Claire Ryley and Penny-Jane Swift looked every inch Victorian schoolmistresses as they helped students and staff of Abbey Primary School re-create activities appropriate for 1873, the year of the School’s foundation. Claire writes:

In the morning Penny-Jane (with her Steps in Time hat on) taught country dancing to well over a hundred children, and then we taught embroidery and Dorset button-making, before the procession to Gold Hill and an all-school photo. This was followed by a dedication assembly and lastly tea, cake and maypole dancing back at school. It was a wonderful day and a tribute to the school, staff, children and parents who entered into the spirit of things with such enthusiasm.

The crocodile along St James Street halted outside Chapel Cottage, where they heard recollections of the building’s previous social and educational uses from resident Colin Francis, a member of the S&DHS. Colin and other participants in the event can be heard here on The Alfred Daily.

The Forster Education Act of 1870 stimulated a surge in the building of schools. The Act laid down principles for the provision of elementary education for all Victorian schoolchildren between the ages of 5 and 12. It did not, however, make elementary school mandatory or free. So the parents of the first pupils of the St James National School, as it was then called, may well have had to pay weekly school pence for their children’s education. Attendance was made compulsory for pupils up to the age of 10 in 1880, and free in 1891.

Kelly’s Directory of 1895 lists two National Schools in Shaftesbury, the other being on Bimport in premises now converted into the apartments of King Edward’s Court, and inspiration for a key episode in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. There were also the fee-paying Boys’ Grammar School (opened 1878) and Grosvenor House Girls’ High School (1884) – now an architects’ practice, adjacent to Bell Street Car Park. There would be Poor Law schooling for children living in the Alcester Workhouse. Kelly records the teachers at St James National School as Samuel Robert Fisher, master; Mrs Elizabeth Fisher, infants’ mistress; and John Thurlow, student master. John would in effect be an apprentice pupil-teacher.

There is much more about local Childhood and Schools on the Shaftesbury Remembers website. The services to schools offered by the volunteers of the joint Gold Hill and Shaftesbury Abbey Museums Education Team are described here.

Bridport-based artist Jules Cross has very kindly donated his latest creation, a striking and atmospheric oil painting of Fonthill Abbey by moonlight, to Gold Hill Museum. This follows his generous gift of valuable first edition guides to Fonthill Abbey published by Shaftesbury printer John Rutter and his competitor John Britton. Their rivalry features in our free Fonthill Fever Exhibition, curated by Beckford Society Secretary Sidney Blackmore, and retained for a second and final season to coincide with the bicentenary of the second sale in September 1823.

Though Jules has lived in Bridport since 2005, exhibiting a series of paintings of Bridport shops and shoppers, he acquired a special interest in William Beckford while resident in Hindon. His 2023 work is entitled An Intruder at Fonthill – Evading Mr Beckford’s Bloodhounds. It was inspired by a story told by the renowned Victorian painter William Powell Frith (1819-1909) in his Autobiography and Reminiscences published in 1887. Frith was famous for panoramic scenes such as The Derby Day and The Railway Station (Paddington), and for portraits of fictional characters from literature. He is unlikely to have ever seen Fonthill Abbey as the structure collapsed in 1825, when he can have been no more than six years old. The story may therefore be fiction too.

A curious visitor finds the gate in the formidable wall encircling the Fonthill estate unattended. He wanders inside and encounters a man he takes to be a gardener, who provides a detailed tour of the gardens. An invitation is then extended to view the interior of the house and its art treasures. When the visitor worries that the owner might object, his host replies: I don’t think Mr Beckford will mind what I do. You see, I have known him all my life, and he lets me do pretty well what I like here.

The internal tour is followed by a magnificent dinner, served on massive plate – the wines of the rarest vintage. Rarer still was Mr Beckford’s conversation, for the host had revealed his identity. The guest dozes off in an easy chair, to be woken by a footman who says: Mr Beckford ordered me to present his compliments to you, sir, and I am to say that as you found your way into Fonthill Abbey without any assistance, you may find your way out again as best you can: and he hopes you will take care to avoid the bloodhounds that are let loose in the gardens every night.

Jules’s painting captures the surreal nature of this story, with a fugitive making off from the tree where he has spent an uncomfortable night, in the lower right corner. We are grateful too for Jules’s donation of prints of contemporary landscape engravings. It is planned to hang his picture in Room 8 when the promised new display cases have been delivered and assembled.

Old Fonthill Abbey Grounds are open for charity 10.00-5.00 on Sunday 14 May 2023, entry at SP3 6SP on the Hindon Newtown lane.

The Byzant is unique to Shaftesbury, though it resembles May Garlands carried in festivities elsewhere. As inhabitants of a hilltop town, Shastonians were long dependent on water carted up the hill from springs at its foot in Enmore Green. Some householders had – and still have – their own wells, but most would have bought their supply from a water-carrier. A great deal of beer would also have been consumed in preference to potentially impure water. The right to draw this water required ceremonial payment of an annual tribute to the Lord of the Manor of Gillingham, first mentioned in a document of 1364. On the Sunday before Ascension Day, the Mayor of Shaftesbury walked in procession down to the wells to deliver bread, a calf’s head, a cask of ale, and a pair of gloves. (Shown in Janet Swiss’s mural in Gold Hill Museum, above).

The Byzant was also handed over and then immediately returned. The origin of the name is uncertain, but a legal document of 1662 requires that a staffe or prize besome be carried. In discussing possible derivations of the name, Gordon Ewart-Dean comments that a Harry Potter broomstick makes a good base to posh up with ribbons, feathers, flowers and a few trinkets. The trinkets may have been rather more expensive plate and jewels, loaned for the event by local worthies, as the Corporation’s accounts for 1708 include two shillings paid for watching ye bezant. Other expenses at the time included new clothes for the most recently married couple in the borough, who were appointed Lord & Lady for the day. No doubt there was a festival atmosphere, with much music, dancing, dining, and drinking. The Mayor and the twelve Capital Burgesses (co-opted rather than elected) always treated themselves to a private banquet. In 1771 this cost £54.11.0., when £17.11.0. was also spent on a new Byzant. It is a reasonable assumption that this was the gilded wooden Byzant (photo above by Alan Booth) saved by Lady Theodora Grosvenor, given to the town, and now on display in the museum. In 1830 the still-unreformed Shaftesbury Corporation decided to abolish the ceremony to save money, and the last Byzant became a relic of a lost tradition, revived again this year to coincide with King Charles III’s coronation. There was a re-enactment in 2019 before the pandemic.

You are invited to join the Byzant Procession, gathering outside the Town Hall from 10.45a.m. for an 11.00a.m. start. Vaguely medieval or Tudor costume welcome, but not compulsory. You can choose a costume to hire from a selection at the museum. On the day, look out for the seven silver pennies!

Further details of the event from Elaine Barratt at chairman@goldhillmuseum.org.uk

On 03 September 1651 the mainly Scottish army of the 21 year-old Charles II was defeated at Worcester. The young king, whose father Charles I had been executed in 1649, was now the most wanted man in England, with a £1000 price tag on his head. He spent the daylight hours of 06 September hiding in the branches of the original Royal Oak at Boscobel, while Parliamentary troopers searched for him below. On Tuesday 04 April at 2.30pm at Gold Hill Museum Paul Cordle tells the gripping story of Charles’s haphazard flight after the battle, which, full of near-misses and narrow squeaks, brought him through south Somerset, west Dorset, and south Wiltshire. After six weeks of living on his nerves and thinking on his feet, Charles finally found a boat to France at Shoreham in West Sussex. Paul’s illustrated talk is free to members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society and open to members of the public on payment of £3 at the door.

Charles had no preconceived escape plan. He had no intention of following a beaten army back to Scotland, and thought his best chance of survival lay in the fewest people being aware of his presence and intentions. The only senior Royalist who stayed with him, Henry Viscount Wilmot, was something of a liability, in that he insisted on riding everywhere and declined to change his appearance. As Charles told Samuel Pepys in 1680, I tooke care not to keepe (Wilmot) with me, but sent him a little before or left to come after me.

By the time Charles took refuge in the Royal Oak, his hair had been cut short, his face and hands stained dark, and his clothes dumped for a Country-Fellowes habbit, with a pair of ordinary grey Cloath Britches, a Leathern Dublett and a greene Jerkin. He did not look like his 1653 portrait (above), painted during his exile in France. Nevertheless, he was in constant danger of being recognised – not least because of his height (“over two yards high”) – and he had to use his wits to persuade the suspicious that they had met him in other, plausible circumstances. Some of the best advice and practical assistance came from Catholic Royalists. They were accustomed to being careful what they said, and the more affluent had built concealed priest holes into their houses. But anyone who helped the fugitive king was putting life and property at risk.

A brief foray on foot revealed that crossing the River Severn into Wales was too dangerous a proposition. The opportunity arose for Charles to masquerade as Will Jackson, servant to Mrs Jane Lane, who already had a pass to visit her pregnant friend Mrs Norton at Abbots Leigh near Bristol. Jane rode pillion to the king, and again when they moved on to Colonel Francis Wyndham’s house at Trent in Dorset, once they had learned that there would be no ships leaving Bristol for France for a month.

In all Charles spent 19 days at Trent, where he may have felt safer after the maid of the House (who knew me) told me that there was a Rogue a Trooper come out of Cromwell’s Army that was telling the people that he had killed me, and that was my Buffe-Coate which he had then on. Upon which most of the Villiage being Fanatiks, they were ringing the Bells and making a Bone-Fyer for joy of it.

‘Will Jackson’ had a new pillion passenger, Mrs Juliana Coningsby, when as part of a pretend runaway marriage party they rode to Charmouth to await a summons to a ship in Lyme. They were let down and returned to Trent via Bridport, where they Rodd directly into the best Inn of the place and found the Yard very full of soldiers. I alighted, and taking the Horses thought it the best way to goe blundering in among them, and lead them through the middle of the Soldiers into the Stable, Which I did and they were very angry with me for my rudeness. And as the Ostler was helping me to feed the Horses, Sure, Sir (Sayes the Ostler) I know your face. Which was noe very pleasant Question to me. The king was able to convince the Ostler that their paths had crossed in Exeter, where Charles said that he had been servant to a merchant, Mr Potter, whom he knew to exist.

On 06 October the king, still playing the role of Will Jackson, carried Mrs Coningsby from Trent to Heale House near Salisbury, via Wincanton and the George Inn at Mere. As this is a journey of at least 43 miles there would need to be breaks for food and perhaps a change of horses.

The following day, for the benefit of any prying eyes, he rode off as far as Stonehenge, and returned to Heale at night. After five days in hiding, he headed for Shoreham, where the captain of a collier bound for Poole had agreed to a diversion to allow two impecunious merchants to collect a debt in France. On 16 October Charles and Wilmot disembarked at Fecamp in Normandy.

England’s brief flirtation with Republicanism ended in 1660. Some years after the Restoration Charles said to his heir, the future James II: Brother, I am too old to go again to my travels. James failed to take the hint and was deposed in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688.

By popular request, Claire Ryley and Ann Symons are repeating their presentation of black and white photographs of Edwardian Shaftesbury from the Tyler Collection at Gold Hill Museum at 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 14 February. A number of people were not able to make the first showing in December 2022 and this is another opportunity to view a series of remarkable images captured by Albert Edward Tyler between about 1899 and 1916. As ever, Claire and Ann will welcome observations from the audience about exactly what is visible on screen. This show is free and open to members of the public as well as of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society.

Even better news is that Claire and Ann are checking through many hundreds of Tyler glass negatives in the process of compiling a presentation of photographs of the surrounding villages (e.g. Ashmore, above, in 1907) in time for Shaftesbury Library’s Local History Month in May 2023. S&DHS volunteers like this Ashmore image so much that it is planned to use it in a new Gold Hill Museum Guide, currently in preparation. The Museum has lacked a Souvenir Guide ever since it re-opened in 2011.

As Ann points out, many of Tyler’s photographs show evidence of careful planning and artful arrangement. There are at least 30 children on the ice, well spaced out so that they are safer but also all clearly in view. Presumably that guarantees more sales of the final print. On the far side of the pond, there are men attending three horse-drawn carts, one with an enormous load of timber requiring three horses to draw it. This is a recognisable view of a well-known Dorset landmark, but it is showing a different world.