Chapter 5 BUILDING THE HOMES

The Founder, as he is always known, had an excellent architect to hand in Howard Seth-Smith, a fellow committee member for the London Working Boys' Homes. It is not necessarily a prerogative of the architect to select the builder, and no doubt Charles Baring Young would have wanted to have a hand in the choice. Today, the normal procedure would be to put the project out to tender, and then choose from a short-list of three. After all, this was going to be a major construction programme, the biggest that Kingham had seen since the restoration of the parish church in 1853, and one that would provide employment to many villagers for more than one generation. But the procedure in 1885 would have been different. An architect might well have his own favourite firm of builders, whom he would recommend, but normally he would turn to the local stonemasons. Seven stonemasons are listed in the 1881 census for Kingham, all of them from the skilful Keen family. For more important projects, the firm of Alfred Groves (1826-1914) of Milton-under-Wychwood was often employed. But when the Homes were built, a family from Sheepscombe near Painswick in Gloucestershire was employed, and the Wiggalls sold up and moved to Kingham.

Richard Wiggall had been born in Birdlip, Gloucestershire, in about 1837, and his wife, Sarah, came from Sheepscombe where they lived for at least twelve years after their marriage. Their three sons, Henry, William and Arthur, were all born in Sheepscombe. Richard and Sarah Wiggall arrived in Kingham in late 1884 or 1885, and presumably went to live in the house that is today called ‘Wiggall's Corner`. With them came their three sons. The eldest, Henry, who had been born in Sheepscombe in 1858, with his wife, Alma Jane, came to Kingham about a year after his father, and occupied a smaller house in Church Street. Henry and his wife were deeply committed to the Wesleyan Methodist chapel in Kingham, and probably the whole family were Methodists. Maybe this had been a factor in securing their appointment since we can be sure that Charles Baring Young was looking not only for a reliable, hard-working and skilful man, but also for someone with a personal evangelical Christian faith. Although he himself was an Anglican, he did not expect his responsible employees to have to belong to the Established Church, but he did expect them to be committed Christian believers.

Henry Wiggall's two younger brothers, William and Arthur, were still unmarried when the family moved to Kingham – William was aged only twenty, and Arthur perhaps no more than fifteen – so at first they lived with their parents in the house now known as ‘Wiggall's Corner`. All the Wiggalls were stone-masons, which was the normal way to describe a builder in the 1880s, and Richard Wiggall was given the title of Clerk of the Works, which gave him executive authority over all the workmen employed on building the Homes. In his book, ‘Kingham the Beloved Place` (Oxford, 1956) the late Ernest Lainchbury recalls

‘seeing a small army of men coming down the road from the Hill where they had been working…Among these men coming home after their day's work were Richard Wiggall, Clerk of the Works, and his three sons, Henry, Arthur and William. William has just (1956) celebrated his 90 th birthday.` (page 319)

Richard Wiggall felt that the time had come for him to retire when the Chapel had been completed in 1903, and he chose the Dedication Day for the new Chapel as the day also for his official resignation. Charles Baring Young paid tribute to his many years of excellent service, and presented him with a Travelling Clock as a mark of his appreciation. Richard Wiggall died on 4 th December 1911, and was buried in Kingham Churchyard three days later by the Revd Henry Wheeler, the Chaplain of the Homes. He was succeeded as Clerk of the Works by his son Arthur, 1869-1952.

Much of our knowledge of those early years comes from the two books by Alfred F. Jarvis, and especially from his ‘Fifty Years of Kingham Hill, 1886 – 1936`, (Kingham Hill Trust, 1936). Alf Jarvis provides the essential colour and atmosphere of those days, and took immense trouble to obtain as much information as he could, for which full acknowledgement must be given. But Alf himself did not come to the Hill as a small boy until 1903, and so was dependent for much of his material on the recollections of older men in the 1930s. On the whole, this was reliable, and can be confirmed by documentary evidence, but in some cases needs to be corrected. Alf was only too willing to acknowledge this: ‘It has been difficult to obtain these facts. There are omissions and may be inaccuracies. Corrections and additional information would be welcomed` (op.cit.p.90). Evidence for this difficulty comes from no better source than Alf Jarvis's personal copy of his book (which I now possess) in which he made several additions and amendments.

Alf Jarvis (op.cit. p.22) paid tribute to ‘other workers on the Hill whose names will be familiar to old boys`. After listing the four Wiggalls, he continues with thirty* others, to whom he added a thirty-first in the annotated copy of his book.

J.Judd C.Bridge A.Dix A.Thornton

J.Bridges J.Keen J.Pearse W.Sherbourne

J.Padley A.Belcher L.Pearse P.Nason

H.Padley F.Belcher N.Pearse H.Winnett

F.Peachey L.Newman W.Wearing H.Biles

A.Bridges J.Wallington A.Watson Shepherd Biles

T.Collett W.Pearse C.Webb James Rathbone.

T.Findley P.Ward C.Pratley

(*owing to a misprint in the book, Alf Jarvis's numbering is inaccurate)

This list is interesting, not merely because it is an indication of the close association between boys on the Hill and the workmen employed there, at least in Alf Jarvis's day (how many of today's pupils could name even a half dozen of those working on the Hill?) but also because Alf Jarvis knew the initials of almost every man. The implication is that they were not addressed by surname only, but that each man was known by his Christian name. (Alf Jarvis very rarely uses Christian names, but the men would have been known normally as, for example, Joe Padley, Fred Peachey or Tom Collett.) Since these are the men whom Alf Jarvis knew, it does not follow that they were all employed on the Hill at the same time, or that they were all involved in the original work in 1885, but with the advantage of our present archival resources it is possible to identify some of them in more detail.

Arthur Bridges, for example, was born in 1887 and died in 1969. He came from a very long-standing Kingham family, and was twice married. His obituary in the Oxford Times of 14 th March 1969 says that ‘he helped to build Kingham Hill School and the Village Hall, and personally erected the Jubilee Gate in the churchyard and put up the plaque to the memory of Mr C. Baring Young in the Village Hall as his contribution to the village he loved. He served with the Royal Engineers in the 1914-1918 war, receiving a reward for gallantry`. Arthur Bridges [his name should really be ‘Bridge`] played football as a young man, and was at one time invited for a trial with Reading Football Club. But he became well-known as a local cricketer. He was a member of the Kingham Cricket Club before the war, and ‘was a forcing batsman and a superb fielder` (Oxford Times). He was a stonemason or bricklayer (his preferred description) by trade, but in later years became a shopkeeper and lived at Kingham Village Stores. His son, Arthur William Bridge, was killed on H.M.S.Anson on Empire Day 1941; there is a commemorative seat for him in the village. Arthur Bridges (1887-1969) cannot have been employed on the Hill until about 1901 at the earliest.

Mr Ernest Lainchbury (op.cit. p.319) reported that William Wiggall had told him in 1956 ‘that his first job on the Hill was to assist in the demolition of a cattle yard and buildings on the top where the main offices are situated with a clock tower`. These buildings had originated in a hovel or cattle shelter erected there by the Fieldsmen in 1819 when this area was part of the Upper Common. Even in 1819 this hovel had been a substantial stone building with a thatched roof, which had cost the Fieldsmen £17 –12s - 3d over and above the value of the stone which came free from the parish quarry, at a time when a workman's wages were still only 7/6d a week. After 1850, the hovel was taken over and extended by Kingham Hill Farm. With its demolition, the ground was ready for building the Homes. The stone from the hovel will have been re-used in later building on the site.

Main offices at KHS

Before purchasing the Daylesford Estate, Charles Baring-Young will have observed the existence of conveniently-situated quarries of good quality building stone on Whitequar (Whitequarry) Hill. To many generations of boys in the twentieth century, these quarries, by now grassed over and ultimately landscaped by Mr Norman Snell, were known as ‘The Dell` and provided an attractively wild and varied location for games on a Sunday afternoon, an occasional Scout patrol camp, a House barbecue, or – perhaps more often – a crafty fag well away from the prying eyes of disapproving authority. But in 1885, they were still working quarries for building stone and for the materials needed by the village for making and surfacing the parish roads. This use received legal recognition in the 1850 Enclosure Award Act which allocated the five-acre quarry enclosure to the parish Overseers of the Highways. When the newly-created Chipping Norton Rural District Council took over responsibility for maintaining all public roads, the last Surveyor of the Highways for Kingham, Caleb Lainchbury, continued to act under the ancient title of ‘Waywarden`, and exercised diligent surveillance of the parish footpaths, footbridges, ditches and drains. He also continued to be responsible for the Quarry, and supervised the work of Jim Pearse, the roadman who hewed out the stone and repaired the roads. From time immemorial, these quarries had provided the stone needed for the repair and maintenance of the parish roads, and this right had been specifically authorised and defined in the Enclosure Award of 1850. From time to time, the Kingham Vestry (which, before 1894, acted as a Parish Council) leased the Quarry as in 1877 when the Vestry Minute Book recorded (Ernest Lainchbury op.cit. p.106) “Mr Turner paid £12 for the Quarry which was then paid to Mr Pearse for the paths of the village”. Mr Turner's annual rent enabled him to sell building stone from the quarry at a profit, and the parish roads were maintained at the pittance of five shillings a week. Two years later (1879), the Vestry “carried unanimously that the Quarry should be under the management of the Waywarden and that all persons having stones for building purposes or otherwise shall pay 2d per yard to the parish, such money to be paid in to the Waywarden, but” (by a majority vote of 5 to 4) “if any person draws stones contrary to the advice of the Way Warden such a person shall pay 4d a yard”.

This was the situation when Charles Baring Young began to build the Homes. He accepted that the quarry on Whitequarry Hill was not included in his purchase of the Daylesford Estate. At first, the Vestry was happy for the Founder to have a lease on the quarry under a formal legal contract, much as Mr Turner had had in 1877, but even this proved unsatisfactory, and in due time led to friction between the parish and the Founder. The stone was good quality Cotswold limestone (not granite , pace Mr Bruce Arnold, whose delightful ‘Coppinger` tetralogy gives otherwise such a precise description of the Hill in the 1940s and 1950s). Easy access from the quarry to the Hill was a considerable advantage; even in 1819 it had cost the Fieldsmen five shillings for each load of stones to be drawn by horse and cart from the quarry to the hovel, and by 1885 the hidden cost of transport would have risen.

There is no evidence as to where the other substantial building material came from. Kingham Hill as yet had few trees, and the nearest woodland in the parish, Upper and Lower Trenchard's Woods, had only been planted after 1850 and so could provide no mature timber. But the Daylesford Estate had been landscaped with several areas of woodland and thousands of trees soon after 1788, and almost certainly the beams and rafters of the new buildings came from that source.

In line with the policy of using local materials and a traditional style of Cotswold architecture, the Homes were roofed with Stonesfield slate. Stonesfield slate (which probably, but not necessarily, came from the village of Stonesfield), is not true slate, but a particular type of Jurassic limestone known as ‘pendle`. It was mined at Stonesfield from the late seventeenth century until the First World War, and became the preferred roofing material to replace thatch on Cotswold houses (G.H.Powell ‘Stonesfield`, 1975). For the Homes, it was the obvious choice, being reasonably cheap (in 1830, one hundred slates cost two shillings and sixpence), accessible, and in keeping with the traditional style favoured by Howard Seth-Smith.

[Unlike true (Welsh) slate, Stonesfield slate deteriorates with time, and by the 1960s the roof of Durham House was developing serious leaks. The decision was taken to strip off all the Stonesfield slates, and replace them with machine-made reconstituted stone tiling. It is alleged that almost the entire cost of re-roofing was offset by the sale of hundreds of surviving sound Stonesfield slates desperately needed for re-roofing listed buildings elsewhere. While the slates were being removed, the roof was covered, as a temporary protection, with plastic sheeting that had to be laboriously replaced at the end of each day's work.

Stonesfield slate

Tiling with Stonesfield slate was a highly specialised craft since, apart from needing the skill to select and lay the slates, the slatter has also to plaster the whole underside of the roof with a mixture of plaster and horse-hair, to keep out drafts and snow. Despite his undoubted ability, Richard Wiggall probably did not have the expertise needed for slating. The required skills were monopolised locally by members of the Rawlings family, and it was probably Robert Rawlings (1852-1937), assisted perhaps by his sons Thomas and George, who undertook the work of roof-tiling, making and inserting the windows, and painting the internal and external woodwork. Ernest Lainchbury (op.cit. p.197) described him as a “man of all trades … a happy and carefree disposition with never an unkind word for anyone …(The) strongest and only word he would use would be ‘Daa-ley`.”

The master carpenter for the woodwork required, for example, in flooring the rooms in the Homes, was George Lamb, estate carpenter of Daylesford, who subsequently became Superintendent of Severn House. I shall write more fully about him and his family later. The ironwork was probably undertaken by the Kingham blacksmith, James Joseph Millen, assisted by seventeen-year old Henry Sedgley who lived in Daylesford.

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