Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  Lord Herbert of Lea, friend of Florence Nightingale, and War Minister during the Crimean War, lived at Wilton until his early death in 1861. He and his Russian mother, Catherine Woronzow, Countess of Pembroke, were both enthusiasts about Byzantine architecture, and they built Wilton a new parish church in the style of the North Italian churches, and filled it with wonderful specimens of Italian marble and mosaics. He also put into the church some of the most ancient stained glass in this country, and it is now indeed a museum of beauty.

  SWINDON

  Swindon has a character unique in the county, for it is a municipal borough created in the nineteenth century. Its history is also unique, and the unique portion of this is all concerned with the last hundred years. The description of Swindon in Britton’s Beauties of Wilts is very surprising in view of later accounts of the place. Here is Britton:

  “Swindon is a market town, placed on an eminence, which affords an extensive prospect over some parts of Gloucestershire and Berkshire. The pleasantness of its situation, combined with other circumstances, have induced many persons of independent fortune to fix their residence at Swindon; and their mansions contribute as much to the adornment of the town as their social intercourse may be said to animate and enliven it. To this may be attributed, perhaps, that liberality of mind which appears to characterise the inhabitants of this little town.… In Domesday the manor is mentioned under the appellation of ‘Svindune’. The present Lord of the Manor is Ambrose Goddard Esq., whose family seat is a neat modern residence with extensive grounds. These occupy the brow of the hill, which affords a widely extensive view over a rich variety of pasture-land.”

  No one would fancy that the pleasantly situated little market town was the Swindon we know today. The Goddard family were originally settled at Upham, near Aldbourne, and in 1560 they bought the manor of Swindon, with which place they had for some centuries already had considerable connection. For three hundred years they were lords of this typical Wiltshire manor, and they seem to have attracted to its neighbourhood a number of what Brittori calls those “persons of independent fortune” who added so much to the amenities of the place.

  A pamphlet written in 1945 shows what happened to the place after Britton’s day. Here is an extract from it:

  “The establishment of the Great Western Railway Works in 1841 caused the market town of some 2,000 persons to grow in 50 years to an industrial town of approximately 45,000 population. The persons who represented this rapid growth came not from the County but very largely from the industrial areas of South Wales and northern England and were, accordingly, alien to Wiltshire.… Swindon is predominantly a working class industrial town having little dignity of architecture and, formerly, but a sparse provision of cultural amenities. Indeed, critics have said that the town is drab and that life in it is drab.”

  In other words, the town went through a phase not unknown to many an industrial town in the Midlands, though it passed through it considerably more quickly. Working-class houses were thrown up without consideration for amenities of any sort. They were crowded together with dreary monotony. Britton’s “pleasant situation” was lost to sight amid a wilderness of railway works, while the slum-like dwelling-houses of Swindon seemed to be heading straight for the Midlands at their dreariest.

  The crucial point in the above quotation is the sentence including these words, “not from the county but very largely from the industrial areas of South Wales and northern England …”. In other words, here was a cargo ship engineered by aliens anchored in the midst of the green ocean of hitherto untouched Wiltshire downs.

  In 1907 the Medical Officer of Health says of this period in the town’s history:

  “The extraordinary and rapid growth of the Town of Swindon has militated against a systematic plan of development, and the narrow thoroughfares and ill-adapted business premises of today are evidence of the haste with which the old order was made to change without due consideration of future requirements.”

  In 1864 the District Councils of Old and of New Swindon were established, and they found that the sanitary conditions of this suddenly growing town were in a deplorable state. “ Sewers scarcely existed, the drainage was often into surface channels in the streets, the water-supply was inadequate and often polluted. The death-rate was high, and was attributed directly to these causes.” The District Councils at once grappled with these terrific tasks, and when in 1900 the Swindon Borough was formed out of these two young and energetic bodies, most of the preliminary work had already been done. But unlike its prototypes in the industrial north, Swindon refused to accept any of these descriptions of itself as the last word; and although it must take years to give to it much architectural dignity or to endow its dwelling-houses with the character and comfort which their best friends desire, the Corporation is beginning at the right end. Swindon people clearly still possess that “liberality of mind” which struck Britton over a hundred years ago. The Wiltshire element in Swindon probably numbers about one in twelve of the population, but the Corporation are proving themselves to have something of the faith of the patriarch Abraham when he said, “ Peradventure there shall be fifty righteous within the city.” There must obviously still be at least fifty of those liberally minded natives who so impressed Britton. The outlook of the Swindon burgesses is not restricted by the legacies of nineteenth-century industrialism, though these may be for the passer-by the conspicuous features of the town. On the contrary, there is no place in Wiltshire with a higher standard of cultural development than this badly built town.

  The Corporation did not begin with architecture but with education, and their generous provision for this service was for many years, until the Education Act, 1944, only made possible by the levying on the Borough of a special rate in addition to the normal education rate. Then, during the war years, when most of the country was solely occupied in raising money for weapons, Swindon also remembered the mental requirements of the workers, native and immigrant, and of the many troops quartered in the district. In 1942 the Corporation took the opportunity of creating a Public Library which has now proved itself to be one of the most energetic in the whole country. Also, since the activities which may be paid for out of the rates are specifically limited by law, the Mayor of Swindon founded a “ Community Fund” which organised concerts and various kinds of artistic enterprises. On November 7th, 1946, the Mayor of Swindon officially opened what the Council believe to be the first local authority Arts Centre in the country. Picture exhibitions and first-rate concerts are held regularly in the Arts Centre, and a growing range of cultural activities is finding a home there; it has opened the eyes of the Swindon people to the beauty of the world, and will soon teach them not to tolerate the ugliness of their town. A writer in the Swindon Review of December 1946 expresses very well this growing cultural spirit in the town:

  “Art may include literature, music, painting, sculpture, ballet, drama. There are many possible claims to civilisation; one could be that a nation can claim to be civilised so far as it enjoys the arts—and will the reader please take note of the verb employed—‘ to enjoy’. It is not ‘ to endure’, it is not ‘to support’, it is not even ‘to understand’—it is ‘ to enjoy’.… The very existence of an arts centre… is opportunity made manifest. It is Art with comfort. It is Intelligence with Enjoyment.… It provides the means for a grown-up interchange of ideas on all subjects, since it provides for the performer and the audience, the executor and the beholder, the reader and the listener, the lecturer and the circle, with the knowledge that neither section is fixed, but both sides are fluid and interchangeable, so that the performer becomes audience, and the listener becomes actor or reader, or leader, as circumstances and subjects vary.”

  With the population animated by these ideas, Swindon cannot long remain a “drab” town with “ little dignity of architecture and but a sparse provision of cultural amenities”. In fact, the Swindon of Britton’s day is returning.

  The Corporation has lately
bought from Lord Bolingbroke the estate of Lydiard Tregoze, a few miles away, with the idea of making the house into a conference centre and the park into a place of recreation for the Swindon people. Thus it will revive the old interchange of social life between a town and its surrounding countryside. This interchange was temporarily severed at Swindon when a great industrial population, hitherto completely unconnected with the neighbourhood, found itself planted in this corner of the very agricultural county of Wilts. Such a breach of the neighbourly spirit must have been equally bad for both sides; but there is no doubt that the breach is on the way to being mended.

  Chapter Twelve

  MARKET TOWNS UNDER THE PLAIN

  CIVILISATION was born in small towns, and it is in danger of perishing in the overgrown cities of today. Athens, Florence, Paris, Oxford, London—their small days were their great epochs; and the enormous conglomerations of people which make up the great towns of today cannot achieve the urban ideal. The form of their town is lost in its streets; and a huge modern industrial town is often like a goods train which moves from somewhere to somewhere, conveying a cargo of unidentifiable crates. The men who operate the train stand at their work, for their domicile can be little more than a perch to sustain them as they go through the day’s job. The great town is not a place for a complete life.

  Although the towns enumerated above were small in size as the world thinks today, they were on a far larger scale than the small towns of Wiltshire, and they were, moreover, different in character. For one thing, they were all university towns, and because of this we are inclined to think of a training in things of the intellect or of the arts as the first essential in civilisation. It certainly is its summit, but it is not absolutely fundamental. A civilised man is one who looks upon himself not primarily as an unattached individual but as an individual who is an essential and integral part of a community of men. In a county like Wiltshire the little old towns are not, like universities or aerodromes, dedicated to one purpose alone. They exist as centres for the surrounding villages, each of which has its own different character; and every townsman has to universalise himself on a diminutive scale in order to take his part in assimilating the life of the villages outside.

  Comparatively very few of the people of London expect or even want to be Lord Mayor. The government of the city is carried on over their heads. It is not their concern. But the most casual stroll through the church or churchyard of a little country town shows how important a part has been taken in local government by the tradesmen and the small professional men of the past. There are their memorial tablets; again and again the chemist, the schoolmaster, the wool-merchant, the factory-owner or the farmer has also been an alderman or mayor. Thus they played their part in the life of the town not only while they lived, but much of its planning, its architecture and its amenities are a legacy from these bygone townsmen.

  So a good country town will have inherited some fine architecture. It will probably have the mediæval church; a dignified town hall; a well-built group of almshouses; the town house of a prosperous local family; an endowed school house; a spacious market place; some good inns; streets well laid out; and shops to supply the townsmen with the necessities of life. These are the buildings which, more than university colleges, express the essentials of urban life. And do not forget that the words urbane, and civilised have the same root idea. They both mean town-bred.

  Moreover, they come from a time when town and country were not divorced as they too often are today. A small town in the past was well aware of its position as the centre of its immediate neighbourhood: the rest of the world counted for very little. Town and country lived on and for each other, and their relationship was an intimate one. This was particularly the case with market towns, which are usually placed at a point making them easily accessible to as many as possible of the villages around. The road leading to a market town had come into existence for no other purpose than to lead to it. “A chief centre of some form of activity” is an early definition of the word metropolis, and the market town in an agricultural district achieves this more completely than do greater towns where all forms of activity are jumbled together.

  Defoe, in his Tour through Wiltshire, says that in the towns from Bradford to Warminster live the “master clothiers who send their wool weekly to the villages where it is spun up in the cottages, and returned to the towns to be woven into cloth”. So these towns were from the first metropolises in this old sense of the word, and in Defoe’s day metropolis and village were far nearer to each other than they have ever been since. The four market towns in the area he speaks of follow one another on the main road on the south-west of the Plain. In the old days the official name for Westbury was “Westbury-under-the-Plain”, but indeed Warminster, Westbury, Trowbridge and Bradford might all be given the same definition. They are still the towns under the Plain.

  But Defoe gives Warminster an additional character. He calls it “without exception the greatest market for wheat in England”; and as a market town for these two country products Warminster grew into the shape we see today. It was marked out by its position to be the market for wheat and wool and the architecture of the town accommodates itself to this.

  A hundred years later that carping man Cobbett gives to Warminster an even more urbane and metropolitan character. This is part of what he said:

  “I must once more observe that Warminster is a very nice town: everything belonging to it is solid and good. There are no villainous gingerbread houses running up, and no nasty shabby-genteel people; no women traipsing about with showy gowns and dirty necks; no Jew-looking fellows with dandy coats, dirty shirts, and half-heels of their shoes. A really nice and good town. It is a great corn market, one of the greatest in this part of England. Besides the market, I was delighted, and greatly surprised to see meat, not only the finest veal and lamb that I had ever seen in my life, but so exceedingly beautiful that I could hardly believe my eyes. I am a great connoisseur in joints of meat, a great judge, if five and thirty years of experience can be sound judgment. I verily believe that I have bought and roasted more whole surloins of beef than any man in England. I know all about the matter. A very great visitor to Newgate Market; in short, though a very little eater, I am a very great provider. It is a fancy; I like the subject, and, with all this knowledge of the matter, I say, I never saw veal and beef half so fine as I saw in Warminster. The town is famous for fine meat, and I knew it, and therefore I went out in the morning to look at the meat.”

  In her palmy days three hundred sacks of wheat were sold in a morning in the ready-money market in the main street of Warminster. Perhaps this reputation for bounteous food was a relic of those pre-Conquest days when Warminster was a royal borough with a special obligation to find the King and his suite board and lodging for one night when he was on a progress. The town was relieved of this expense in 1663 and again in 1786 when Charles II and George III with their families were respectively entertained at Longleat.

  During the latter visit Lord Bath presented to the King some of the farmers who were attending the market, and they explained to him their system of pitching one sack as a pledge for a whole load. He “ expressed great pleasure at such honest arrangements”. Some years afterwards His Majesty,

  “whilst promenading amongst his subjects on the terrace

  at Windsor one Sunday afternoon, recognised a Wiltshire farmer.

  Beckoning the abashed yeoman to him he said:

  ‘Well! How are they all getting on at Warminster?’

  ‘Please, Your Majesty, I’ve left Wiltshire, and am now farming

  in Gloucestershire.’

  ‘Bad! bad! bad! you should have stuck to Warminster market

  and sacks. Along the Severn down come the badgers [barley

  bailffs] and spoil the market! You should have stuck to

  Warminster and sacks.’ ”

  The main street of Warminster runs the whole length of the town; in fact, it really is the town, and a very
fine street too. Early in the eighteenth century it was described as “ so full of deep hollow ways that you might step from the footpath to the top of a loaded wagon”, but now it has the dignity of a place which has long been the home of prosperous commercial men, and their well-built, well-proportioned houses show where they live. The churches and public buildings in Warminster are of no great antiquity, for the originals have mostly been replaced by later ones.

  Derivation of place-names is as controversial as are most antiquarian problems, and since etymology has become a serious science instead of basing itself, as of old, upon phonetics, agreement is even more impossible. After considerable controversy the name of Warminster seemed for some time to have settled comfortably into a combination of Were, the river upon which it stood, and Minster, the abbey on the banks of that river. History and phonetics had as usual found a compromise. But now they say that there never was an abbey at Warminster and we must say good-bye to the minster which “formerly stood in a field between Portway and Ashpath” and of which “not a trace remains”. Belief in that minster is made more difficult by the fact that if it ever existed to be dissolved, this must have taken place as early as the fourteenth century, and so had nothing to do with the Reformation—that vast sink into which so many ecclesiastical buildings throughout the country have conveniently vanished. The present church, called for euphony’s sake the “minster”, was originally built in the Decorated style of the fourteenth century, and it was added to in the fashions of each successive hundred years till its last rebuilding by Sir Arthur Blomfield in the 1880’s. Worshippers have always found its position too far from the centre of the town, and in a “Report of the survey of all colleges, chantries, etc.” which was made in 1511 this note appears: