…as luck would have it a trip into Salisbury on a hot June day got me immersed in local history and also opened the door to yet another way in which Bishop’s is tightly woven into the tapestry of local society. We chose to eat outside and so Fisherton Street was a natural place to head for – the café’s menu has a Mediterranean slant which seemed most appropriate as the temperature climbed towards 30 degrees, and the courtyard outside the Mill is a lovely place to be. Another advantage is the bookshop. Have a drink, order your grub and then squirrel your way briefly into piles of secondhand volumes while you wait for the tortillas to arrive…
I was anticipating picking up another Hastings or Beevor war tome, but this time a couple of rather less imposing paper back volumes caught my eye close to the door. A cursory scan of ‘A Victorian Village’ and ‘The Lost Village’ encouraged me to buy both, and I have spent much of the ensuing weekend immersed in the past characters and lives of villages of rural Wiltshire. Both books are fascinating, both are stuffed full of the parochial details that are so often lost in the modern world, and both are of special relevance now that I live in a village to the East of Salisbury close to Ralph Whitlock’s home village of Pitton.
I was already aware of Ralph. A memorial stone in Bentley Woods, on my morning cycle route, celebrates his work in support of that wonderful environment; coming at the top of a climb I had seen the name but relative exhaustion had prevented me from following up any further! However further investigation reveals that Ralph was a Bishop’s Boy, starting at the school as a fee-paying student in January 1926. At the time he was one of just 4 (yes – four!) boys who had pursued education to secondary level from the village. That was a big thing – and the journey in for the first two years before a bus service started was a challenge of similar proportions. The six mile journey on pitted and rutted roads frequented largely by horse drawn wagons was hilly, and in the winter illuminated only by an acetylene lamp on the front of his bicycle. A short cut through the woodland of the Clarendon Estate was quicker but impassable either when wet or poorly lit. My inevitable conclusion as I read was that they were made out of tough stuff in those days – even more so the first man to own a penny farthing in Pitton (one Jim Fry) who apparently rode his new hi-tech machine all the way to Southampton! When the buses did start and South Wilts Grammar opened in 1928 the broadening of horizons must have had an even more dramatic effect on educational prospects for girls in the area around Salisbury.
Ralph Whitlock left Bishop’s to become a countryman, and a writer about the countryside who contributed pieces for various national newspapers as well as appearing on TV and in radio productions. Though his career took him across the globe, he retained his strong local roots and lived in Winterslow to the end. I am left deeply impressed by the love letters that this Bishop’s Boy wrote to his Wiltshire villages, and so glad that I took the time to dive into some books while my food was yet to come.
SDS
