Dr James Ross, biographer of Henry VI, assesses the claim that Henry was “England’s Worst King” at 2.30p.m. at Gold Hill Museum, Shaftesbury, on Tuesday 10 January. Henry died in the Tower of London in May 1471, probably murdered on the orders of his Yorkist rival, King Edward IV. Henry was taken to Chertsey Abbey in Surrey to be buried …. not an appropriate burial site for a monarch: it was intended, presumably, to ensure his memory faded in this obscure abbey. If so, it failed. A cult to the king was already well established within two years of his death. (Ross, “Henry VI: A Good, Simple and Innocent Man”, p98)

In 1480 Edward tried to impose a ban on those “in going of Pilgrimage to King Henry” at Chertsey. In 1484 Richard III admitted defeat and had Henry moved to St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where he still lies opposite his Nemesis, Edward. Metal badges were made of Henry for pilgrims to buy. Almost 400 have been found, some in France. Henry’s nephew, Henry Tudor, pressed the Pope unsuccessfully on more than one occasion to canonise his uncle, who was credited with performing a total of 368 miracles posthumously. Some of these were quite local.

On 07 February 1486 Alice Newnett of Mere in Wiltshire apparently died of the plague. After a priest had administered the last rites, her grieving mother sewed Alice into her shroud, and the body lay for two hours on the ground. Suddenly Alice sat bolt upright. According to her, she had seen a vision of a holy man in dark silk and a gold crown, who promised to restore her to life on two conditions: one, that she lay in her shroud until he told her to rise; the other, that she make a wax candle as tall as she was and deliver it to the tomb of King Henry VI at Windsor. (Lauren Johnson, BBC History Magazine, February 2021)

Richard Beys, the victim of a profound miscarriage of justice, was hanged at Salisbury on 23 February 1484. He too had a vision of a tall figure royally dressed in a blue velvet gown, accompanied by the Virgin Mary. While Mary held up Beys’s body with her hands under his feet, the grey-haired royal figure had slipped his hand between the noose and Beys’s neck, thus preserving him from strangulation …. Beys travelled to Henry’s tomb to report his miracle and give thanks, leaving there the noose that had hanged him. (Lauren Johnson, “Shadow King: the Life and Death of Henry VI”, p546)

Dr Ross’s talk is free to members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society and open to the public on payment of £3 at the door.

In October 1899 Shaftesbury Council built a temporary grandstand, capacity 800, opposite the Town Hall in anticipation of a Royal Visit. The streets were festooned with bunting, and a competition was held to encourage householders to add to the blaze of colour. They needed little encouragement, as patriotic fervour was at its height in the early days of the Second Boer War in South Africa. People flooded into the town from far and wide. Prime positions were reserved for local dignitaries, such as Lord Stalbridge of the Grosvenor family who owned most of Shaftesbury until 1919; the vinegar tycoon Mark Hanbury Beaufoy ; and the Mayors of Shaftesbury and Blandford. In the event, the Royal Visit lasted just seven minutes.

The royal visitor, Edward Prince of Wales, had arrived in Dorset at Shillingstone Station on the old Somerset & Dorset line, to join a three-day shooting party at nearby Iwerne Minster. He was the guest of Lord and Lady Wolverton, George Grenfell and Georgiana Maria Glyn. The Glyns were part of a banking dynasty, and, until he succeeded to the Wolverton title, George was Liberal MP for Shaftesbury, 1857-73. In 1878 he employed perhaps the leading Victorian Gothic Revival architect, Alfred Waterhouse, whose work includes Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum, to build a splendid country house. The Prince of Wales became a frequent visitor, continuing later as King, and after the house had passed into the hands of the Ismays, owners of the White Star Line and ‘Titanic.’ This explains why Shillingstone, a modest country station, boasts a rather grand canopy.

Thanks to Press reports unearthed by Hilltop History broadcaster Dave Hardiman, we have been able to place the Tyler photograph, still displayed above the stairs in Shaftesbury Town Hall, in its historical context. According to the (highly deferential) reporting, the Prince had decided to return to London two hours earlier than planned doubtless owing to the troubled condition of state affairs. It’s true that the Boer War was going badly, and perhaps Queen Victoria in her advanced years had allowed Edward rather more access to government business. However, Edward was a notorious playboy, with more than 50 mistresses during a lifetime of over-indulgence. In 1901 his waistline reached 48 inches, and in 1898 he began a relationship with the Edwardian beauty Alice Keppel (1868-1947), great-grandmother of the current Queen Consort. In spite, or perhaps because, of this reputation, he seems to have been genuinely popular. There was a continuous demonstration of loyal affection from Iwerne to Semley Station, but at Shaftesbury the inhabitants quite excelled themselves in their efforts to do honour to His Royal Highness.

Two bands played the royal procession into the town. Shaftesbury Town Band were resplendent in new uniforms, while the 1st Battalion of the Dorset Volunteers provided both a military band and a 100-strong guard of honour, drawn up in front of the Town Hall. Accompanying the Prince in his carriage were the Wolvertons and the twenty-year-old Grand Duke Michael, who was the first of the Russian Royal Family to be murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Conspicuous by her absence was the much-loved Princess of Wales, Alexandra of Denmark. There can have been no time to alight, or for formal speeches; instead, printed addresses and handshakes were exchanged. After seven minutes the cavalcade moved off to Semley Station, where the 10.20 Exeter to Waterloo express made an unscheduled stop.

The inhabitants of Shaftesbury managed to fill the rest of their special day with a football match played on the cricket field, which visitors Fordingbridge Turks won 2-0, and a great deal of celebratory dining. The day’s proceedings which will be long remembered by all who witnessed them, terminated with a magnificent pyrotechnic display in the cricket field.

Claire Ryley and Ann Symons look forward to observations from the audience about other images from the Tyler Collection at 2.30 on 06 December at Gold Hill Museum. This presentation is free to members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, while non-members may pay £3 at the door.

On Tuesday 06 December at 2.30p.m. at Gold Hill Museum, Claire Ryley and Ann Symons will at last have the opportunity to deliver their presentation of photographic gems from The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society’s Tyler Collection. Together with another S&DHS member, Chris Stupples, Claire and Ann have discovered that Albert Edward Tyler (1873-1919) was a butcher’s son from Shropshire, who became a photographer’s apprentice in Market Drayton, and who by the time of the 1901 Census had set up as a photographer at 53 Salisbury Street in Shaftesbury. In the years prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, he must have been a familiar sight lugging around heavy photographic equipment as he captured images of the district and its people, most of whom understood the need to stand still. Audience participation will be welcome, as the Tyler photographs often provide more questions than answers.

Some of the Tyler images have been labelled by the photographer, but many have not. The reference to the Late King’s visit must have been added after Edward VII’s death in June 1910. The Prince of Wales’s Feathers visible on banners suggest that Edward was carrying out royal duties before he succeeded his mother Queen Victoria in January 1901. There was no certainty about the date, or the precise location, until it was noticed that there is a captioned enlargement of this photograph above the stairs in Shaftesbury Town Hall. The caption reads: The Prince of Wales handing his reply to the Address presented to him by the Mayor and Corporation of the Borough of Shaftesbury 21 October 1899.

Doubts remain as to what was being celebrated in October 1899, and exactly where, though clearly the photographer had an excellent, elevated vantage point, no small consideration when plate cameras were such bulky pieces of kit. We would be pleased to hear of any reports which shed further light on the context of this photograph. Likewise, Claire and Ann look forward to observations from the audience about other images from the Tyler Collection on 06 December. There are further details about Albert Edward Tyler (1873-1919) here.

This event will be free to S&DHS members and open to the public on payment of £3 at the door.

At 7.30p.m. on Tuesday 27 September Dr Amy Frost, (above, centre) Curator of Beckford’s Tower and Museum, will deliver the annual Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture on behalf of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society at the Town Hall. Two hundred years ago, in September 1822, 700 sightseers a day were flocking to Fonthill Abbey, the Gothic folly created by reclusive slaveowner William Beckford in west Wiltshire and filled with valuable works of art. By 1821 he was unable to pay the interest on debts calculated to be £145,000 – about £15 million at today’s values. Reluctantly, Beckford put the sale of Fonthill in the hands of auctioneer James Christie and decamped to Bath, where he began yet more grandiose building. The auction date was set for 17 September 1822.

The story of the sale is told in “Fonthill Fever”, an impressive free exhibition curated by Sidney Blackmore which can be seen daily at Gold Hill Museum Shaftesbury until 31 October.

The sale did not take place as planned, much to the annoyance of the wealthy would-be buyers who had paid for expensive catalogues and tickets. In 1823, however, there was a second chance to view the art treasures, as Beckford’s private buyer, the nineteenth century equivalent of an arms dealer, had decided he didn’t want the contents of the house. This precipitated a second scramble to bid for highly desirable objets d’art. Even Beckford decided to buy back some of his old stuff.

The story of Beckford’s life of building and collecting in Bath, where he lived in Lansdown Crescent until his death in 1844, will be the subject of Dr Frost’s illustrated talk. Amy is the go-to expert on William Beckford, as the Curator of Beckford’s Tower and Museum, and Senior Architectural Curator of the Bath Preservation Trust. With his fortune restored, conceivably with a profit, Beckford could not resist altering the urban and rural landscape, and skyline north of Bath. It is not giving too much away to presume that he had something of an obsession with towers

Admission to the lecture is £5 at the door and free to members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society.

With the next booster campaign of Covid vaccines due to begin on 05 September, it is perhaps worth revisit-ing the early days of the practice of vaccination to uncover a surprise or two. In 1796 Gloucestershire country doctor Edward Jenner inoculated his gardener’s 9 year-old son with serum taken from cowpox blisters on the hands of milkmaid Sarah Nelmes. The source of the infection was called Blossom, and as the Latin for “cow” is “vacca” Jenner coined the term “vaccination”. The boy became only mildly ill, and was later shown – and this was the truly dangerous part of the experiment – to be immune to infection with smallpox. This was an horrendous, disfiguring disease, endemic in Britain and likely to flare up in local epidemics with high mortality rates. Jenner confirmed his results with 23 other cases and published his findings in 1798. In 1802 he was granted £10,000 by Parliament, and £20,000 in 1807 after the Royal College of Physicians endorsed the practice of vaccination.

Jenner deserved these and other accolades for his providing scientific proof that inoculation with cowpox provided immunity against the much more virulent smallpox. He knew, as did many countryfolk, that cowherds and milkmaids who had caught cowpox from handling cattle were unlikely to succumb to smallpox. Benjamin Jesty (1737-1816), a farmer from Yetminster in North Dorset, had made the same observation. In 1771 and again in 1774 there were outbreaks of smallpox in the village. Jesty took his wife and two sons to a neighbour’s farm in Chetnole, and scratched fluid from a blister on the udder of one of the cattle into his wife’s forearm and the boys’ upper arms. Jesty himself had already had “the cow-pock” some years before. The boys were resilient but Elizabeth suffered from swelling and a high fever, before making a full recovery. A contemporary relative writes that villagers “began to regard Jesty as an inhuman brute, who could dare to practise experiments upon his family. The sequel of which would be (to turn them) into wild beasts. The worthy farmer was hooted at, reviled, and pelted whenever he attended the markets in his neighbourhood.” (Quoted by Andrew Norman on p35 of ‘Purbeck Personalities’). These would appear to be the attitudes being satirised by Gillray above.

By 1797 the Jesty family had moved to Purbeck, where the Rector of Swanage, Dr Andrew Bell, and his wife Agnes conducted a personal vaccination campaign in the spring of 1803. (Bell is best known for introducing the Madras System of pupil teachers and promoting a network of National Schools for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Christian Church. One such National School still existed in Bimport, Shaftesbury, in 1895 and featured in Thomas Hardy’s last novel, “Jude the Obscure”.) Bell decided that Jesty deserved some recognition as the first vaccinator and wrote on these lines to the Original Vaccine Pock Institute in London in August 1803. The outcome was a testimonial from the Institute “of our personal regard, and to commemorate a fact as that of preventing the Smallpox by inoculating the Cowpock 31 years ago, at our request a three-quarter length portrait of Mr Jesty is painted by that excellent artist Mr Sharp, to be preserved at the Original Vaccine Pock Institution.” (Norman, p36) If Benjamin Jesty appears somewhat uncomfortable in his rustic attire, it is because he was a fidgety sitter and had to be diverted by the piano playing of Mrs Sharp. Had it not been for the intervention of Andrew Bell, one suspects that the Jestys’ part in the development of vaccination would have disappeared almost entirely from the historical record.

Still on the theme of Vaccination, Dave Hardiman of Hilltop History writes about the enforcement of the 1853 Vaccination Act in Shaftesbury in 1897:

A law had been introduced, that required parents to ensure that all children were vaccinated against smallpox before they were 3 months old. There were some parents who were against vaccination and refused it. Sounds familiar.

In March, at the Shaftesbury County Court, a builder of Motcombe, named Alfred Harris, who held contrary views as to the efficacy and necessity of vaccination was fined £1-14s-6d (£260 today) for neglecting to procure the vaccination of his child. He demanded 12 months to pay, but the court refused this and told him that, if the payment was not forthcoming, the police would be granted permission to seize goods, which would then be sold at auction in order to pay the outstanding fine. Well, two weeks passed without the fine being paid and so the law was set in motion.

Much local interest was aroused at the prospect of an auctioneer selling Harris’s goods, and other anti-vaccinators proposed to assemble and give the auctioneer a hard time or, in common parlance at the time, ‘A warm welcome’. Interest grew and it was expected that the goods would be seized on Saturday morning, with the auction to follow. However, anticipating trouble, Inspector Elford despatched P.C’s Toop & Stickley early on Friday morning in a pony & trap to Harris’s address with a warrant to seize the goods. Harris was not at home, but his wife let them in, where they seized and conveyed away a couch and two chairs. They then met Alfred Harris on the road and told him that the goods would be sold by auction at the police yard at midday.
Harris notified his anti-vax friends and they and numerous others gathered in the police yard at the appointed time. No bids were forthcoming from the public and in fact Inspector Elford acquired them with a bid of £1-19s. Afterwards, a meeting of anti-vaccinators was held at the Commons, where Mr J.K.Rutter, Mr Collier (a Methodist minister) and the defendant denounced the Vaccination Act. A collection was made to recoup Harris’s losses and Inspector Elford agreed to sell the goods back to him for the price paid at auction, for which he was very grateful.

In August, more anti-vaccinators were fined. Thomas Burr, a horse dealer of Enmore Green, Sydney John Harris, a carpenter of Motcombe and Frederick Spinney, a blacksmith also of Motcombe, were each summoned to court for failing to have their children vaccinated within 3 months of birth. Mr Norton, the vaccination officer, reported that that all had been previously fined for refusing to have their children vaccinated and that none of them intended to pay. They each said that they refused to obey the law because they considered that vaccination had evil effects. They were now each fined £1 (£150).

Smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organisation in 1980, after a sustained worldwide vaccination campaign.