Abingdon People - Abingdon on Thames Town Council

Elizabeth Poole

The Abingdon prophetess Elizabeth Poole was – almost certainly – born in the London parish of St Gregory by St Paul in 1622. At some point in her youth she joined a Baptist congregation, but, it seems, was expelled. She appeared in Abingdon after the town was taken by the Parliamentarians in 1644. There had been some allegation of sexual impropriety, and one can only guess that her migration to Abingdon was in search of the boy-friend among the London troops that formed the garrison. If this is correct, she didn’t find him, but she did become a friend of Thomasine Pendarves and a member of John Pendarves’s proto-Baptist community, and seems to have developed a reputation for spiritual insight.

She first comes unambiguously into the spotlight in the fraught month of December 1648. The army had entered London and seized power; its leaders were debating the disposition of the king and the political settlement of the nation. As ‘the gentlewoman from Abingdon’, Poole was given a fixed status in the Council of Officers. She had access to the soldiers singly or in small groups, and was allowed to speak in their plenary sessions. But when, on 5 January 1649, she advised that the king should be imprisoned but not executed, her prophetic gifts were called into question and she was dismissed. The full background remains unclear. Her own theology came from membership of the small, mostly female, group around the mystical Doctor John Pordage of Bradfield, but she was effectively acting as a mouthpiece for much more widely held political and religious opinions. Who arranged her entry into the Council is unknown, but a possible candidate would be the Abingdon soldier Francis Allen.

At some time after the Whitehall debacle, Poole returned permanently to London and continued a sometimes spectacular career as a religious activist. She seems to have had a significant following. In 1668, she was arrested for illegal operation of a printing press, but there is no further trace of her in the records.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

Archdeacon Alfred Pott

Alfred Pott was vicar of St Helen’s, Abingdon, from 1867 to 1875. It was one of six parishes he served in during his fifty-two years as a parish priest. He was appointed Archdeacon of Berkshire in 1869 which made him the assistant to the bishop in the Berkshire parishes of the Oxford diocese, a position he held until he finally retired from active ministry in 1902 at the age of eighty. In his retirement, Alfred Pott wrote Memoirs of my life, 1822-1903 as a typescript intended solely for his children, but a surviving copy came to light a century after it was written and has provided much of the material for these articles.

Pott suffered from periodic bouts of ill health all his life and a constant theme in his Memoirs is his doubt about having the strength to undertake the new positions that were offered to him. Despite these problems he survived to his late eighties and his contemporaries much appreciated his wise counsel and his ability to get things done.

Alfred Pott’s parents were Charles Pott, a merchant, and later the treasurer of the Foundling Hospital in London, and Anna, née Cox, daughter of Samuel Compton Cox, a leading lawyer. Alfred was educated at Eton and Oxford, ordained as a priest in 1846, and, after a short period as a deacon at Swallowfield, served at Cuddesdon, near Oxford, from 1847 to 1857 as curate and then vicar. A protégé of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, he also served for many years as one of his examining chaplains, a post he continued to hold even after Wilberforce became bishop of Winchester.

In 1852 Wilberforce gave him the task of setting up a theological college on land opposite the bishop’s palace in Cuddesdon, and then appointed him as the first principal. The college aroused some initial opposition to what were described as its ‘Romanising practices’, but Pott and his immediate successor established its place in theological education.

In 1855, while at Cuddesdon, Pott married Emily Harriet (1835-1903), daughter of Joseph Gibbs, vicar of Clifton Hampden. During their long married life they had five daughters and five sons. Joseph was a younger brother of William Gibbs who managed the very profitable family guano business and was also a notable religious philanthropist. Gibbs family money was significant in Pott’s building projects, particularly in Abingdon.

After resigning from Cuddesdon due to one of his periodic bouts of ill health, Pott resumed his ministry after a break of a few months and, in 1858, moved to East Hendred, near Wantage, where the local squire was a Roman Catholic. He began by building church schools and then asked the well-known church architect Henry Woodyer to undertake the restoration of the parish church.

Pott succeeded the long-serving Nathaniel Dodson as vicar of Abingdon in 1867. He was hesitant – there was no vicarage and “the loss of income was not inconsiderable” – but was “strongly urged” by Bishop Wilberforce to accept, perhaps suggesting that Wilberforce, knowing that Pott had some private means, wanted him to serve in parishes which it would be difficult to get other good candidates to accept. He moved to Abingdon although the new vicarage had still to be built and immediately set about improving the facilities in the town. His priority was the construction of proper church schools, and boys’, girls’ and infants’ schools were built in 1868-9.
Pott then turned his attention to the restoration of St Helen’s Church. He was daunted by the prospect of “a work of great cost and difficulty” but asked Henry Woodyer to draw up plans. Woodyer’s style of architecture with its emphasis on the chancel fitted Pott’s high church views, and their plans went far beyond the immediately necessary repairs and stabilisation of the structure.

St Helen’s has an unusual layout for a church. Its site constrained it to growing by adding aisles and, from the sixteenth century, the chancel and nave had been flanked by two aisles on each side, all the full length of the church and with only small differences in the heights of the five pitched roofs. Woodyer transformed the central chancel and nave aisle by raising its roof to be significantly higher than the roofs of the neighbouring four aisles, and inserting a new east window. Pott and his family, particularly William Gibbs, paid the entire cost of the new chancel aisle.

But despite the large amount of work on the church from 1869 to 1873 the tower was untouched even though it was in too unstable a state to allow the bells to be rung. We can, perhaps, surmise that Pott knew that funds to stabilise the tower would eventually have to be found by the parish and that he also knew it was only Gibbs money and not local donations that would pay for the high church chancel he so much wanted for St Helen’s. It was a further thirteen years before the work on the tower could be completed. The full restoration of St Helen’s was finally celebrated in 1886.

In addition to organising the building of the junior schools and the major reordering of St Helen’s, Pott also had a great influence on the life of the church and the grammar school. He reorganised church services, used the surplice for preaching, a high church practice, and replaced pew rents by voluntary weekly offerings. He served as chairman of the governors of Abingdon School from his appointment as vicar in 1869 until 1900, long after he had left Abingdon. The local historian James Townsend, writing some forty years later, comments that he won general respect through the changes he accomplished and “by the tact and vigour of his character”.

Pott resigned his Abingdon living in 1874 suffering again from one of his recurrent bouts of ill health. In 1875 he moved to Clifton Hampden as vicar and then, in 1882, accepted his last incumbency and moved to Sonning, near Reading, where he stayed for seventeen years. Both these parishes were already provided with a refurbished church, a vicarage, and a school, allowing Pott to concentrate on his pastoral work and his responsibilities as archdeacon.

Pott resigned as a parish priest in 1899 and as archdeacon in 1902, and retired to Windlesham in Surrey, where died in 1908. He was very highly regarded by his contemporaries who valued his “practical wisdom, great powers of organisation, judicious advice, and unobtrusive readiness to help”.

© AAAHS and contributors 2023 & 2024

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.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

Harry Redfern

Henry Redfern – always known as Harry – was an important Edwardian architect with strong Abingdon associations. He was born in April 1861 at Berwick St John, Wiltshire, the son of George and Mary Redfern. His father was a surveyor and clerk of works to architect Henry Woodyer during his restoration work at St Helen’s, Abingdon. Harry was educated at Abingdon School, attending from 1871 to 1876.

In 1876 he was articled to Woodyer who was based in Guildford, but left a year later to join William Butterfield in London. By 1889 he had an independent architectural practice in Derby, but in 1896 went into partnership with John James Stevenson in London until the latter’s death in 1908. He became a Fellow of the RIBA in 1903.

With Stevenson, Redfern designed a number of houses in London, and in Abingdon he rebuilt in 1901 the former malthouse and adjacent premises at 58-60 East St Helen Street as a house and offices for lawyer Charles Alfred Pryce. Other work in Abingdon included the lodge at Abingdon School in 1897 and an extension to Lacies Court for Mrs Richard Chamberlain in 1902. In the same year, with J J Stevenson, he designed the new Board Schools in Bostock Road (now Carswell Community Primary School) and an eclectic Arts-and-Crafts house, Summerfield in Wootton Road, for Thomas Skurray, a director of Morland’s Brewery. This was sadly demolished in 2012. In 1911 he designed the altar for St Michael’s, Park Road. He was an active member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and was involved with the restoration of the Roysse Room (1911) and the former Abbey buildings in 1896 after the brewing business moved out.

history_The-Lodge-Abingdon-School-scaled

The Lodge, Abingdon School (1897).
(© D. Clark)

Redfern’s major work can be seen in Cambridge, at Christ’s and Magdalene Colleges, four university laboratories, and houses for Cambridge dons, some of which were later incorporated into Wolfson and Robinson Colleges. In Oxford, he designed the old biochemistry laboratory. He was also responsible, as chief architect for the State Management Districts of the Home Office from 1915 to 1945, for building fourteen public houses in Carlisle to cater for the large number of workers attracted there by the new munitions factories at Gretna Green. The government took control of the pubs in the area in order to ensure that the workforce – largely single men – stayed sober enough to work safely with explosives. Redfern’s pubs were light and airy with Arts-and-Crafts features, but planned so that the barman could see what was going on in every corner. They often had bowling alleys and gardens but also had kitchens so that food could be served – aspects of pubs that took until the late twentieth century to be common nationally. His work was commemorated by the pub in Etterby (1938) being named the Redfern.

In his last year he wrote Some Recollections of William Butterfield and Henry Woodyer (1950).He died on 8 March 1950.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

The Abingdon Market Cross, by Sampson Strong, about 1605

John Richardson

John Richardson was Abingdon’s serjeant-at-mace from 1628 until his death in 1663. His functions included escorting the mayor on ceremonial occasions and, more importantly, acting as his executive assistant, progress-chaser, receiver, enforcer and even at times jailer. A salary of 52s per year, although no doubt supplemented with perquisites, suggests that the job was not full time, although what else he did is not known. Nothing is known of his birth or family, but his executrix was a widow, Eleanor Moore, perhaps a daughter or granddaughter, who remarried soon after his death. He was buried in the vestry at St Nicholas’ Church.

Richardson first appears in the records in 1625, when he witnessed the will of the wealthy John Blacknall, dying of plague. In a time when Abingdon was riven by factional strife, he was plainly on the side of the Blacknalls and their allies, the Mayotts. His employment dates from the mayoralty of John Mayott, and he was once dismissed by Benjamin Tesdale of the opposing faction, but restored to office a few months later. The Tesdales were advanced Puritans, the Blacknalls and Mayotts religious conservatives.

Richardson’s historical significance is in the long account he wrote, in amateurish verse, of a civic celebration held in September 1641, a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Its importance is shown by the fact that someone spent the money to have it printed in Oxford and published locally. At first sight, it is a neutral description of the occasion, with perhaps a little deadpan humour when he describes the seven hours of preaching that the population were forced to sit through as part of their holiday. In the introduction, the author innocently describes his work as ‘this harmelesse and small Pamphlet’.

Yet harmless it was not, nor was meant to be. Deep in the seventeenth century consciousness was a detailed knowledge of the Bible, and, like much writing of the time, the piece abounds in biblical allusions which carry the intended message. Re-reading it with this in mind shows it as a well calibrated and well-aimed attack from the traditionalist side on many of the Puritan tenets upheld by the Tesdales and their friends. In particular, Richardson is concerned to vindicate the use of music and singing in worship, which the Puritans disliked, and to protect the Market Cross, threatened with destruction as – according to the Puritans – idolatrous.

The most polemical section comes in the middle, where Richardson describes himself preceding the Mayor and Corporation from St Helen’s to the Cross, and hearing the townsfolk enthusiastically singing a psalm:

 (Being come to th’ famous Crosse, our journies end),
Her mounting Stayres in state we did ascend;
The Clerk was call’d, and he a Bible took,
The hundred and sixt Psalme he out did look,
Two thousand Quoristers their notes did raise,
And warbled out the great Creatours praise,
Their thundering Eccho gave so great a shout,
Nicklas and Helen were quite baffled out.
Over my head, I saw King David stand,
Listning toth' Musick, with his Harp in hand,
Sure when the Psalmist liv'd, with's sacred Lire,
He seldom play'd, or sung to such a Quire.
If either King could speake, hee'd sweare by's Crown
No Haire-braind Separatist would pull him downe:
For why, this heavenly joy, we had so late,
Did seeme, in part, the Crosse to consecrate.

The key to the passage is the reference to King David and the rather strained trope that the Cross is somehow being consecrated. This makes a connection which contemporaries will have understood between the Cross and the holy Ark in the Bible, which was consecrated by David with instrumental music, singing and dancing. David’s wife Michal was cursed with sterility for her disapproval, and a certain Uzza was struck dead for touching the Ark with impious hands (1 Chronicles 16:5-9; 2 Samuel 6:5-23). The Puritans were being warned, though they would in fact succeed a few years later in their aim of demolishing the Cross.

Richardson no doubt wrote other poems, but none have come down to us. His verses have little literary merit. But In honour of Abingdon, or the Seventh day of September’s solemnization tells us more of the state of Abingdon society, and indeed that of the country as a whole, in the run-up to the Civil War than many more expertly written accounts.

© AAAHS and contributors 2015

Thomas Richardson

Thomas Richardson was a prominent Abingdon townsman. He built up a grocery business serving the town and the surrounding area and, as a leading member of the Wesleyan community, he had a prominent role in building Abingdon’s first Methodist chapel. He was born in Bicester in 1801, and seems to have been living in Abingdon by 1829 when he married Mary Warren, born in Stony Stratford in 1806. They had two children, Elizabeth, born about 1834, and Charles, about 1836. By 1831 he was occupying premises in Ock Street, just east of where the Post Office Sorting Office is now (2015).

These premises were among the more valuable properties in the street, with an estimated rental value – although he owned them – of over £32. Of the 136 properties on the south side of the street, only seven had a higher valuation. The building provided space for his family, a couple of servants, and at least some of his employees. Richardson would remain there for the rest of his life.

In religion, Richardson was a nonconformist. In 1846, it was he who received the Town Council’s permission to ‘pull down two tenements in the Ock Street and build a Wesleyan chapel on the site thereof’. The site was immediately to the west of Richardson’s house. The 1851 census shows a Wesleyan minister among his household.

In his politics, Richardson was a Liberal. In 1832, he spoke at a public meeting, seconding a petition to be sent to Westminster in support of the local MP, John Maberly, and parliamentary reform. In the parliamentary election of 1854 he was named in the newspapers as a supporter of J T Norris, who favoured ending discrimination against nonconformists. In the same year his fellow-Liberals nominated him for a vacant place on the borough council, but he declined to stand, citing pressure of business.

Richardson’s grocery business was solid and stable. In 1861, he described himself to the census enumerator as employing twelve people. There were branches in Marcham, Blewbury and Steventon. Advertisements show that he shared agency contracts for branded goods with another prominent local businessman, E J Trendell. He was seen as sufficiently reliable to be charged on several occasions with winding up the affairs of fellow-grocers who had become bankrupt. There may have been a period of unease when, in 1854, a Faringdon grocer accused of selling coffee adulterated with 30% of chicory declared that he had bought it in good faith from Richardson. The local magistrates evidently believed him, but such chicanery was commonplace enough at the time, and there is no record of further action being taken.

Thomas Richardson died in January 1874. His son and heir Charles had ambitions to live as a gentleman, and the business was immediately sold to George Rant for £5000. The site at 56 Ock Street would be the main shop of Rant & Tombs till it was demolished in 1965. Charles left Abingdon about 1881, became bankrupt in 1893, and died in 1911. Charles’s third daughter Dorothy (1873-1957) achieved fame as a feminist writer and a sometime lover of H G Wells.

© AAAHS and contributors 2015

Oliver Sansom

Oliver Sansom, leader of the Quakers in the Vale of White Horse, was born in 1636 in Beedon but of a family based in Charney Bassett. At seven, and in spite of this being in the front line in the Civil War, he was sent to an aunt in Charney to go to the school at nearby Longworth. He first attended a Quaker meeting in 1657, but it was not until the early 1660s that he became a serious member of that sect. By then he had married Jane Bunce who was of another Charney family. Over time, he converted Jane and the other members of both families to his own new beliefs.

Of the many sects that proliferated in those disturbed times, it was the Quakers who were the most disliked both by Anglicans and by other Dissenters. They separated themselves from normal society, insisting on obeying what they regarded as God’s law even when this was at variance with the law of the land. In particular, they refused to pay the tithes that maintained the Anglican clergy. Sansom was destined to spend long periods of his life in prison, although this doesn’t seem to have greatly hampered his sectarian activities.

Living as a farmer in Boxford, Sansom became leader of the Quakers in the region of Newbury. But before 1678, after much legal trouble over tithes, he gave up farming and moved to Faringdon as a mercer. Faringdon became the centre for the three hundred or so Quakers in the Vale, one of three such groupings in Berkshire. It was led by Sansom with the help of members of his family: his wife Jane handled administrative and social affairs, and her sister Joan Vokins the spiritual teaching and exhortation.

Sansom was an occasional visitor to Abingdon for missionary work and recruiting, and in 1691 he moved there permanently for the purpose of reinforcing the local Quaker community which was always a small one. A Quaker meeting house was established near the west end of Ock Street before 1700. Sansom made his home in Boar Street, the present Bath Street. Although it was no longer illegal to be a Quaker, he continued to defy the law in refusing to pay taxes and tithes, and remained in continuous conflict with the local authorities until his death in 1710. He left numerous polemical writings, administrative documents, letters, and a very informative autobiography.

Sansom was buried in the Quaker burial ground near the meeting house. He and his wife are not known to have had any children.

© AAAHS and contributors 2016

John Sant

John Sant was one of the few abbots of Abingdon whose career path led beyond the confines of the Abbey. He became abbot in 1468. It was the time of the Wars of the Roses. The Yorkist Edward IV was on the throne, and Sant probably owed his position to his allegiance to the Yorkist cause. Nothing is known of his birth or earlier career, save that he had a degree in theology from Oxford.

In 1474, Edward sent Sant on a diplomatic mission to Rome. He seems to have made a good impression on the pope, and in the next few years, with Edward’s approval, would be a papal nuncio and then legate de latere to England, Ireland and Wales. His remit included the sale of indulgences and the personal inspection and, if necessary, the reform of religious institutions in all three countries. He was in Rome again in 1478, when he became a patron of the Church of San Spirito in Sassia, originally founded by King Ine of Wessex, and recently rebuilt by Pope Sixtus IV. In the next year, he went there once more as head of an official embassy with several other churchmen to report to the pope on the success of his mission.

Difficulties started in 1485, after the Battle of Bosworth, when the Lancastrian claimant took the throne as Henry VII. Two Yorkist fugitives took sanctuary in Culham church, which belonged to Abingdon Abbey, but were physically pulled out by the new king’s men. Sant was immediately under suspicion of complicity with the Yorkists and was threatened with heavy penalties in case of further opposition.

Henry occasionally visited Abingdon and once sent Sant on an embassy to France, but did not gain his allegiance. Sant helped one Yorkist rebellion with money, and later foolishly agreed to finance a local group that was plotting against the Tudor regime. The plot was discovered, and most of the plotters were executed. Sant was forced to pay a fine approximately equal to half the abbey’s annual income. Much of the Abbey’s landed property was forfeited to the Crown, but was later restored. Sant died in 1496, having bequeathed his personal possessions to Henry ‘in token of all the grace shown to him’.

The Sellwood Families

Many of the élite families in Abingdon’s history may not have regarded themselves as Abingdon families at all. They were, rather, branches from trunks that flourished elsewhere. They might have kept in close contact with their ancestral homes and returned there to be buried. Examples are the Knapps of Chilton, the Morlands of West Ilsley, the Bowles of Longworth.

There were three Sellwood families in Abingdon at different times. They were not directly descended from each other; one probably and two certainly came from the contiguous villages of Eaton and Appleton, some five miles to the north-west.

The first of these families appeared in the mid-sixteenth century with Thomas and Elizabeth Sellwood who had children baptised at St Helen’s, as did, in the following generation, Christopher and Joan. An unfortunate Anne Sellwood buried an illegitimate daughter Sysliein 1559. But none of these achieved any great prominence in the town, and there is no clear evidence that their offspring remained there in the following century.

The second Sellwood family first appears in the Abingdon records when, some time about 1620, Robert (I) Sellwood (1607-44) came from Appleton to be apprenticed to the baker Richard Wise. In due course, he married his master’s daughter Katherine and continued in the baking trade. There were two sons, Richard (?-1683) and Robert (II) (1637-1722), and a daughter, Alice. The 1664 hearth tax records show Richard Sellwood, who continued his father’s bakery business, living in St Nicolas’ parish, probably in Stert Street, and having three hearths, which shows a reasonable middle-class lifestyle. Richard and his wife Martha had three sons and three daughters. One of the sons, John, (?-1725) is noted as a clock and watchmaker; a number of Sellwoods had been clockmakers in London, although they were no longer active when John was at an age to be apprenticed. Another of Richard’s sons, Samuel, (?-1731/2) continued as a baker, and was buried in St Nicolas’. Richard and his family were religious dissenters, and were occasionally fined when this was illegal, but were obviously ready to conform to the extent needed to carry on their trades and have conventional burials.

Robert(I)’s other son, Robert (II), an apothecary, married into the élite Cheyney family, and, in spite of having been a presbyterian as late as 1673, became a governor of Christ’s Hospital in 1676. He was mayor four times between 1677 and 1702 and, elected again in 1720, had to be excused on account of his ‘great age and indisposition of body’. He will then have been 83 years old. His son John (c.1663-1715) was mayor three times between 1697 and 1707. Robert(II)’s daughter Elizabeth married a wealthy London brewer, William Hucks, who would use his Abingdon relationships to challenge the well-entrenched Simon Harcourt for the borough’s parliamentary seat and, in 1708, to replace him in it.

The third family was that headed by the lawyer Samuel Sellwood. He was born at Eaton in 1752, the son of Robert and Mary Sellwood née Mayow. By 1778, Samuel was a secondary burgess in Abingdon’s corporation. By 1780 he was town clerk, a function he would retain until his death 38 years later. He had a large legal practice, was also clerk to Christ’s Hospital, and acted in similar roles for numerous other institutions. He married Frances Kendall at St Helen’s in 1783. They had a big house on the north side of Ock Street; it had three living rooms and four bedrooms, with four more for servants. In 1801, they sold it and lived for the rest of their lives at Old Abbey House.

Samuel Sellwood was particularly active in political matters. He was advisor and agent for Abingdon’s patron and MP, Edward Loveden Loveden, and later for his near neighbour, George Knapp. He worked for the local volunteer militia that was set up in 1798 in fear of a French invasion, took the rank of Captain – unpaid and not subject to military discipline – and negotiated with the then MP, Thomas Theodosius Metcalfe, for a stand of colours – the set of ceremonial flags that defined a regiment. He worked closely with two local fellow-lawyers: Benjamin Morland, who seems to have been a distant cousin, and John Bowles, a predecessor as town clerk. When Bowles died, Samuel Sellwood became guardian of his young son Thomas. Thomas Bowles eventually married Sellwood’s daughter, Hester Sophia,and many of their descendants still live in the Abingdon area.

Samuel Sellwood died in 1818 and his wife in 1842. Both are buried in Appleton, as are two of their children who died young. A son, also Samuel, became a fellow of Magdalen College and died without issue. The Sellwoods are commemorated in Abingdon in the name of Sellwood Road.

Thomas Skurray

Born in Faringdon in 1868, Thomas Skurray was educated at King Alfred’s School in Wantage and Reading School, going on to read chemistry at University College, London. However, family circumstances forced him to leave without finishing the course. He nonetheless developed an interest in bacteriological research and in the chemistry of food and drink, and was elected a fellow of the Chemical Society in 1892.

At the age of twenty Skurray joined T H Field & Sons, brewers of Shillingford, Berkshire. In 1889 Fields were taken over by Morlands and he made good use of the opportunities this provided. It took him just ten years to attain membership of the Morlands board. He became joint managing director in December 1906 and chairman in December 1923, a position he held until his death

Skurray’s expertise kept Morlands in a position of technical leadership in the brewing industry. He developed an advanced process for the production of a malt extract which gave a particular character to the brewery’s bottled beers and mild ale. Other innovations during his career included a new maltings, a soft drinks factory, and a replacement brewhouse.

He served during World War One on numerous administrative bodies. Among his other activities, he developed a process to convert sugar waste into a honey substitute for export to the troops.

His brewing interests were not confined to Abingdon; he was chairman of the Brewers’ Society 1928 to 1931 and held many directorships in other brewing companies, most notably Wilsons of Manchester; Ind Coope and Allsopp, Burton on Trent and Peter Walker, Warrington.

An obituary by a colleague refers to his joining Trust Houses Ltd. in 1921 to help that idealistic venture recover from serious commercial difficulties, ‘What brought him and kept him, giving time and energy, was his love of the country inn, his belief in its importance in the social life of our time’. His interest in public houses and hotels led to his appointment to the Royal Commission on Licensing from 1929 to 1931, where he campaigned for improved catering and accommodation in public houses.

Apart from his business interests, he was devoted to the County of Berkshire which was, as the Times reported in his obituary, ‘both home and heaven to him’ and was influential in having White Horse Hill scheduled as an ancient monument. He served on the County Council for 28 years; he was chairman of finance from 1921 to early 1938 and council chairman from 1931 until his death. From 1932 to 1938 he was a member of Council of the University of Reading. There were few aspects of local life in which he did not take an interest; he was a member of Oxford Preservation Trust, a Conservator of the River Thames, chairman of the Warren Hospital and a supporter of Abingdon Council Junior School.

At the age of 15 he was playing football for Reading Football Club; later he played for Abingdon Town. He was an all-round sportsman, an accomplished cricketer, tennis player, figure skater, golfer and a fine shot.

He married in 1896 Mabel Harris, daughter of John Harris of The Park, Abingdon, a former mayor of the town. They lived at Walton House in Ock Street until 1906 when they moved into the house known as Summerfield in the Wootton Road, now sadly demolished, that the architect Harry Redfern had designed for them.

There were three children of the marriage: Clare, Deane, and Judy. Clare, whose married name was Spurgin, had a world-wide career as an expert in managing juvenile delinquents, and her work was recognised by the award of an OBE in England and equivalent honours in other countries. Deane Skurray, an architect, became a Morlands director in 1934, designing several pubs for the company and managing its estate. Judy married an army officer and was a housewife and mother.

Thomas Skurray died at Summerfield on 22 June 1938. He had become a rich man, leaving an estate of £334,000.

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