Abingdon People - Abingdon on Thames Town Council

Willoughby Bertie (seated) as a composer.

Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon

Willoughby Bertie became fourth Earl of Abingdon on the death of his father, also Willoughby, in 1760 and was made High Steward of Abingdon and of Wallingford in the same year.

He was an active radical politician, who as a young man had gone in company with the then outlawed John Wilkes to visit Voltaire, the great figurehead of advanced Enlightenment politics, in Geneva. His political opinions seem unexceptionable today but were regarded as outrageous by his contemporaries. He strongly opposed the war against the American colonies, taking the view that Parliament was acting outside its legal powers in seeking to justify taxation without representation, and that this might lead to a parliamentary tyranny in Britain as it had in America. He took a similar position on British rule in Ireland. His effectiveness as a politician was always limited; he was too principled to join with others and too undiplomatic to make tactical alliances, and was often regarded as eccentric rather than serious.

Bertie was a notable musician. He played the flute, and was a prolific and skilful composer and song writer. About 150 of his compositions are extant. Some works were joint productions between himself and Haydn. He was patron of a series of concerts in London, on which he lost a large amount of money. A painting of him by J F Rigaud (shown above as a print) depicts him in the act of composition.

In Abingdon, he was active in local politics, supporting Whig candidates at the hustings. At his accession, he presented the Corporation with two valuable silver bowls and ladles, and in 1788 he made a gift of his accumulated fees as High Steward which were sufficient to pay for the culverting of the Stert Stream from the end of Broad Street to the Vineyard.

An enthusiastic huntsman and horse breeder, Bertie was very probably one of the backers of the Abingdon Races, which began in 1767 at Culham Heath; certainly, he opened the dancing at the ball given on the occasion, and served as a steward of the course in the following year.

In 1768 Bertie married Susanne Warren, daughter and co-heiress of a wealthy naval officer with interests both in England and America, but this did not save him from severe financial difficulties which had their origin in debts inherited from his father. He had to withdraw from the turf and sell off the furnishings of his seat at Rycote (near Thame). He died, bankrupt, in 1799, and his third and only surviving son, Montague Bertie, succeeded at the age of fifteen to the earldom, to the High Stewardship of Abingdon, and to his debts. Successive Earls of Abingdon have continued to be High Stewards of the town to this day.

© AAAHS and contributors 2015

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

The Bostock family

The Bostocks were a prominent Abingdon family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are believed to have originated in Cheshire, but by 1520 John Bostock is named as a master of the Holy Cross fraternity. In 1547, his nephew Humphrey was one of the two feoffees who held the funds and were responsible for the properties of the Guild of Our Lady. (Since it had no charter, the Guild of Our Lady could not hold property in its own name.) Humphrey Bostock went on to become one of the first governors of Christ’s Hospital at its foundation in 1553, and, in 1558, the third mayor of the then newly chartered town of Abingdon.

Bostock influence in Abingdon reached its peak with Humphrey’s son, Lionell (c. 1533–1600). Lionell Bostock became rich as a woollen draper, but in later life, having bought the Fitzharris estate in Abingdon and other properties elsewhere, he gave up his trade to live as a landed gentleman. He was a great benefactor of Christ’s Hospital, of which he was a governor and twice master, and was four times mayor of the town.

It was in Lionell’s time that serious factional conflict broke out among the governors of Christ’s Hospital. This started in 1585 when his cousin Anthony Bostock accused one of his colleagues, John Fisher, of financial wrongdoing, and was supported by some of the other governors. ‘High words’ passed, and Anthony, accused of sowing ‘dissention, strife, and variance’, was dismissed. The strife would continue through several generations both in the Hospital and in the town’s corporation.

Lionell was noteworthy as a puritan. In 1577, together with Sir John Fettiplace of Appleton, he financed a weekly ‘lecture’, essentially a sermon organised independently of the church authorities, but which townsfolk would be encouraged, or even compelled, by the municipal authorities to attend. The lecturers were chosen from among the most eminent of Oxford theologians, and Abingdon people would be exposed to the most advanced religious thinking of the day. The lectures continued until 1660. In his will, Lionell left additional money for a regular Christmas Day sermon at St Helen’s by another visiting preacher.

The family’s reputation declined in the time of Lionell’s son William (1572–before 1643). William became a governor of the Hospital and was master in 1606. He was described as ‘a person very powerful and contentious’, and popularly known as ‘mad William Bostock’. William lost money, sold land, and left Abingdon about 1622, to die at Windsor in relative poverty. Fitzharris passed to a cousin, Edmund Bostock (d. 1643). Edmund’s son William, a lawyer, left Abingdon in 1648, bringing the Bostock connection with Fitzharris to an end. A grandson, also William, lived briefly at Lacies Court, but left the town in 1677.

The Bostocks are commemorated in Abingdon by Bostock Road, north of Ock Street.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

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.

Sir George Bowyer

At the intersection of the Oxford and Radley roads in Abingdon is a group of buildings – church, cloister, presbytery, school and former convent – that have developed over the years for the benefit of Abingdon’s Catholic community. They have their origin in an organisation or ‘mission’ which was created in the 1850s largely by the efforts of three men. Sir George Boyer was one of them and was the generous donor. The other two were Father John Paul O’Toole, the first minister to the mission, and William Wilkinson Wardell, the initial architect.

George Bowyer (1811-1883) was the eldest son of Sir George Bowyer, Bart, of Radley. With his family, George spent his early years in Italy where he developed a love of learning. Initially he thought of a military career, but abandoned this in favour of the law. On his return to England in 1836 he was called to the bar. Although Bowyer did practise as a lawyer, he found the academic study of law to be more congenial. He published several legal treatises that were well received and might have led to a successful legal career. But this was not to be.

An Anglican since birth, Bowyer was drawn in the 1830s into the religious controversies of the time. He was attracted to the Oxford Movement, which sought to return the Church of England to its roots and resulted in numerous well-publicised conversions to the Roman Catholic faith. In 1850, he himself became a Roman Catholic. It was a decision that would inform his ideas and actions for the remainder of his life.

Bowyer became the legal adviser to the newly appointed Cardinal-Archbishop Nicholas Wiseman at Westminster, at that time the centre of a stormy controversy. The pope had just appointed bishops to new Catholic dioceses in England and Wales, an action widely characterised as ‘papal aggression’, and Wiseman had issued a flamboyant declaration hailing the revival of Catholicism. Bowyer was undeterred; he never wavered from his attachment to the church of his adoption. He was tireless in defending the interests of the church and the pope, giving vent to his feelings in speeches or else in numerous letters to The Times. His services to the Catholic Church were recognised by various honours and dignities, including being named as a chamberlain to the pope, Pius IX.

Bowyer’s attempts to enter Parliament proved to be quite arduous. Securing election as a Catholic to public bodies was not easy. Having failed to gain endorsement as a candidate in two Berkshire constituencies, Bowyer was eventually elected in 1852 as member for Dundalk in Ireland and later sat for County Wexford. Once in Parliament, contemporaries found him hard to categorise; on some issues he was in agreement with Gladstone, though at other times he followed the lead set by Disraeli. He could always be relied on to champion the papacy in its opposition to the Italian nationalists led by Garibaldi, whom Bowyer loathed but who was a hero to the Liberals. He supported Irish home rule because that was the desire of his electors.

Our Lady and St Edmund – the church and cloister from the east
(Photo M. Brod 2014)

Bowyer chose to inform his co-religionists of his plan for a church at Abingdon in the columns of the Catholic newspaper, The Tablet. Readers were advised that the ancient town had once been the home of one of England’s leading abbeys and the birthplace of St Edmund Rich, a one-time Archbishop of Canterbury. Although a number of prominent Catholic families were associated with the appeal, it would seem the project owed most to the generosity of George Bowyer. He not only gave the land, sufficient for a church, presbytery, convent and cemetery, but provided the building materials and undertook to find a stipend of £100 per year for the incumbent. At the same time, he was building at his own expense the church of St John of Jerusalem in Great Ormond Street in London – it was later moved brick by brick to St John’s Wood – and was a patron of the associated hospital.

His generosity was not restricted to religious projects, He patronised the Order of Oddfellows, an organisation for mutual support in adversity, which set up a Bowyer Lodge in his honour. Also, in the early 1840s he presented the Abingdon Council with three large paintings, portraits of Charles II and of James II after Lely and a Martyrdom of St Sebastian attributed to Velasquez. In 1870 there was a further presentation of a valuable silver-gilt vase that had been a family heirloom. These gifts however were not disinterested; they were made at times when he was seeking nomination as a parliamentary candidate, but they evidently failed to have the desired effect.

Bowyer succeeded to his father’s baronetcy in 1860. He died in 1883 and is buried in the family vault at Radley. He had never married, and the title passed to a brother. His philanthropy had put the estate into debt, and it was sold in 1889.

© AAAHS and contributors 2014

The Braunche family

The Braunches were a leading family in Abingdon through several generations. A John Branch (d. 1488) worked from 1438 as a master carpenter on the building of All Souls College in Oxford. He was responsible for selecting and preparing the timber to be felled, and he may have been the designer of the hammer-beam roof in the chapel. Although his pay was only fractionally above that of the more skilled of the half dozen or so other carpenters employed, he was paid by the week and they by the day, so his income was probably more steady than theirs. He was almost certainly the John Braunche who leased property in 1438 from men whom we can recognise as leaders of the Fraternity or Guild of the Holy Cross, at that time not yet a chartered corporation. In 1440, John Braunche and his wife Avise (died 1490) took a house in West St Helen Street. The family’s connection with the Fraternity continued. Their son John (died 1521) carried on the carpentry business and was a Fraternity member. Their grandson Richard (about 1503−1544), who prospered as a woollen draper, was a master of the Guild. At the time of Amyce’s survey in 1554, Richard’s widow Elizabeth (about 1507−1556) was living in the Bury near the end of Lombard Street and deriving income from three adjoining properties in East St Helen Street, two of which, the present Nos. 55 and 51, still exist.

Richard’s elder son Thomas owned the Bull Inn on the corner of Littlebury Street (about where the NatWest Bank is now) but he died in 1565 and left it to his brother William (before 1538−1602), a woollen draper like his father but also a maltster. William continued the family tradition, becoming a governor of Christ’s Hospital, which had been established in 1553 to replace the old Fraternity. He was master four times between 1572 and 1593, as well as being mayor of Abingdon four times between 1563 and 1588. He also represented the town in the short-lived parliament of 1593.

It was in William’s time that factional conflict broke out in both the Corporation and in Christ’s Hospital, and he played a major role in it. This resulted in his oldest son Thomas (1557−1603) having his entry to these bodies delayed, so that he never achieved great distinction in them. Another son, Richard (1560−before 1602), became a clergyman and was rector of Hinton Waldrist and Longworth, while a third, Lionel (1566-1605), moved to London. In the next generation, the name of Braunche no longer appears among Corporation members and Hospital governors. Their position in Abingdon politics was taken up by a son-in-law, Robert Payne, who also inherited the Bull Inn. There was a John Braunche, saddler, who was active in Abingdon in 1637 but is not known to have taken any part in public affairs. Lionel’s offspring emigrated to Virginia and started an American branch of the family.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

Mary Buckland, nee Morland

Mary Morland exemplifies the limited possibilities of a woman of her time to make a career in scientific research. She was born in Marcham in 1797, daughter of the Abingdon lawyer Benjamin Morland. George Bowes Morland, also a lawyer and one of the important figures in the development of Abingdon’s brewing industry, was a half-brother. Her mother died when she was a baby, and she seems to have been entrusted for part of her childhood to Sir Christopher Pegge, Regius Professor of Anatomy in Oxford, and his wife, who encouraged her early scientific interests.

Fossil collecting seems to have been regarded as an acceptable pursuit for a female; an older woman, Etheldred Bennett, had already attracted attention in that field. While still a teenager, Mary Morland corresponded with Georges Cuvier, then at the peak of his career as the effective founder of paleontology, the scientific study of fossilised early life. She sent him specimens and produced illustrations for him, and in or soon after 1817 he sent her a copy of his latest book Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom) which was causing a stir in intellectual circles. The story goes that she was reading this on a coach journey, and got into conversation with a fellow passenger who was reading the same book. This was William Buckland (1784-1856), an Oxford clergyman who had turned geologist in the hope of reconciling the fossil record with the Biblical creation narrative. An intense collaboration soon started. In 1825, Buckland was given a Christ Church canonry – a highly lucrative sinecure –and they were married.

Married life will not have been dull. Buckland was an eccentric whose social behaviour was unpredictable, whose diet included beasts not usually regarded as edible – a dinner party based on crocodile was not a success –and whose sense of humour sometimes gave offence, but his lectures were immensely entertaining and attracted large audiences. He was liable to prance or stamp about the lecture room to demonstrate how extinct creatures might have walked. On one night, he called his wife from her bed to the kitchen to make him a slab of dough, over which he caused a pet tortoise to walk so that he could compare its footprints with those of a long dead ancestor. Their house was chaotic with every surface including the floors abundantly littered with specimens and books, and very rarely dusted. They travelled widely to places of geological interest and to scientific conferences.

The role of a Victorian wife was difficult to combine with independent scientific work. Mary Buckland had nine children, of whom five survived to adulthood, and she took great care over their education. She was active in charitable work, and when staying at Islip where her husband, now Dean of Westminster, was also rector, taught geography at the local school. This was frowned on as giving the lower orders ideas above their station.

Nonetheless, she continued to be scientifically active, although now mainly as collaborator, curator of specimens, and amanuensis to her husband. She improved his prose style, drew the illustrations for his publications, and developed techniques to reassemble fossil fragments. Their greatest joint achievement was the lavishly illustrated treatise Geology and Mineralogy (1836) where the biblical interpretation of the fossil record was definitively abandoned. William Buckland’s name appeared as sole author, but it was recognised by others that much of his professional success was due to the collaboration of his wife.

In the 1840s, Buckland’s mental health began to fail, and after 1850 he was confined to an asylum. He died in 1856. Mary, now working with her daughter Caroline, had branched out into the microscopic study of marine zoophytes (simple animals that behave in some ways as plants). She died in 1857, possibly from the after-effects of a coach accident on one of their continental journeys long before.

© AAAHS and contributors 2015

The Challenor Family in Abingdon

Members of the Challenor family members played important and influential roles in the development of Abingdon life from the time they arrived in the town in about 1850. Originally solicitors, Challenors became doctors, vicars, nurses. They served in the army, became officers of Abingdon Town Council, served as volunteers in the fire brigade and were elected mayors of the Town.

The first Bromley Challenor in Abingdon (1821-1888) according to family tradition was articled to Morland & Son solicitors. He qualified as a solicitor early in 1851, set up his practice in Abingdon, and over the next forty years became well-known in the town. He was a mainstay of many local organisations and founded a firm of solicitors that exists to this day. Amongst his offices, he became Clerk to the commissioners for property, Attorney’s Clerk, Clerk to Justices of the Abingdon division for Berkshire as well as Clerk to the Trustees of Lyford Charity.

The first Bromley Challenor as Mayor in 1863-64.
(© With thanks to Abingdon County Hall Museum.)

He married Mary Anne Gregory in 1850 and they had 12 children; some of their sons followed their father into the legal profession, taking partnerships in what became the family firm.

His oldest son, 1851- 1918, was also called Bromley and also became a solicitor, taking on most of the responsibilities that his father had held when he died in 1888. This second Bromley also became the Town Clerk as well as the Area Coroner, and Clerk to the Governors of Abingdon School. He married Martha Matilda Childs and they had eight children.

Bromley junior as Town Clerk in his official wig.

Bromley Challenor junior as Town Clerk in his official wig.
He was appointed to this post on 8 March 1877.
(© With thanks to Marion Cox)

Bromley junior was a serial volunteer, being a founder member of Abingdon’s Fire Brigade when it was formed in June 1871, becoming a sergeant in the Abingdon Company of the 4^thBerks. (Volunteer) Battalion, and was a member of the Town Rowing Club, amongst other things. In 1898, he published a volume of selections from the borough records from its incorporation under Philip and Mary until 1897. This is still a really useful source for local historians

Bromley junior’s oldest son, also Bromley (1879-1963), married Agnes Leonora Duncan in Llandaff Cathedral in 1914 She became the first female mayor of Abingdon in 1950. They lived in Waysmeet, now demolished, sited along the Faringdon Road, and had three children. Agnes passed on her great love of music to her children. Their son, also Bromley, trained initially in the solicitor’s firm that his great-grandfather had founded but it was not for him; he became a piano teacher and a much-loved church organist. One of Agnes’ great granddaughters, Helen Roberts, became accompanist to the much-acclaimed Treorchy Male Voice Choir, harking back to Agnes’ Welsh roots

Agnes was a founder member of the Abingdon Townswomen’s Guild and, in 1939, formed the Abingdon Women’s Voluntary Service of which she later became the centre organiser. She was co-opted onto a vacancy on the borough council in 1941 as a result of her work in the community. In May 1950, by a process of seniority, she was elected to the office of Mayor, the first woman in the history of the borough to occupy this position. Her daughter, Janet, filled the position of Mayoress, today referred to as the Mayor’s Escort. In 1951 she scored another first by becoming the first woman to be elected an Alderman.

Agnes Challenor as Mayor 1950-51.(© With thanks to Abingdon Town Council)

Oscar Bernard, (1890-1942) a son of the second Bromley, had won the Military Cross in 1917 when, as a temporary captain, he led his men “most gallantly” the face of heavy fire. He served as a King’s Messenger and once had to deliver a message to the Czar of Russia. He then became Coroner and Clerk to the Abingdon Justices. He was also a member of the Abingdon Fire Brigade from 1910 and its Chief from 1933 until his death in 1942, attributed to the stress of leading the Brigade to help deal with the aftermath of bombing raids on Portsmouth and elsewhere

Oscar Bernard Challenor in his uniform as Chief Fire Officer of the Abingdon Brigade.(© With thanks to Marion Cox)

Harry Septimus Challenor (1863-1936), third son of the first Bromley, became a surgeon. He was a founder member of the Malthouse Surgery, and was involved with the Hospital, the workhouse and the alms houses. He was also involved in taking care of the boys at Abingdon School. Harry was elected mayor of Abingdon three times, in 1908-9, 1917-18, and 1918-19, and was a founder member of Frilford Heath Golf Club.

Harry Septimus Challenor(© With thanks to Marion Cox)

George Norman Bromley Challenor (1914-1999) became a solicitor and, having fought in the second world war, returned to Abingdon taking up a partnership in his uncle Bromley’s firm. On his uncle’s death, he assumed the responsibilities of coroner, clerk to the County Magistrates, superintendent registrar and clerk to the Lyford Almshouses Charity. He was already Clerk to Abingdon District Chamber of Trade. When he retired as Clerk to the Abingdon County Magistrates in December 1976, he ended the century-long family tradition of being Clerk in this post, the original family holder having been Bromley Challenor junior. In recognition for his service as coroner, in 1979 he was elected President of the Coroner’s Society of England and Wales.

George Norman Bromley Challenor as President of the Coroners’ Society of England & Wales 1978-79, wearing the collar bearing the coats of arms of the coroners’ districts(© With thanks to Marion Cox)

The women of the family were also very active, being heavily involved with St Helen’s Church, two of Bromley junior’s daughters especially. Mercy Challenor (1882-1969) served as a Red Cross nurse at Tesdale House from 1915-1919. In 1922, together with her cousin Pernell Challenor, she founded the 2^nd Abingdon Group of the Scouts, originally known as the 2^nd North Berks Abingdon. The group met in a building in Ock Street and later moved to a hut in Sellwood Road. In the 1960s some of the land was sold to Blakes, the builders who built homes in Farm Road; part of the deal was to build a scout hut there, which is where the group still meets.

Like her sister Mercy, Gladys Grace Challenor (1889-1968) also served in the British Red Cross in Tesdale House from 1915-1919. During the Second World War she looked after elderly evacuees, and she ran a blood donor service in Abingdon for many years. She was awarded the MBE in 1966 after serving in the Red Cross for over 50 years. She had held the post of Divisional President of the Red Cross and was Divisional Treasurer at the time of her death in 1968.

Gladys Grace Challenor

Gladys Grace Challenor,
a daughter of Bromley Challenor junior,
in her Red Cross uniform in 1933
(© With thanks to Marion Cox)

By 1976, members of the Challenor family had held both the post of Clerk to the Abingdon County Magistrates and the post of Coroner for over a century and the post of superintendent registrar of marriages for ninety years. They helped to found many institutions that are still, not just going strong, but important parts of the fabric of Abingdon life.

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.

Bromley Challenor

Bromley Challenor was born in 1821 in Teddington, Middlesex. He arrived in Abingdon sometime in the late 1840s having worked as a solicitor’s clerk in Newbury, and by 1848 was established enough to be the cash secretary to the Abingdon Literary and Scientific Institution.

In 1850, aged 29 and a solicitor’s clerk, he married Mary Anne Gregory, a local girl whose parents lived in East St Helen Street, and over the years they had twelve children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. Twin girls born in 1854, lived for only a few months.

Bromley qualified as a solicitor early in 1851 and set up his practice in East St Helen Street, later moving to the High Street and finally to Stert Street. During the next forty years, after rapidly establishing himself and becoming well known in the town, he became a mainstay of many local organisations and founded a firm of solicitors that exists to this day.

Bromley was an ambitious man; as well as representing clients in court, he managed to hold a number of posts simultaneously. One example is the post of clerkship to the Petty Sessional Division of the County and another, clerkship to the Commissioners of Taxes for Borough and County. In 1855 Bromley was appointed Solicitor to the Abingdon Building Society by a unanimous decision of the Directors and in 1858 became Honorary Secretary to the Wool Fair. 1860 he was appointed Clerk to the Board of Guardians and held that post until his death. He also, amongst other positions, served as the district registrar and on the audit committee of the St Helen’s Vestry.

As if all this was not enough, he was a town councillor between 1855 and 1874, serving as Mayor in 1863-1864. He was interested enough in identifying with the Conservative party to act as the district agent, which seems to have made him unpopular with some voters; he lost his council seat in the local election of 1874 perhaps as a result. From then on, he appears to have taken something of a back seat in the town.

In 1874, his eldest son, Bromley junior, joined the firm and, by 1875, the name had changed from Challenor to Challenor & Son, which it still holds today. A few years later, a younger son, Edward Marchant, also joined. Having two sons working with him allowed the caseload and extent of the work to increase to include, for example, organising property auctions.

Throughout his life in Abingdon, Bromley was heavily involved in work that impacted on other people’s lives via the Town Council, Workhouse, almshouses and Littlemore asylum, as well as with ordinary everyday legal problems and events such as the Wool Fair. He socialised and associated with many other local prominent dignitaries as a councillor with his membership of the Abingdon Rifles, Masons and Oddfellows; the many newspaper articles of the time about the various dinners and formal occasions that took place make clear these were not necessarily onerous or even decorous.

Bromley Challenor died on 20 August 1888 aged 67 at his home, The Firs, Marcham Road, Abingdon after the “long and painful illness” which had been affecting him for over four and a half years, and is buried in Abingdon Cemetery. He was survived by his wife and ten of their twelve children.

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