He became Baron Glyn in the coronation honours of 1953 and moved to the House of Lords where he remained active until his death in May 1960. He had married in 1921 Sybell Long, widow of a senior officer killed in 1917. She died in 1958. There were no children of the marriage, and the barony became extinct.

Ralph Glyn was an old-fashioned figure even in his own time – a back-bencher who saw his prime duty as being to his country and his constituents, not his party. His private means enabled him to take personal initiatives. His business interests made him indifferent to hopes of government office. He worked hard for his constituents, and thoroughly deserved the confidence they placed in him.

© AAAHS and contributors 2019

Edward Loveden Loveden

Edward Loveden Loveden was a regional magnate, economically powerful and politically influential throughout north Berkshire and especially in Abingdon.

He was born as Edward Loveden Townsend into a wealthy family in Cirencester and educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford. Loveden was his mother’s family name. His father died while he was still a minor, and in 1772 he inherited the Buscot Park estate from his maternal relatives. The terms of the will obliged him to adopt Loveden as a surname.

He was now a very wealthy young man, and In 1773 he married Margaret Pryse, heiress to a 30,000 acre estate near Aberystwith and became even richer. He built the present Buscot Park mansion on its hilltop site overlooking the Thames. Completed in 1782, it was said to be one of the finest houses in Berkshire.

Loveden became prominent in a number of fields. Maintaining his intellectual interests, he gained a Doctor of Laws degree, and had a fine library at Buscot Park; he was a member of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. As a patron of charity, he was a governor of the Bethlem hospital for lunatics in London. As a businessman, he was deeply engaged in the development of the local canal network. In the 1780s he was one of the proprietors of the Thames and Severn Canal which linked Bristol with Lechlade, and he tried to promote a further stretch from Lechlade to Abingdon as a shorter route to London. When this failed, he built a lock and wharves at Buscot which would later provide a good proportion of his income. In local affairs, he was High Sheriff of the county in 1780 and 1781 and a lieutenant-colonel in the Berkshire militia – a sort of Home Guard to counter the danger of a French invasion – in the 1790s. It went with his status that when in 1795 a regiment stationed in the county behaved badly, it was he who protested to the Duke of Cumberland, head of the army, on behalf of the north of Berkshire. His opposite number and rival, Charles Dundas of Kintbury, did the same for the south.

He became MP for Abingdon in 1783, claiming to be of no party but generally supporting the younger Pitt. Surviving letters show him to have been on friendly terms with many leading Abingdon townsmen, including the influential Baptists of the Tomkins family. His agent and friend was the town clerk, Samuel Sellwood. He gave up the Abingdon seat in 1796, preferring to stand for one of the two county seats. But in this he failed because of the hostility of Charles Dundas who held the other. He re-entered Parliament in 1802 sitting for Shaftesbury, but continued to be actively engaged, largely through Sellwood, with politics in Abingdon. He supported George Knapp through his several attempts to win the Abingdon seat, which he finally did in 1807.

But sadly for Loveden’s reputation, what fame he achieved in his lifetime was through a well-publicised scandal. His first wife, Margaret Pryse, died in 1784. The second was a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Nash, who died in 1788. In 1794 he foolishly married Anne Lintall who was less than half his age. Ten years later, childless and bored, she began a passionate relationship with a young academic friend of her husband, Tom Barker. The lovers were indiscreet, the domestic staff at Buscot scandalised, and Loveden initiated proceedings for divorce.

At this time, divorce could only be granted by Parliament after a sequence of findings in the civil and ecclesiastical courts. It was a complex and expensive process. Eventually, the House of Lords did grant the divorce, but it was then the Commons who had to decide the financial settlement. Loveden was to pay his ex-wife £400 per year. He refused, and persuaded the Lords to rescind their verdict. The affair raised considerable interest, not exclusively for its legal complications, and the intimate evidence given to the courts was widely published.

Loveden and his first wife had two surviving daughters and one son. The daughters were both sickly. Margaret married Samuel Wilson Warneford much against her father’s wishes. She died insane just three years later, and the money she had brought her husband went towards building the Warneford Hospital in Oxford. Jane Elizabeth was a cripple who remained at Buscot Park. The son, Pryse, took his mother’s surname and inherited her estate in Wales; as Pryse Loveden Pryse, he had a long career as MP for Cardigan Boroughs.

Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College

Archie Kirkman Loyd

Archie Kirkman Loyd was twice MP for the Abingdon Division of Berkshire, from 1895 to 1905 and from 1916 to 1918. Born in India and trained in England for a career in the Indian Civil Service, he opted instead for the law. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1868 and became a Queen’s Counsel in 1892. In 1885 he married Henrietta Louisa Clutterbuck, of a wealthy landed family in Chippenham. They resided first at West Ilsley and later at Downs House, East Hendred. There were four sons, one of whom was killed in the early months of the First World War.

Loyd was a second cousin of Harriet Sarah Loyd, daughter and heiress of the very rich banker Samuel Jones Loyd, Lord Overstone. She married Robert Lindsay – who changed his name to Loyd-Lindsay – in 1858 and settled at Lockinge, near Wantage. Loyd-Lindsay was a figure of great influence in North Berkshire. He was one of the MPs for the county of Berkshire from 1865 to 1885 when he became Lord Wantage, and his cousin Charles Lindsay sat for Abingdon from 1865 to 1874.

Archie Loyd was very close to Harriet and her husband. Loyd-Lindsey was one of the founders of what later became the British Red Cross. That organisation met its first great challenge in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and Loyd became Loyd-Lindsay’s private secretary in a period of hectic activity. They went together to organise humanitarian relief in the Serbo-Turkish war in 1876, narrowly escaping being caught up in the extremely bloody battle of Alexinatz, and Loyd personally headed the mission to the Russo-Turkish war a year later. He received the thanks of the Tsar at an audience at Plevna in present-day Bulgaria. When in 1883 Loyd-Lindsay, convalescent after an illness, took a long trip to South Africa, Loyd accompanied him. In 1887 Loyd’s wife gave birth at Lockinge; the boy was named Robert Lindsay Loyd and no doubt had Lord Wantage as godfather.

It was Lord Wantage, as head of the constituency Conservative Association, who nominated Loyd as parliamentary candidate in 1895. The Abingdon division extended as far as Faringdon, Wantage and Wallingford; it was a safe Conservative seat, and Loyd took it with a much increased majority.

Loyd was unopposed in 1900, but did not stand in the election of 1906 because of ill health. In 1916, the then MP, Harold Henderson, resigned, and Loyd came out of retirement to replace him. He was unopposed at the by-election, and held the seat until 1918. His nephew, Arthur Thomas Loyd, would be MP for the Abingdon division from 1921 to 1923.

Archie Loyd was assiduous if unspectacular as an MP. One of his earliest preoccupations was with the level of death duties to be paid on an estate that went to a widow when there were no children – a matter of obvious concern at Lockinge House. Following his patron’s example, he was always ready to take up the cause of ex-servicemen in difficulty with civilian bureaucracy. As a former assize barrister, he was active in reforms of the criminal law, and as MP for a largely agricultural constituency, supported the interests of tenant farmers and worked to get better housing and old age pensions for their labourers.

Loyd was a Berkshire JP and deputy-lieutenant, and a member of the Berkshire County Council. He was a governor of Abingdon School from 1901 till his death. But his abiding interest was the British Red Cross, of which he was vice-chairman, remaining active until late in his life. He published a book on the organisation of the Red Cross during the First World War, as well as several treatises on the law relating to cheques and promissory notes.

Loyd’s career is defined by his relationship with both the Loyd-Lindsays. Harriet refers in her memoir to his ‘life-long affection and devotion’, and made him significant gifts of property after her husband’s death. It was his nephew, Arthur Thomas Loyd, who inherited the major portion of the Lockinge estate.

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