Recently reprinted, the following titles, both originally published in 2004, are available from the author for £40 plus postage and packing (£5 in the UK).
DANIEL OF BEAMINSTER IN THE COUNTY OF DORSET: A NARRATIVE PEDIGREE
Yeoman farmers, attorneys, doctors and staunch Puritans, the Daniels of Beaminster have been prominent in the town since at least the fourteenth century. Part of the family’s historic holding, Knowle Farm, is owned by their descendants to this day.
The present work is a record of these tenacious landholders and takes the convenient form of a narrative pedigree. The lives and family connections of all traceable Daniels, including those of the South Petherton branch, are examined in often minute detail. Their houses and property are located and described.
Descendants in the female line are included, where possible, to at least the third generation. The detailed pedigrees of numerous allied families are set out in charts at the end of the work.
The possibility of kinship with the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel and with his sister, Mrs Florio – recently identified as the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets – is raised and discussed.
Daniel of Beaminster is the outcome of many years of research by prize-winning historian Rupert Willoughby, himself a Daniel descendant. It draws upon an extensive family archive as well as documents in public collections, is fully referenced and indexed, and enlivened by numerous colour and black and white illustrations.
It is intended not merely as a private family memoir but as a wider contribution to the history and genealogy of Dorset.
‘The author is well known to readers of SDNQ as a genealogist whose work always reflects good scholarship. Here, on these pages, as in all his work, there is no guesswork and no assumptions; reconstruction is outlined from documentary evidence, and the links between people clearly and positively established.
Perhaps the greatest value of this book lies not in the text referring to the Daniel family, but to the intelligent use of a variety of sources to reconstruct a family history. This book could serve as a model for the guidance of all those who want to learn how they could approach their own investigations by noting which sources they might consult for their own family reconstruction, and how that research could, finally, be presented’
Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset
The Beaminster-Crewkerne omnibus prepares to depart from the White Hart Hotel, Beaminster, c.1910. The little boy on the top, wearing a cap, is the author’s grandfather.
The same view today, with the little boy’s great-grandchildren.
THREE DORSET FAMILIES (HAWKINS, HOMER, WOOD)
This study of the much inter-related Hawkins, Homer and Wood families is a store-house of family lore, intended mainly for the benefit of their many descendants.
They command wider interest, though, because of the extent of their holdings – in their 19th-century heyday, the combined property of the Hawkins alone extended from the outskirts of Dorchester almost to Chesil Beach – and because of their far-reaching influence over the affairs of the county – as landowners, magistrates, county councillors, educationalists and promoters of religion.
They are, moreover, of no little interest to students and admirers of Thomas Hardy, who was born within their sphere of influence and was involved with them in various ways. Members of the Wood family were the real-life occupants of ‘Oxwell Hall’ at the very time that The Trumpet Major is set; whilst Catherine Hawkins of Waddon, the young widow who took over the management of her husband’s farm, was the inspiration for Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine of Far From the Madding Crowd. At the same time, the hapless Farmer Boldwood of the novel represents the true type of a Hawkins, a Homer or a Wood. These were dominant figures in Hardy’s world and one feels he had them in mind when writing of ‘the gentleman-farmer at Little Weatherbury’, described as ‘very handsome – rather stern looking – and rich’. Boldwood, that ‘solemn and reserved yeoman’, whom Bathsheba first glimpses in his ‘low carriage, bowling along … behind a horse of unimpeachable breed’, even has the good looks for which the horse-loving Hawkins were notable!
The story of each family unfolds in the form of a seamless narrative pedigree, each individual member being subject to as full a biography as possible. The net is widely cast to include female-line descendants and their connections by marriage. Fully referenced, illustrated and indexed, Three Dorset Families is an album of vignettes, many of which are surprising, moving or comical.
Waddon House, Portesham. The brothers Charles and William Hawkins and their brother-in-law Thomas Samson took a lease of Waddon in 1805, but their uncle Richard Wallis had been the previous tenant and it appears that Charles had been brought up in the house, having been orphaned at the age of ten.
The ‘Waddon Skull’ for many years reposed in a recess on the stairs. According to tradition, the remains were of a Negro servant of a former owner (Harry Chafyn?), who, entering his master’s bedroom one night on an alarm of fire, was mistaken for a robber and slain. A ‘screaming skull’, liable to be fractious and cause disturbances in the house’, it eventually became ‘too noisy’ for the comfort of the family. Charles’s daughter-in-law Catherine – the model for Bathsheba Everdene, who died in 1905 – packed it in William Hawkins’s old yeomanry shako box and, with her customary vigour, dispatched it to the Dorset County Museum.
Catherine’s son Charles, ‘a man of magnificent physique’, was the last of the line at Waddon. He died in 1927, having been kept alive for a week on a diet of oysters and champagne. His funeral at Portesham was conducted by the Master of the Cattistock Hunt – a clergyman.
Little Waddon House, ancestral home of the Hawkins family
Some vignettes from Three Dorset Families …
Aubrey Attwater. A man of whom it was said that ‘after-dinner conversation was his joy, and he an expert at it’, Aubrey was a friend of Siegfried Sassoon and of Robert Graves, both of whom were officers in his regiment. According to Graves, Aubrey ‘was known as “Brains” in the battalion. The militia majors, for the most part country gentlemen with estates in Wales and no thoughts in peacetime beyond hunting, shooting, fishing, and the control of their tenantry, were delighted with Attwater’s informative talk over the port at mess. Sergeant Malley, the mess-sergeant, would go round with his “Light or vintage, sir?”, and the old majors would prompt Attwater: “Now, Brains! Tell us about Shakespeare. Is it true that Bacon wrote him?” Or: “Well, Brains! What do you think about this chap Hilaire Belloc? Does he really know when the war’s going to end?” Attwater would humorously accept his position as combined encyclopedia and almanac.’
The Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould. His marriage to Grace Taylor – a ‘practically illiterate’ mill girl, 16 years old at the time of their first meeting – had taken place despite the opposition of both families. According to legend (which is said to been the inspiration for Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion), Sabine had fallen in love with Grace – remembered as a woman of considerable spirit and character – and, having proposed marriage, had sent her away to be educated (and to have her Yorkshire accent ironed out), an experiment in social engineering that met with remarkable success.
Joseph Saunders. According to the diary (1804-5) of the Rev. William Ettrick, Vicar of Affpuddle and Turnerspuddle, Joseph and his elder brother Thomas came under the spell of Susan Woodrowe, ‘a Hag and reputed witch’. She is blamed for the death of Thomas’s horse ‘without ostensible Cause, as related by her with singular Glee, and other losses sustained by him in that year, especially 5 calves out of 8 – it being uncommon to lose any … Jos Saunders … also had many losses, and was equally hated by her.’
Mary Lillington. She features as ‘the other woman’ in the diary of John Richards of Warmwell, who entered his more secretive thoughts in Italian: ‘Munday, the 26 Ditto [May 1701]. – Mary Lillington came hither … Sunday, the 29th Ditto [June 1701]. – Besai M.L. pr’ma. Vez. [I kissed M.L. the first time] – the affair causing much anguish to Richards’s jealous wife Alice.
Athelhampton Hall
George James Wood. He had taken a lease of the Athelhampton estate from Lord Wellesley in 1836, bought the freehold from him in 1848, and resided there. Athelhampton Hall in the 1830s was ‘a deserted and seemingly ruined building used as a farm. The garden was a wilderness through which cattle roamed right up to the door.’ George James Wood is credited with saving it from ruin, although his intervention is considered to have been ‘over-active’, and by demolishing the old gatehouse (in 1862) he is said to have ‘perpetrated an outrage’.
Henry William Hawkins. He was an enthusiastic rider to hounds (meetings of the Cattistock regularly taking place at Martinstown), often leading the hunt; and on one memorable occasion, won ‘Hawkins’s Steeplechase’ across Waddon Vale, the course beginning at Waddon House and ending at Upwey … Described as a ‘mild, meekmannered man’, he seems to have been held in great esteem and affection, particularly by his children.
Thomas Hare. Tradition has it that Thomas Hare, aged nine, had run bare-foot alongside the coach travelling through Dorset, bringing news of the victory at Waterloo. Noted as a political reformer, he is famous for inventing the electoral method known as ‘S.T.V.’ – Single Transferable Vote – which is the method now used in Ireland and other parts of the world, including in some elections in the U.S.A., and is still the favourite of advocates of electoral reform. Precociously clever and no doubt largely self-educated, he was admitted to the Inner Temple on 14 November 1828, aged 22, having already, at the age of 20, published a pamphlet entitled The Maritime Policy of Great Britain, in which he argued for a relaxation of the Navigation Laws.
The Rt. Rev. Lewis Clayton, Bishop of Leicester. In contrast to his wife, who is said to have ‘worn the trousers’, Bishop Clayton was ‘a gentle and quiet man, and was regarded by many as a saint … His wife Katherine was a woman of force and drive, who was made a Commander of the British Empire for her services to the town and diocese of Peterborough, and was made a Freeman of the city in 1927.’ She lived latterly in Eccleston Square, London, where she died on 10 November 1933, aged 90, ‘a commanding figure to the last’.
Sophia Pope. Towards the end of her life she was apt to become a little confused. During a visit by her niece’s husband, Francis Galpin, and their 17-year-old grandson Brian, she addressed the latter sternly: ‘Francis, I hear you have been a very naughty boy – causing Francis, by then a senior canon of the Church of England, to go bright red. ‘Doubtless he remembered perfectly well what the naughtiness was,’ says Brian, ‘though we were never able to get it out of him, either then or later.’ Aunt Sophy died at her house in Yeovil in 1939, aged 92.
William Edward Hawkins. He was chiefly remembered for his hatred of all innovation; as a foxhunter, he declared that the increasingly prevalent barbed wire ‘should be drawn across the man who invented it’; he refused to accept the new Summer Time, ‘so that his labourers had to return home for their mid-day meal at 3 p.m.’; and scorned to invest in a steam plough set (though Francis Eddison, a pioneer of steam ploughing, lived nearby and was a ‘frequent and pleasant visitor’). In 1923, however, he collaborated with his Martinstown neighbours Edwin Pope of Ashton Farm and Edward Barnaby Duke of East Farm to introduce the first supply of piped water to the village (still partly in use).
William Homer. He was described in a lawsuit of 1689 as a respectable man with ‘an estate of £20 a year or over and with a considerable personal estate is probably the richest person in the whole town [Bere Regis], and neither he nor any of his generation ever kept an ale house’.
Roger’s Hill Farm, Affpuddle, occupied by the Homers from 1749 to 1805, but earlier the home of their relative Magdalen Ash
Magdalen Ash. William Homer’s opponent in 1689, she was described as ‘a woman of such a haughty extravagant and litigious inclination, and so given to profuse luxuries in dyett, costly clothes, ridinge horses and other wasteful expenses’.
Arthur John Homer Hawkins. His progressive views were reflected in the upbringing of his own children. He insisted in their early years that they went around barefoot, and, on one occasion, summarily removed from the person of his daughter several layers of petticoat that he deemed unnecessary.
