At 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 03 March at Gold Hill Museum, Professor Karen Hunt will give an illustrated talk entitled ‘Women’s Suffrage in Dorset: forgotten stories’. She writes: Dorset is not a county usually associated with the long campaign for votes for women that culminated in partial enfranchisement in 1918. However, that does not mean that the women (and men) of the county were indifferent to women’s lack of citizenship. This talk explores where in Dorset women chose to organise, what they did and the effects it had locally. Why did suffragism blossom in some places and not others; why were there far more suffragists than suffragettes; and how did the experience of this campaigning affect Dorset women once the vote was won?

Having retired from teaching at Keele University, Karen is now Professor Emerita of Modern British History, about which she still writes and lectures. A Trustee of Bridport Museum, she worked with Holly Miller to re-create the banner of the West Dorset Women’s Suffrage Society, which has been paraded at the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally. This talk is free to members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, while seats should be available from 2.20p.m. to the public, on payment of £5 at the door.

Mary Lowndes (1857-1929) was the daughter of Richard Lowndes, rector of St Mary’s Church, Sturminster Newton, and his wife Annie Harriet Kaye. After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, she began to draw cartoons (designs) for stained glass artist Henry Holiday. Her first, two-light window ‘Feed My Sheep’ was installed in 1893 at St Peter’s, Hinton St Mary in Dorset; eventually her Arts & Crafts-style designs were in demand throughout England and Wales, and the 1897 Lowndes and Drury partnership expanded into the purpose-built Glass House, Fulham, in 1906. This was the leading studio-workshop for Arts & Crafts stained glass, providing facilities for independent, like-minded practitioners, including female artists for whom Mary was an inspirational trail-blazer.

In 1907 Mary Lowndes was instrumental in the formation of The Artists’ Suffrage League, which produced dramatic posters, postcards, Christmas cards and banners, like the 1909 example at the head of this blog. In 1910 she published a guide to ‘Banners and Banner-Making’, in which she asserted that you do not want to read it, you want to worship it. Choose purple and gold for ambition, red for courage, green for long-cherished hopes … It is a declaration.

A photograph in our archives from a1913 Fancy Dress Dance organised by boarders at Miss Dunn’s Grosvenor House School for Girls, Shaftesbury, indicates that Women’s Suffrage was very much an issue of the moment for the pupils in this small but highly regarded Dorset private school.

Under the Antiquities Law devised by Iraq’s newly appointed Honorary Director of Antiquities, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), archaeological finds were to be divided equally between the finders and the kingdom of Iraq. Thus 25% of Woolley’s finds from Ur went to Philadelphia, 25% to the British Museum, and 50% remained in Iraq, where sadly many have been looted or damaged in recent conflicts. The final choice rested with the Director of Antiquities, though Ms Bell was enough of a realist to recognise that western museums must be able to retain some treasures by way of an incentive, and were often better equipped to restore artefacts and translate inscriptions. In some instances allocations were decided by the toss of a coin. But as a passionate Arabist, she was determined to preserve vital elements of Iraq’s cultural heritage for a new national museum, opened shortly before her premature death in 1926.

After the first session of haggling in 1923, Gertrude Bell wrote: It took us the whole day to do the division but it was extremely interesting and Mr Woolley was an angel. We had to claim the best things for ourselves but we did our best to make it up to him … The best object is a hideous Sumerian statue of a King of Lagash, about three feet high but headless.

When Agatha Christie returned to Ur in the spring of 1930, again via the Orient Express, the duty of escorting her on a tour of other archaeological sites in Iraq fell to the junior member of the team, Max Mallowan. Quietly spoken, he was 14 years younger and a lot shorter than Agatha, but very considerate. In September 1930, after much agonising by the bride-to-be, they were married in Edinburgh.

From 1932 the Mallowans formed a team of their own, in part self-financed, at other digs in the Near East. Agatha spent part of each day at her typewriter, drawing on recent experiences to produce best-sellers like Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). The latter is Dedicated to My Many Archaeological Friends in Iraq and Syria and begins: Louise Leidner, the wife of a prominent archaeologist, joins her husband at a dig in Iraq – and behaves as if she is in fear for her life! When those fears prove to be well-founded, the great Hercule Poirot is called in to investigate a seemingly impossible crime. The Leidner character was based, somewhat transparently, on the volatile Katharine Woolley. Fortunately, she did not recognise herself, or if she did, took no offence.

After 12 seasons, beginning in 1922, excavations at Ur were concluded. Katharine acted as Site Director in the final season. Years of work remained to be done on thousands of artefacts and cuneiform inscriptions, mostly on clay tablets. Woolley continued to write about Ur for 20 years or more, while undertaking other archaeo-logical projects assisted by his wife. In 1935 he was knighted for services to archaeology. During World War Two he advised Churchill as a recruiter of the art experts and museum personnel known as the Monuments Men (and women), whose task was to protect cultural property in war zones, and recover art treasures stolen by the Nazis. As Monuments, Fine Art and Archives Officer Lt. Col. Sir Leonard Woolley, he observed that: Prior to this war, no army had thought of protecting the monuments of the country in which and with which it was at war, and there were no precedents to follow…. All this was changed by a general order issued by Supreme Commander-in-Chief [General Eisenhower] just before he left Algiers, an order accompanied by a personal letter to all Commanders…the good name of the Army depended in great measure on the respect which it showed to the art heritage of the modern world.

After Katharine’s death from multiple sclerosis in 1945, Woolley was free to make his own decisions about where to live, and with whom. An ill-advised liaison with a clergyman’s wife led to involvement in a costly divorce case and did serious damage to his finances. His decision to rent Sedgehill Manor from 1948 to 1957 (by the end of which time he was seriously worried that his money would run out) provided the newly-founded Shaftesbury & District Historical Society with access to a famous lecturer and President. Sir Leonard Woolley and I knew each other for longer than he knew anyone outside his own family – off and on wrote Noel Teulon Porter in his Introduction to As I Seem to Remember, a collection of Woolley anecdotes, reminiscences and extracts from two BBC radio broadcasts. Their association apparently went back to a dig, Woolley’s first, at Roman Corbridge near Hadrian’s Wall in 1906. He was a man of slight stature and no commanding appearance – but presence, yes! … Sir Leonard took a keen and constant interest in the Society and Museum. He appears in a photograph with NTP and three others taken when the Museum first moved to premises on Gold Hill in 1954 – not the current ones. With the support of NTP, Shaftesbury Grammar School teacher Frank Hopton and at least one student, he began a small-scale dig at Sedgehill. One of the students, the late Dave Roberts, recalled this episode in 2021. Illustrious visitors to Sedgehill might have to walk about a mile from Semley station. Woolley himself seemed able, like the Prince of Wales in 1899, to have fast trains stop at Semley to suit his personal convenience. Biographer HVF Winstone describes how the sage of archaeology was known to arrive home from Semley in the cab of the local coal merchant’s lorry. The Mallowans might call when driving between their main residence near Wallingford and their summer retreat at Greenway in Devon, bought in 1938. As I Seem to Remember was published by the S&DHS in 1962, when the final (9th) volume of the Ur Excavations report also appeared. Both were posthumous, as Woolley had died in 1960.

In the final report Woolley stuck with his conclusion of nearly thirty years earlier that he had found evidence of probably the world’s oldest museum. On the intact floor of a chamber of the Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna were half a dozen diverse objects found lying on an unbroken brick pavement of the sixth century B.C., yet the newest of them was seven hundred years older than the pavement and the earliest perhaps two thousand: the evidence was altogether against their having got there by accident. (Woolley, “Ur of the Chaldees”, 1950 edition, p.135) One of the objects, a small clay cylinder inscribed with cuneiform of the time of the building of the palace / nunnery, described another object that was itself now nowhere to be found: a brick dated to around 2100 BCE (about 1500 years before the construction of the palace) (Moudhy Al-Rashid 2025) This cylindrical clay tablet, Woolley decided, must have been an exhibition label from a deliberately curated collection of local antiquities. (ibid.)

Moudhy, our lecturer on a new date to be confirmed, has taken each of the objects, plus the drum / label and the person of Ennigaldi-Nanna, as the themes of chapters in a superb new book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History. (Hodder, 2025) One reviewer declares it an ingenious, passionate “history of histories” … we vividly witness how lives across the millennia are revealed and connected.

“Harrison”, the salmon-pink 1934 Rolls-Royce 20/25 Barker Sports Saloon belonging to former Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Stuttard, can often be seen at local village fetes and charity events. The unusual colour reflects that of the Financial Times, to which Sir John sent regular reports of his 10,000 mile marathon drive from Peking to Paris in 1997. After negotiating some of the world’s highest and roughest roads in Tibet, Nepal and Pakistan, Harrison was in need of bodywork repairs and a respray, but Sir John decided to keep the novel colour scheme. Harrison has attended multiple Rolls-Royce rallies at home and abroad, and Sir John has written about many of them. He brings his expert knowledge of the early years of Rolls-Royce to the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society meeting at Gold Hill Museum at 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 06 January. His illustrated talk is entitled Rolls-Royce and Russia, Czarist and Bolshevik. Seats should be available for non-members from 2.20 p.m. on payment of £5 at the door.

The partnership of the Northern motor engineer, Henry Royce, and the Old Etonian financier and car salesman, Sir Charles Rolls, was formed when they were introduced at the new Midland Hotel, Manchester in 1904. Rolls was so impressed by Royce’s prototype 10 hp car that he undertook to sell as many as Royce could build. Previously he had been selling Peugeots imported from France and Minervas from Belgium. In their early years Rolls-Royce provided the chassis, engine, gearbox and transmission, while customers could choose from a variety of independent coachbuilders such as Barker. By 1907 Rolls-Royce Ltd was winning awards for the quality and reliability of its cars. Rolls was also a pioneer aviator and his personal involvement in RR Ltd was ended at the age of 32 by a fatal crash at a precursor of the Bournemouth Air Show.

Royce was devastated by Rolls’s death. A workaholic who frequently forgot to eat, he suffered from serious intestinal problems from 1911. He moved from the works in Derby and divided his year between Sussex and Le Canadel in the south of France, accompanied by key members of his design team. During World War One he focused on the development of aero engines – the motley collection of aircraft which left for France in 1914 was seriously under-powered. By 1930 he had been knighted for his contribution to aviation, and had laid the foundations for production of the Merlin engine which first ran in October 1933. Royce died aged 70 in April of that year. The Merlin was subsequently fitted to a whole range of famous World War Two aircraft including the Spitfire, Hurricane, Mosquito and Lancaster.

Rolls-Royce and Russia, Czarist and Bolshevik (This synopsis & Russian images kindly provided by the speaker)

Czarist Russia was known for its architecture, fine art, literature and music. With this appreciation of quality and the wealth of the nobility and business, it was not long before Rolls-Royce found a niche market in the years before the First World War. After being introduced to the marque in 1913, the Czar became a loyal customer. In total, 42 Rolls-Royce motor cars were delivered before the 1917 Revolutions which ended the Romanov dynasty. But the Revolutions did not end Russia’s appreciation of Rolls-Royce. Trotsky and Lenin commandeered the Czarist cars and at least a further 46 Rolls-Royce motor cars were ordered by the Soviet Government until diplomatic relations soured and Stalin put a stop to further imports.

Sir John Stuttard will relate the story of the owners of Rolls-Royce motor cars in Russia, set among the treasures, the turmoil of the Revolutions, the Civil War and the excesses of the Bolshevik era. It is based on the book he wrote and published in 2021, working with a senior executive, Maxim Kartashev, of the State Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, and his co-author.

At 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 04 November at Gold Hill Museum Andrew Vickers will explore the origins of Shillingstone’s claim to be – as the road signs still assert – the Bravest Village in England.

Andrew, the Chairman of Okeford Fitzpaine Local History Group, has researched this story with impeccable thoroughness, and made some surprising discoveries. He writes by way of introduction:

The village of Shillingstone in Dorset has a long oral tradition of having a special place in the history of World War One. The village is believed to have won a competition to have supplied the highest proportion of volunteers to the colours, pro rata to the size of the community, than any other village in the country. There is also an oral tradition that the village was awarded a captured German field gun and a gold filigree processional cross as rewards. There are some tantalising clues as to the veracity of these claims to be found in the village today. On the village war memorial is an inscribed panel with the words ‘Message from HM King George V; His majesty was gratified to learn how splendidly the people of Shillingstone have responded to the call of the colours. I imagine this must be a record.’ Sept 28 1914

There is no doubt that Britain needed to expand its volunteer army rapidly from the outbreak of war in August 1914. Both Germany, the main enemy in the west, and ally France could put over a million conscripts into the field. In comparison Britain’s professional army was tiny, numbering fewer than 50,000. Volunteers flocked to recruiting offices, but were entirely untrained. The Press lent their weight to the recruiting campaign. In an article dated Sunday 27 December 1914 Lord Northcliffe’s best-selling Weekly Dispatch Sunday newspaper launched a competition to find Britain’s Bravest Village. (A village was defined as having a population of fewer than 5000). They offered a bronze medallion “to the most patriotic village in the British Isles which contributes the greatest percentage of its manhood to the colours – who join the colours before 31 January 1915.” The closing date for entries was 28 February 1915, though the results were not declared until 26 March 1916. (By this time the Military Service Act had introduced conscription for single men aged 18 to 41.)

The Weekly Dispatch’s winners were – in first place: Knowlton, Kent; in second place: Mennock, Dumfriesshire. No trace of Shillingstone. Andrew will explain this apparent discrepancy in an insightful & entertaining talk. This is free to members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, while seats should be available for non-members from 2.20p.m. on payment of £5 at the door.

Millionaire Shopping is the first full, detailed and original account of the huge and unstoppable collecting and artistic patronage of Alfred Morrison (1821-1897) of Fonthill House. From 25 September it can be accessed and downloaded for free at Millionaire Shopping | UCL Press We are delighted to welcome the editor and one of the principal authors, Professor Caroline Dakers, to give her second Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture at 7.30p.m. on Tuesday 07 October at Shaftesbury Town Hall. This is free to members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, and open to interested members of the public on payment of £7 at the door. Caroline previously delivered the TPM lecture in October 2016 when she revealed a fascinating range of knowledge of the movers and shakers who have resided in the Fonthill area, anticipating her 2018 book Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History. Our speaker has further engagements in London on 09 October and New York on 15 October, so we are privileged to feature so early on her itinerary, and grateful for the following synopsis:

The life of Alfred Morrison (1821-1897), the eccentric landowner of Fonthill. After travelling across North America and failing to get elected to Parliament, Morrison inherited a million from his merchant father (the equivalent of about 60 million today) and set about forming one of the most extraordinary collections of art and decorative objects in the country. He was obsessed with famous men and women, for example, acquiring letters by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Admiral Nelson and Jane Austen, and portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Medici princes. Examples of Chinese porcelain looted from the Imperial Palace in Pekin and displayed in his dining room at Fonthill now sell for millions of pounds.

Caroline will talk about his life, from his early experiences of slavery in the southern states of America to his improving the Fonthill estate, building cottages and breeding prize-winning sheep. What do we now think of his taste? Was his very much younger wife Mabel, daughter of the rector of Wilton, merely another of his treasures? What happened to the collections after his death?