Local politician – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

The Bowles Family

The Bowles family was widespread in Berkshire and the branch centred in Longworth and Charney Basset seems to have been affluent. John Bowles, born there in 1700, married Mary Justice of Appleford in 1724. They lived at Charney, then moved to Long Wittenham near Mary’s family, and in around 1740 moved again to Abingdon. One incentive may have been Abingdon School, where two of the Bowles’ five sons were soon enrolled; another, the fact that Mary’s brother Thomas was a prominent citizen there – he would be mayor in 1753. Members of the three next generations of John Bowles’ family remained resident in Abingdon and were prominent in local affairs.

John died in 1754, and, following family tradition, was buried at Longworth. His will shows that he was active as a maltster and farmer, though it is not clear where he farmed. The two youngest sons, James and Thomas, made their careers as stationers in London with their elder brothers as shareholders. James died in 1782, Thomas in 1788, both unmarried. The three others, John, William and Richard, became prominent citizens of Abingdon in their turn.

The oldest, John jnr, became a lawyer and was Abingdon town clerk for a time. He did well financially and among his acquisitions was a 300-acre estate at Milton Hill, some five miles south of the town. The second, William, flourished as a maltster, brewer and farmer. He acquired, mostly on lease, the estates of Fitzharris and Lacies Court on the northern boundary, and resided at Fitzharris. He was mayor in 1786, and three times Master of Christ’s Hospital. Like his maternal uncle Thomas, he was an extreme Tory, and when the Corporation applied for a new charter that would effectively exclude Whigs from local influence, it was he who financed the project.

The third son, Richard, studied at Oxford and became vicar of Lechlade in Gloucestershire. When already middle-aged, he married a local lady, Kitty Bampton, no longer young, ‘but with a considerable fortune’. This enabled him to return to Abingdon about 1773 as rector of St Nicolas. It was nominally the vicar of St Helen’s who was responsible for St Nicolas and the rectory should have been a sinecure, but the system was not working well and he did have to support the church. In his will he endowed a ‘Sunday lectureship’ which would effectively provide the vicar that St Nicolas didn’t have. When he died in 1804, his wife returned to Lechlade and had him buried there, breaking with the Bowles family tradition.

As John and William approached their sixties, they must have worried about the lack of heirs for their considerable wealth. In 1786, William married Ann Woodley, a local woman half his age and of a lower social station. It seems to have been almost a clandestine affair; the marriage took place in London, not in Abingdon. William jnr was born a year later, and two daughters followed.

When William married, his housekeeper became redundant and moved over to John’s household. Their son Thomas was baptised at St Helen’s in 1789, bearing his father’s surname and identified as ‘born of the body of Martha Murrill’. John’s will regarded Thomas as a legitimate son and heir, and treated Martha generously. When ‘Martha Murrell, spinster’ died in 1834 she was a relatively wealthy woman.

Thus there were only two male Bowles in the third generation. Thomas preferred the life of a country gentleman to that of a townsman, and lived on the estate his father had bought, rebuilding Milton Hill House as a prestige residence. He married Hester Sophia, daughter of the lawyer Samuel Sellwood who had been one of his guardians after his father’s death. He divided his activities between the affairs of the county and of the town: he was high sheriff of Berkshire in 1830, and a prospective parliamentary candidate for the borough in 1832, but withdrew when it became plain he could not win the seat. He died in a flu epidemic in 1837, leaving a large and affluent family. His eldest son, John Samuel (1816-1884), remained active in town affairs, patronising local good causes and speaking for it in the county quarter sessions where, as a borough, it was not directly represented.

William junior’s life was less successful. In 1810, he bought an estate at West Malling, Kent, and went to live there. According to a Bowles family historian, he married a Miss Rowan and they had two daughters. There was a Rowan family with West Malling connections, but no trace has been found in the public records of this marriage or of its offspring. If there ever was such a marriage, the lady must have died young, for in 1819 William sold the estate and returned to Abingdon.

He continued in his father’s footsteps, being mayor in 1824 and becoming a governor of Christ’s Hospital. In 1824, he married Caroline Anne Stephenson of a legal family in London. There were seven children of whom six survived, but Caroline Anne does not seem to have taken to Abingdon. From 1828 the family was living elsewhere for much of the time, in Paris, Devon, and at various places in Hampshire. When in 1839 William sold up in Abingdon, including the leases and contents of Fitzharris and Lacies Court, it was probably no longer the family home.

Sadly, the money ran out and the marriage broke down. Evidence given in an 1829 lawsuit shows William to have ignored financial advice and made imprudent investments. He built a substantial house on his land at Lacies Court which he sold at a loss to the vicar of St Helen’s, Nathaniel Dodson. Rumour had it that this was to pay off a gambling debt. The 1841 census shows the wife and children in Clapham – they later moved to Ryde in the Isle of Wight – and those of 1851 and 1861 have William living alone as a lodger in London. He died in Tottenham in 1870.

Some of the descendants of Thomas Bowles remain in the Abingdon area, but the status of the Bowles family as members of Abingdon’s financial and social elite lasted only three generations.

The authors thank Caroline Cannon-Brookes for helpful discussions and for access to the Bowles family history notes made by Major-Gen H. Bowles in 1925.

Agnes Leonora Challenor

Agnes Leonora Challenor, née Duncan, was born in Wales on 19 March 1882, the eldest of eight children. Her parents were Scottish. Her father, John T. Duncan, had moved to Cardiff where he had a small fleet of coaling ships, known as collier transports, which supplied Welsh coal to the Royal Navy. He is described as a shipbroker and ship owner in the 1901 census and he named one of his ships after Agnes.

Around this time Agnes Duncan first visited Abingdon because two of her brothers had been admitted to Abingdon School in January 1900 as boarders. Jack (John William) and Norman Duncan were among the first of sixteen boys resident in a newly opened school boarding house, Tesdale House. This was in the Marcham Road next door to the Challenor residence known as The Firs (now No. 22 Marcham Road), where her future husband, Bromley Challenor (III), lived.

Agnes married Bromley – also the eldest of eight children – in Llandaff Cathedral on 28 January 1914. They lived in Waysmeet, on a site that is currently between St Katharine’s & St Helen’s School and the house known now as Chesterton, sited along the Faringdon Road. It was a joint wedding present from both families, one side buying the land and the other building the house. It had extensive lawns, two grass tennis courts, a kitchen garden, an orchard, an enormous outhouse for storing farm equipment, two fish ponds, a long tree-lined drive with a turning circle in front of the front door, and a wild flower meadow. The large potting shed at the side of the house was where the spare key was kept. Sadly, the house was demolished and the site is now a housing estate.

Waysmeet in about 1970. The house and grounds were given to Agnes and Bromley by their families as a joint wedding present. The Faringdon Road runs along the bottom of the picture.
(With thanks to Tim Goodman)

There were three children of the marriage: Janet born in August 1916, Bromley (IV) born in November 1918 and Margaret born in February 1921.

Agnes and Bromley Challenor with their children in the late 1920s Left to right: Margaret, Bromley junior and Janet.
(With thanks to Marion Cox.)

Agnes was a member of the Abingdon Madrigal Society as well as the Abingdon and District Musical Society and often played her own grand piano.

She passed on her great love of music to her children. Bromley junior (as the family sometimes called him) trained initially in the solicitor’s firm that his great-grandfather had founded and in which his grandfather and father, as well as most of the male Challenors had also worked, but he really disliked it. Instead, he became a piano teacher and a much-loved church organist at Dry Sandford, at Besselsleigh and at Dorchester Abbey as well as at St. Mary Magdalene, Shippon, which is where his funeral took place in 2005. One of Agnes’ great granddaughters, Helen Roberts, became the much-acclaimed accompanist of the Treorchy Male Voice Choir, harking back to Agnes’ Welsh roots.

Despite having no ambition to enter public life, Mrs Challenor was thrown into it by the events of the Second World War. She was a founder member of the Abingdon Townswomen’s Guild and, in 1939, was invited to form the Abingdon Women’s Voluntary Service of which she later became centre organiser.

She was co-opted onto a vacancy on the borough council in 1941 as the result of her work in the community. The press report of the 1941 Mayor-making includes the comment: “Mrs Bromley Challenor was appointed to the vacancy caused by the elevation of Councillor A. Tombs”. In May 1950, when by process of seniority, she herself was elected to the office of Mayor, the first woman in the history of the borough to occupy this position, she said “I felt it such a golden opportunity for a woman to get on to the council that I accepted it”. Her daughter, Janet, filled the position of Mayoress, today referred to as the Mayor’s Escort.

Mrs Challenor hoped that her election to the highest civic office would be an incentive to other women to stand for a seat on the council and during her time as a borough councillor she worked hard to encourage other women to put themselves forward as candidates.

In 1951 she scored another first by becoming the first woman to be elected an Alderman. She was a conscientious member of the borough council, but in 1953 she suffered a stroke. Nevertheless, her interest in the council and in Christ’s Hospital of Abingdon, an influential local charity, remained undiminished, but, sadly, ill health forced her to resign from both organisations in 1956. She was presented with an engrossed minute from the Borough Council recording their appreciation of her hard work as Councillor, Mayor and Alderman.

Apart from her council activities, Mrs Challenor took a great interest in the parish church of St Helen and worked as a fundraiser for the new organ (1927) and the parish hall (1928). She formed the Abingdon branch of the British Sailors’ Society and supported both the Church of England Children’s Society and Dr Barnardo’s charity.

Agnes Leonora Challenor died, aged 85, at her home, Waysmeet, Faringdon Road, Abingdon, on 6 April 1967, and her ashes were interred in the Old Cemetery close to other Challenor family members.

© AAAHS and contributors 2020

Francis Little

Francis Little, or Brooke, for he used both names interchangeably, was one of the most significant figures in Abingdon’s political life about the turn of the seventeenth century. Originally from Henley, he became a freeman of the town in 1587, and within five years was serving the first of four terms as mayor. He would also be twice master of Christ’s Hospital, the local charity that was of at least equal importance and probably of greater prestige for its governors than the Corporation; he was once the town’s member of parliament; and several times a churchwarden of St Helen’s.

Little is unique in his time, for his actions and writings give us a reasonably clear picture of his character and beliefs, which is not the case for any of his contemporaries. We see that he was always ready to take on any civic task that might need doing, such as auditing the Hospital accounts or travelling to London to negotiate a new charter. He was responsible for the refurbishing of the Hospital hall in the years after 1605, and the acquisition of the portraits of donors and benefactors that grace it to this day. He was equally involved in a major project in 1605 to repair, re-gild and repaint the market cross, an imposing structure of which Abingdon was proud, and he contributed generously towards the cost. In local politics, he met intense opposition, but fought his corner and usually won. His great achievement was the new ‘chapters’ which, starting in 1599, revised and modernised the rules by which the town governed itself. He must have been an able politician and a formidable committee man. In old age, he became the first serious historian of Abingdon; his manuscript of 1627 describes the development of the Holy Cross Fraternity and of the Hospital, and praises their benefactors down to his own times.

The tradition that Little personified and that underlay the ‘chapters’ and his other activities was a venerable one: the holistic idea of a harmonious urban society where all men counted, each according to his degree, but where it was wealth and experience that carried the responsibility of working for the good of the community and equally the duty and privilege of ruling it. Such principles were the reverse of democratic, but were neither cynical nor necessarily self-serving. They would last, although increasingly contested, until the Civil War, a decade or so after Little’s death.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

The Mayott family

The Mayotts were a leading family in Abingdon for more than two hundred years. Roger Mayott arrived from Horton in Staffordshire at some time before 1509. Over a hundred of his descendants can be identified in Abingdon before the last of them was buried at St Helen’s in 1715. Six Mayotts were mayors a total of fifteen times, and the same six were masters of Christ’s Hospital a total of sixteen times. By the 1660s, the family had split into several cousinages, of which two were wealthy enough to have their own coats of arms. Roger Mayott himself had been a farmer as well as a merchant, but later generations seem to have concentrated on trade and industry, notably brewing. They had marriage alliances with other prominent families in Abingdon, Oxford, and Reading.

In spite of their divisions, the Mayotts seem always to have acted as a unit in civic affairs. In the factional conflicts that rent Abingdon’s élite society from about 1580, the Mayotts through several generations led the conservative opposition to the Tesdales, whom they saw as social upstarts and reviled for their radicalism in religion. They frequently appealed to the Privy Council, which criticised their factionalism but, in 1629, removed a puritan vicar of St Helen’s of whom they disapproved. Before and during the Civil War which raged in the 1640s, the Mayotts and their friends dominated St Nicolas and Christ’s Hospital, while in the Corporation and in St Helen’s the parties were more evenly matched. During the interregnum that followed the war, the Mayotts came to terms with the more conservative elements of the regime. They helped to defend St Nicolas against puritan attempts to have it demolished, and gained the trust of the republicans who ruled briefly after Oliver Cromwell’s death. But when the monarchy was restored in 1660, the Mayott mayor of the time could not reconcile himself to the change. In 1663, when invited to swear allegiance to the new regime, he refused to do so, and was dismissed from his civic offices. From then on, Mayotts seem to have tended to leave Abingdon and live as gentlemen in Oxford or on country estates, and there would be no further Mayotts among the mayors of Abingdon.

The contribution of the Mayotts to Abingdon history is commemorated in the names of Mayott’s Road and of Mayott House.

Arthur E Preston in mayoral regalia, c.1912

Arthur Edwin Preston

Arthur Preston was a prosperous chartered accountant who lived in Abingdon for most of his life. He served the Borough Council as its accountant for twenty-two years and as mayor for three years, and represented Abingdon on the Berkshire County Council where he was chairman of the Finance Committee. He served eleven terms as a governor of the Christ’s Hospital charity, and was also a governor of Abingdon School.

He was fascinated by local history, building up a large collection of documents and employing assistants to transcribe and translate documents held elsewhere. He is well known as the author of a major publication on the history of St Nicholas’ Church, Abingdon School, and Fitzharris Manor, written in conjunction with Agnes Baker, his historical secretary.

In 1922, he financed a major archaeological project to establish the position and dimensions of the old Abbey church (demolished in 1538), which is now marked out in the Abbey Gardens. In 1935, he paid for a major restoration of the painted ceiling in the Lady Chapel at St Helen’s.

This sense of historical continuity shows also in his achievements as a local politician and administrator. His primary concern, given his experience as an accountant, was always in financial matters, but he was largely responsible for a refurbishment of the Guildhall, and he himself paid for that of the Roysse Room. It was at his initiative that the Council acquired the Old Abbey House and its grounds. He had a detailed inventory made of the Council’s plate, pictures and muniments, and added to them from his own collection.

In the Council, Preston developed a reputation as a powerful debater who usually got his way in controversial issues. Much of the present state of Abingdon and its well-preserved heritage shows the effect of his influence and his concern for historical continuity.

Preston married Lydia Jacobs of Burford in 1895 and they lived at Whitefield in Park Crescent. She died in 1943. They had no children, but supported his nieces and nephews with generosity.

The Tesdale family

The history of Abingdon before the twentieth century is largely a story of family dynasties which rose and declined, cooperated with or opposed each other, and often intermarried. The Tesdales were among the most important of these.A John Tesdale came ‘from the north’ at some time in the later fifteenth century. His son, also John, became a monk at Abingdon Abbey and rose to be prior by the time of its dissolution in 1538. He was also master of the Abbey’s school, which survived the dissolution and from which the present Abingdon School is directly descended.

A significant fact about the Tesdales is that they settled at the manor of Fitzharris, which was on the boundary of Abingdon and, arguably, looked as much outward to the county as inward to the town. The most notable family member, Thomas (1547-1610), showed early promise when he started a successful malting business at Fitzharris as a teenager. He was twice elected to be mayor though he never actually served. But he spent a large part of his career as an unusually entrepreneurial farmer at Glympton in Oxfordshire where he made his fortune by growing and processing woad, an expensive dyestuff which mostly came from France. That fortune was largely expended after his death for the benefit of his native town. Part of it went to Abingdon School – now refounded by the munificence of John Roysse – developing the scheme to provide scholarships for poor Abingdon boys, the ‘Bennett boys’ from the name of his step-uncle who originated it, and providing the means to employ a second schoolmaster to teach them. And, perhaps even more important, a large sum went towards the foundation of Pembroke College in Oxford which was to be where Abingdon School leavers would go to train for the ministry. Thomas Tesdale’s wealth and connections led to him moving in exalted circles – his trustees included a future archbishop, a judge who was of the Bennett family, and the head of an Oxford college.

After Thomas Tesdale’s departure from Abingdon, several cousins became active in local affairs, to be followed as time passed by their sons. This coincided with a period of conflict both in the Corporation and in Christ’s Hospital as family factions strove for control of their lucrative endowments. The Tesdales were hampered in this by their adherence to Puritan principles in religion at a time when these were not acceptable among the national authorities. Whenever there was a flareup of hostility in the local political arena, appeals went to the Privy Council or to the Court of Chancery which most often ruled against the Tesdales and their friends.

By the 1630s, the Tesdales had lost their position in Christ’s Hospital although they remained influential in the Corporation and in St Helen’s Church. There continued to be Tesdale mayors until after the Civil War. But after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 Puritanism was proscribed, and any further public activities were out of the question. Tesdales were frequently fined for attending unlawful assemblies, and in 1671 Tesdale boys were expelled from Abingdon School. Tesdales remained in Abingdon until well into the next century and seem to have prospered, but they were never again represented in its ruling bodies.

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