At 6.30p.m. on Thursday 06 August there is an opportunity to see an evening presentation at Gold Hill Museum by Ann Symons and Claire Ryley of their researches into Early and Lesser Known Shaftesbury Photographers. The headline image of Shaftesbury High Street was taken by George Lydford in March 1877. Born in Gillingham in 1835, George trained as a joiner and carpenter; married Elizabeth Mary Scannell in 1857, with whom he had three children; and by 1871 the family had moved to Shaftesbury, where George established a business as a landscape and portrait photographer. He may have been one of Shaftesbury’s first professional photographers, as the Rev. Thomas Perkins,  headmaster of Shaftesbury’s new (boys’) Grammar School from 1878, was a dedicated amateur, and both E.F. Upfield and Albert Tyler were active later, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The High Street, with its distant triumphal arch, had been decorated to celebrate the March 1877 wedding at Motcombe of Lady Theodora Grosvenor (1840-1924) to Thomas Merthyr Guest. This was during the period of dominant Grosvenor influence over the town, where the family owned hundreds of properties until Theodora’s nephew, the second Lord Stalbridge, decided that everything must go in the Sale of Shaftesbury in 1918.

The Shaftesbury festivities included an ox roast in the Old Cattle Market and a huge bonfire on Castle Hill with a firework display.

Theodora was the thirteenth and last child of Richard, second Marquess of Westminster, and Elizabeth, to whom (for her lifetime) the Grosvenor estates in Dorset and Wiltshire passed on the Marquess’s death in 1869. At that point Theodora saw her role as devoted companion and support to her seventy-two year old mother who, as Lady of the Manor, had many public duties and engagements to perform, some of which her daughter undertook on her behalf. One was to lay the foundation stone of the Westminster Memorial Cottage Hospital at Shaftesbury on 25 May 1871 in memory of the late Marquess. (Laurence Clark: ‘A Motcombe Miscellany’ p.22)

An anonymous 1860s photographic portrait of Lady Theodora Grosvenor. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

From 1879 the Guests lived at Inwood House near Henstridge during the winter, where they were joined by Theodora’s mother, and spent summers with the dowager Marchioness at Motcombe. After her death in 1891, aged 94, the Dorset properties reverted to Theodora’s brother, who decided to rebuild Motcombe House on a much more palatial scale. Theodora retained a strong interest in the development of the Westminster Hospital, donating a new operating theatre in 1907, and after her husband’s death in 1904, financing the building and running of an 8 bed cottage hospital in his memory at Templecombe. The Merthyr Guest Hospital later grew to 100 beds and was part of the NHS until its closure in 1974. In the autumn of 1923, aged 84, she was President of the Westminster Hospital committee and in the matter of a dispute involving criticism of the Matron “sick & tired of it all.” (See Dave Hardiman’s article in the 2021/22 Byzant ‘The Unfortunate Matron of the Westminster Memorial Hospital.’)  Other parts of Theodora’s legacy, still in existence a century after her death, include the Hunt Servants Benefit Society, founded in 1872 (she was a keen and able horsewoman); two of a ring of six bells installed at Motcombe Church to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887; and the original Merthyr Guest Cup, a trophy for clubs in the Blackmore Vale Sunday Football League, contested at least until 2023. According to Laurence Clark, She always attended the annual final in Inwood grounds to present the cups and medals. 

This lively, popular and illustrated talk, first given in the afternoon last December, is free to members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, while non-members may pay £5 at the door. Membership helps to support the work of Gold Hill Museum, and gives free admission to the rest of the forthcoming lecture programme. Please click on highlighted names or phrases to find further information archived in our website.

The story of Shaftesbury Football Club, founded in 1888, is told through a new temporary exhibition of archives and artefacts at Gold Hill Museum, from July to October 2026. We are indebted to Hilltop Historian Dave Hardiman for much of the research into the Club’s history, and all the content of this blog. On 05 April 1969, aged 15, (Dave writes) I made my debut for Shaftesbury Football Club reserve team at the old Barton Hill ground. I played left wing and, although we lost 5-0, my diary notes that it was ‘Not a bad debut’. I remember being praised by Dave Few at half-time for nearly scoring with a long-range shot that hit the crossbar.

By 1969, the club was already 80 years old. It is said that the first record of football being played in Shaftesbury came about as a result of the building of Motcombe House (now Port Regis school) by a firm of builders called Parnell’s from Rugby in Warwickshire. As well as their own labourers, Shaftesbury men were also employed, which led to a match between the two groups. The team from Rugby called themselves the ‘Mansion Swifts’. Unfortunately, no record of the result survives, but it led directly to an advertisement in the Western Gazette, asking anyone interested in forming a Shaftesbury football club, to attend a meeting at the Old Ship Inn in the town. The meeting took place in October 1888 and ten days later another notice announced the formation of Shaftesbury Football Club.

A pitch was established on what also served as the cricket pitch, which was at the time rented from Mr Jeffery for £1 a year. During the first 10 years or so, only friendly games were played against local teams, although the team did enter cup competitions. In those early days the team were conveyed to away matches in horse drawn wagonettes. In 1897, the team reached the final of the Dorset Junior Challenge Cup, where unfortunately they lost to Poole Town reserves.

Competition was tough with no shortage of rivalry between the local towns. This can be well illustrated by the events that took place when Shaftesbury visited Sturminster Newton on the 11th February 1897, just 9 years after the club’s foundation. It was reported in the Western Gazette as follows:

‘The referee was a Sturminster Newton man, and his match report stated that the score was 3-2 to Sturminster when the Shaftesbury team left the field, having objected to a goal that had been allowed, which the Shaftesbury team maintained, had not crossed the line. The referee stated that in fact the ball had been not inches, but feet over the line (If only they had had VAR). The Captain of the Shaftesbury Football team, Mr Long, who had been playing on the day, sent a long letter to the Association, which put a different emphasis on the events of the day. He said that a great deal of ill-feeling had been directed against Shaftesbury, and long before the match took place the Shaftesbury players were threatened as to what they might expect when they next visited Sturminster Newton. After consideration, the Dorset F.A. ruled that Shaftesbury Football club be suspended for one week for leaving the field of play without the consent of the referee. Sturminster Newton were suspended for two weeks for the bad behaviour of the spectators.’

During these early years, there was one Shaftesbury man who made a tremendous contribution, not only to football in the town, but also to football in Dorset. Harry Sidney Smith (1869-1934) came to be affectionately known as ‘Bumper’ (photographed in 1903).

Harry was born in Wilton in 1869, the family moved to Shaftesbury soon afterwards, and by 1871 they were living in St. James. In 1890, at the age of 21, Harry married Harriet Fanner of Cann and they lived at Hawkesdene. For many years he was a well-known resident in the everyday life of Shaftesbury, where he carried on business as a painter and decorator, but it may also be said (by the Western Gazette) that his short stocky figure and his views, often expressed with disconcerting bluntness, were as familiar on the football grounds of north Dorset as they were in the local councils and the controlling county body.

His obituary stated that football to him became something more than a mere pastime. It was a physical creed, and he gave a passionate devotion to the interests of the game. He played it in his earlier days as a member of the old Shaftesbury Football Club. Later he was a referee and, when his physical condition declined, he identified himself more whole-heartedly in the organisational side.

One aspect that will always be associated with his memory, was the Shaftesbury & District League, of which he was a founder, and for 30 years its secretary. He encouraged the younger players, and the annual six-a-side tournament on Easter Monday was one of the best known and popular fixtures in this part of the country. It can fairly be said that the fine array of cups, trophies and medals for this tournament, the Shaftesbury & District League and other cup competitions, which he was chiefly instrumental in organising, were mainly obtained through his personal appeal to sponsors and others over a wide area. He was secretary of Shaftesbury Football Club, and at the time of his death in 1934, probably one of the oldest members of the Dorset Football Association, and one of the oldest referees under the same body. For many years, football in north Dorset must have owed more to him than to any other man.

At the end of the season in 1921, in recognition of his services to the Shaftesbury & District Football League he was presented with a handsome silver tea service and an electro-plated tea tray, suitably inscribed, acknowledging 21 years’ service to local football. The mayor made the presentation, expressing a hope that Mr Smith would serve for a further 21 years and that the game would flourish in the future, as it had in the past.

Harry replied and, in his speech, he appealed to clubs to stamp out rough and foul play, and to support referees in their duties. He also urged the need to put down the use of insulting remarks to referees. He might have been disappointed to know how that appeal turned out.

He and Philip Pearce were also responsible for getting schoolboy football started in north Dorset and, after a competition in 1931, he remarked that it would be a great credit to some of the men’s teams of Dorset, if they took their lickings in the same spirit as had the boys of the losing teams that day.

Having entered the recently formed Shaftesbury & District League, the club achieved their first honour by winning the league challenge cup in 1900. Then, in 1903, they won the Shaftesbury & District League Cup, which was celebrated by a presentation ceremony of the cup and medals following a match between the team and a ‘pick of the league’ team on Saturday the 4th April at the Town ground.

Players in the Shaftesbury team that day were, A. Munday, F. Gray, R. Powell, J. Tapper, C. Short, H. Weldon, F. Buckland, Ridout, F. Weldon, Keast & Toogood. Harry (Bumper) Smith refereed the game which, despite bad weather, was played in front of a good number of spectators. Shaftesbury won 5-2 with Keast scoring 4 of the Shaftesbury goals. I’ve always known the nickname of Shaftesbury Football club as ‘The Rockies’. Whether this originated at the foundation of the club, I don’t know, but the 1903 match report in the Western Gazette, states that ‘The visitors were the first to score ….. but Keast followed for the homesters soon after. Burrington scored the second for the visitors, but before the interval Keast placed the “Rocks” on terms.’

There were many successful teams during the ensuing years, winning both the Challenge Cup and the league in 1906; then their first county honour in 1909 when they won the Dorset Junior Cup; as well as the league again. In 1912 they won the Shaftesbury Open Cup.

Here’s the team that won the Shaftesbury & District League and Dorset Junior cups in 1909.

Unfortunately, World War I (1914-1918) brought football to a temporary end in Shaftesbury. As a sad footnote, at least two of the 1909 team (Bert Keast & Hubert Weldon) were killed serving King & Country during the war, while another (Frederick Toogood) died of wounds soon after the war ended. Ernest Short served and survived the war years but died in 1920 at the age of only 32. Details about the lives of these four can be found on the Shaftesbury Remembers website: Bertram Keast died as a PoW in Germany, having been wounded and captured at Passchendaele in October 1917, while Hubert Frank Weldon was presumed killed in action at Ypres in March 1915. His name is one of thousands recorded on the Menin Gate. Frederick George Toogood was wounded in Mesopotamia in December 1915 and hospitalised in India until June 1916. He died and was buried at Yeovil in January 1919. Five brothers also served. Ernest George Short died at Enmore Green, Shaftesbury.

After the war, in 1923, the team started playing at the Barton Hill recreation ground, which remained the town’s football ground for the next 51 years, and  where, 46 years later, Dave started his first game for the club.

This exhibition is free, as is entry to Gold Hill Museum, and on display outside our Library until the end of October.

RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912, as the newest, largest, and undeniably the most luxurious, ocean liner yet built. She was entering the highly competitive trans-Atlantic market where her USP was the superb quality of first-class passenger accommodation and service, matching the standards provided by the world’s most expensive hotels. Passengers on Cunard and German rivals would have a faster crossing, but not in comparable comfort. This applied even to lesser facilities provided for second and third-class ticket holders. If first-class on Titanic resembled a floating Ritz designed to gratify American millionaires, second-class was a floating Lyons Corner House to soothe the English genteel. (Richard Davenport-Hines,Titanic Lives, p193)

Occupying one of the palatial suites was the British chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay. After White Star was acquired by the billionaire American financier J. P. Morgan in 1902, Ismay became president of the International Mercantile Marine conglomerate. His younger brother, James, took the opportunity to leave White Star to pursue a burgeoning interest in agriculture and land management, buying the Iwerne Minster estate in North Dorset in 1908. Ill health prevented him from accepting an invitation to join Titanic on her maiden voyage. This was also true of Lord Pirrie, the Chairman of Belfast shipbuilders Harland & Wolff, with whom Bruce Ismay had planned the building of a trio of super-ships, Olympic, Titanic and Gigantic (later wisely named Britannic). Pirrie was recovering from prostate surgery, quite a big deal in 1912. If he had travelled on the ship and died, he would have been the most notable British fatality; and if he had survived in a lifeboat, he would have been an international scapegoat. (Titanic Lives p.43) That was to be the fate of Bruce Ismay. Also making a late and fortuitous cancellation was Pierpont Morgan, who preferred to oversee the shipment of his Paris art collection to America. (Titanic Lives, p.154)

Edward Smith had captained 17 White Star ships without any serious incident. After the Adriatic’s maiden voyage in 1907 he was reported as saying: “I never saw a wreck, and I have never been wrecked, nor have I been in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster.” (Titanic Lives p.251) Thus, there may have been a degree of complacency in his decision not to slacken speed as Titanic approached an icefield much further south than normal. On a moonless night and a flat calm sea, with no tell-tale waves breaking at the waterline of any iceberg, it was asking a lot of lookouts to spot even a berg 100 feet high. In trying to steer round this mountain of ice, while throwing Titanic’s three propeller shafts into reverse, First Officer Murdoch only succeeded in sideswiping projections on the underwater 8/9ths of the iceberg. Many passengers slept through the collision or were not alarmed by it. In first-class Ella White thought “It was just as though we went over about a thousand marbles. There was nothing terrifying about it at all.” (Titanic Lives p.273) She and her maid survived, but her husband and his manservant did not.

By about midnight on 14/15 October Captain Smith and Naval Architect /principal designer Thomas Andrews, talented nephew of, and probable successor to Pirrie, had assessed the damage. While confident that two, and possibly four, of Titanic’s sixteen watertight compartments could flood and the ship remain afloat, Andrews reckoned that at least five compartments were breached. He knew that if the ship foundered by the bow, water would eventually cascade over the tops of so-called watertight bulkheads into the next compartments, because the bulkheads only extended part-way into the ship’s superstructure. If Titanic had rammed the iceberg head-on, as the German liner SS Kronprinz Wilhelm had done in 1907 and still limped to port, the damage would probably have been confined to a crumpled bow. A glancing blow at speed was sufficient to loosen the rivets holding hull plates together and prove mortal. Titanic was double-bottomed, to guard against running aground, but there was no inner skin of watertight longitudinal bulkheads. Her builders had allowed for a worst-case scenario where, say in thick fog, a collision might compromise the integrity of one transverse bulkhead and two adjacent compartments. In theory the ship should stay afloat long enough for rescue vessels to arrive and transfer passengers and crew in the limited number of lifeboats (20) required by current regulations. None of Titanic’s competitors had significantly more.

The British Enquiry Report calculated that there were 1178 spaces on 14 lifeboats plus two emergency boats and four collapsible rafts. These were not enough for over 1300 passengers, let alone nearly 900 crew. The loading of the lifeboats was little short of chaotic. Apart from the token lowering of two lifeboats for the benefit of a Board of Trade inspector at Southampton, There had been no proper boat drill nor a muster. It was explained that great difficulty frequently exists in getting firemen [stokers] to take part in a boat drill. They regard it as no part of their work. To be fair to the firemen, they remained stoically up to their waists in water shutting down the furnaces, as red-hot boilers and icy sea water make a lethally explosive combination. Many of these heroes did not escape. The first lifeboat was lowered at about 12.45a.m. with 3 crewmen, 23 passengers (all first-class, but they were accommodated nearest the boat deck) and 39 vacancies. Smith’s order was “Put the women & children in, and lower away”. At the starboard lifeboats, Murdoch interpreted this to mean women & children first. On the port side, Second Officer Lightoller took it to mean women & children only. He rigorously excluded all males, including teenage boys. It was difficult to persuade women to leave their husbands and partners. Early reluctance to abandon the apparent safety and warmth of the allegedly unsinkable ship was compounded by the deafening, cacophonous screeching of steam necessarily being vented from three of the funnels, and the prospect of the hazardous descent over sixty feet towards the inky blackness of the Atlantic. The American Report speculated that even fewer than 711 would have been saved had the boats been swinging in high winds and smashed against the side of the ship. There were more than enough life preservers for everyone but floating in icy water would not prevent death from thermal shock or hypothermia. Most of the boats pulled away from the vicinity of Titanic, for fear of being sucked down in a vortex, or swamped by desperate swimmers. Throughout all this horror the lights of another ship were visible, but they came no closer. They presumably belonged to the Californian, whose Captain Stanley Lord had stopped in the icefield to await daylight. The Marconi wireless operator on the Californian had retired to his bunk about 5 minutes before Titanic hit the iceberg at 23.40, and 35 minutes before the heroic operators on Titanic sent their first distress message. Crew on the Californian saw regular rockets being fired and reported them to Lord, but inexplicably he took no action. He was abstemious and so unlikely to have been intoxicated, as suggested later. At about 2a.m. Bruce Ismay and another male passenger boarded one of the starboard-side collapsible lifeboats. There were, he testified later, no women nor indeed any males in sight. At 2.20 a.m. Titanic finally sank. (To be continued)

At the time of writing, April 2026, interest in the Titanic story remains immense. The BBC recently broadcast a four-part dramatisation, based verbatim on survivors’ accounts. At a Devizes auction sale of artefacts and memorabilia held on 18 April, a canvas seat cover from one of the lifeboats, emblazoned with the White Star Line burgee, was anticipated to sell for £180,000, and made £390,000. On 19 April a Titanic Exhibition organised by White Star Heritage opened at the Birmingham NEC. On 18 June 2023 the OceanGate Titan submersible imploded while diving on the wreck of Titanic 2.5 miles down on the ocean floor, adding five more fatalities to the 1490 lost in 1912.

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.