Our latest library exhibition is running now until mid-June 2025 in the Wychwoods Library in Milton. We feature a selection of images inspired by childhood memories, from Edwardian times to the mid-1970s.

As with all our exhibitions in the Wychwoods Library in Milton, these images have been selected from donations over time to our archive. As always, we invite feedback from visitors: all comments and observations are welcome. We especially welcome any new information about the individuals depicted in our photographs. So often we find scant details attached to photos which come to us – and this is a common experience, whether for archivists, historians, or simply family members looking at pictures from our forebears who saw no reason to record details!

Childhood Between the Wars

Childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, during the inter-war period and Great Depression, varied greatly by social class. It was marked by economic hardship for many. Education was compulsory from ages 5 (and earlier) to 14, though some children continued until 18 in grammar or fee-paying schools.

Schooling emphasised reading, writing, and arithmetic, alongside nature studies, country dancing, and practical skills such as sewing and woodwork. Discipline was strict, with punishments which would include writing lines or receiving the cane.

Outside school, children often helped with chores, while their playtime revolved around simple games and toys. Streets became playgrounds, where games like hopscotch, skipping, conkers, and football thrived. In summer, cricket was popular, while Double Dutch required skill with long skipping ropes. Newly published comics such as The Beano, The Magnet, and School Friend captivated children, offering tales of adventure and humour. Sweets, affordable with pocket money, provided small indulgences, with popular choices including Black Jacks and gobstoppers.

Childhood illnesses such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, and polio were common and could result in extended stays in isolation hospitals or long-term disabilities. Despite these challenges, children displayed resilience and creativity, making the most of limited resources.

The Second World War and After

The outbreak of war in 1939 disrupted these lives dramatically, as many children were evacuated from urban areas to the countryside, reshaping their experiences and altering their childhood forever. These years combined simplicity, hardship, and a strong sense of community.

These days, many of us who grew up in the postwar years can reflect on our own childhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, a time characterised by independence, outdoor play, and simpler entertainment.

During that era, children enjoyed freedoms now considered rare. They would leave home after breakfast, return briefly for lunch, and only come back at dinner, often dirty and bruised from adventurous play. In cities, bomb sites leftover from World War II, barren and open, became dens for imaginative exploration. With limited television programming, children relied on self-made entertainment—cycling for miles, fishing in local streams, and climbing trees in parks. Organized sports, such as cricket and football, dominated the streets, while girls often played skipping games or hopscotch. Traffic-free streets provided ample space for these activities, fostering a sense of community among children.

Family life tended still to be centred around traditional roles, with fathers working and mothers handling household chores. Meals were home-cooked, apart from occasional fish and chips, and snacking was minimal. Clothing and shoes were expensive, often handed down, and homemade items were common. There was little societal pressure for fashionable brands.

Looking back, summers seemed perpetually warm and sunny, as children spent most days outdoors. Streets now overwhelmed by traffic and parks lacking unaccompanied play reveal how times have changed. With the advent of technology and possibly also the impact of the Covid reset, free time in childhood has tended to shift indoors, focused on smartphones and video games. Perhaps we might say that reflecting on the 1950s and 1960s highlights a loss of innocence and the freedom that once defined growing up.

Our latest library exhibition is running now until mid-April 2025 in the Wychwoods Library in Milton. We feature a selection of images of local football teams and some action shots – covering dates from Edwardian times to the mid-1960s.

As with all our exhibitions in the Wychwoods Library in Milton, these images have been selected from our online archive.The origins of football in the Wychwoods can be traced back to the late 19th century, a period when the modern game was beginning to take shape across the country. Local records suggest that informal matches were played in village greens and schoolyards. These early games were often unstructured, with varying rules depending on the participants.

As the popularity of football grew, so did the desire to form organised teams. By the early 20th century, several local football clubs had emerged in the Wychwoods. These clubs provided a structured environment for players and helped to standardise the rules of the game.

Village football continues to be an important focus for communities throughout the country, and football in the Wychwoods is no exception.

Memories of Village Football – by Fred Russell

Longtime Ascott resident and keen footballer Fred Russell has kindly provided these recollections of his footballing years in the Wychwoods

Opposite Ivy’s grocery shop, Frank Coombes had his bicycle repair shop. Frank also sold leather football studs and white oil in medicine bottles which many of us young men of the villages would buy to rub on swollen ankles and tired legs after playing football. The label on the bottle read EMBROCATION WHITE OILS, FOR USE ON HORSES!

In my early days of playing for my village team many villages had to drive the sheep or cattle off the pitch before the game could start. This included my own village of Ascott. Milton always had a good pitch on the Green. Shipton pitch was where it is today beside the New Beaconsfield Hall, though this was before the new hall was built and the pitch was marked out in the other direction. The site of the New Beaconsfield Hall is where the Shipton children built their bonfire.

The headquarters of most village teams was the local pub. Many pubs provided a place in one of their outbuildings where the away team could change, but there were no showers or baths after a game. However, I recall one occasion, when Ascott played Dean, a small hamlet near Chadlington, whose headquarters were at the Malt Shovel in Chadlington. After the game on a late afternoon in November, the daylight almost gone, we were directed to one of the outbuildings where, stumbling over empty beer crates and barrels, we found a large, galvanised bathtub full of hot water. We stood in the water, still with our strip on, and washed the mud and muck off our legs. By the time we left the shed to get the bus home, the water in the bath was the colour of thick brown cocoa!

The Ascott club hired the Backs Coach Company from Witney for away matches, this was often driven by Graham Arundel, a one-time keen footballer himself, and member of a well-respected Shipton family.

It was ten shillings to join the football club for the season, and if you were picked to play the match fee was two and sixpence, or half-a-crown (12.5p in today’s money). Half-a-crown would have paid for a decent seat at the pictures (cinema) in those days. The most expensive seats were three and six (17.5p), these were the seats favoured by courting couples. Sadly, I never did reach the back row of seats.

The best footballer I ever saw was Stanley Matthews who played for Stoke City for most of his career. I still think he is the best footballer I will ever see.

Listen to the clip here:

Transcript

But behind all these (reasons causing emigration) was one overriding factor that’s usually politely called “demographic”.

I don’t know if you have heard that entertaining anecdote about the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, a famous Victorian parson. The one that wrote Onward Christian Soldiers and also saved from oblivion the song about Widdecombe Fair.

Well he was a conscientious, energetic parson down on the west side of Dartmoor. And he was at a, having, presiding over a children’s party one afternoon and he saw a pretty little girl sort of staring at him a bit fixedly and so he bent down benignly and said, “Good afternoon my dear and whose little girl are you?”

And she burst into tears and said, “I’m yours Papa” …..

The recording of the full talk is here >>>

Listen to the clip

Transcript

Not all the arrangements for receiving immigrants worked perfectly and one chap who got to Christchurch spent a few days in the immigration barracks at Addington, but they were so overcrowded that he’d never had his clothes off the whole time and slept chiefly on the mess room table.

Having obtained work but not accommodation, he was sent with his wife and child to the old police barracks in Armagh Street and was much surprised to be ushered into a police cell. The only alteration being that the old iron bar door was taken off and laid outside and a more civilized one put on.

 With this exception, the cell was in the same condition as when used for prisoners, the authorities not even having taken trouble to erase the choice compositions both of prose and verse with which the cell had been adorned by its previous compulsory occupants.

 As my wife cannot read and is like most of Eve’s daughters a little curious, she wanted to know what all the writing was about. So I had the pleasant task of pretending to read them to her,  converting them to what Scriptural texts I could remember.

Upon which she remarked “Dear me. I wonder what they locked the poor fellows up for. They must have been very religious.”  

The recording of the full talk is here >>>

I am pleased to share this letter from Glenda Lewis, a descendant of Wychwoods emigrants to New Zealand. Glenda is numbered among many such descendants who are drawn to the Wychwoods from overseas, specifically to connect with their family story.

Over the years the society has helped with enquiries from a distance, but I was pleased and delighted to meet a descendent of Wychwoods emigrants in person, and quite out of the blue,  on  2nd September 2024 outside the Wychwoods Library.

My meeting with Glenda was particularly fortuitous as I was in the midst of research about Wychwood emigrants to New Zealand in the 1870s, as part of our commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Cospatrick tragedy.

 Glenda told me of her Wychwood ancestors.  I told her about our research, and we began a correspondence about our shared interest.

On the 18th November she wrote to me with this moving tribute to the Wychwood emigrants, a letter she wishes to share with all of us in the Wychwood villages.

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 To the people of Shipton, Milton and Ascott under Wychwood
From Glenda Lewis, Wellington, New Zealand: 18 November, 2024

What romantic ideas the name Wychwood conjured when I first learnt that my great grandfather Joseph Pratley came from Milton-u-W.  He and my great grandmother, Jane Watts of Lineham, came to New Zealand on separate ships in 1874.  I don’t know if they had already formed a relationship, but they soon married and settled in Waipawa along with a couple of his brothers, and one of hers, I think.  Whenever I drive north to see my daughter in Napier, I stop at the cemetery to pay tribute to Jane (my mother’s mother’s mother).  She died at age 66, after an emergency operation on the kitchen table.  By that stage, Joseph was ‘seeing’ another woman, referred to scathingly by my grandmother as ‘Jesse in white boots’. 

In 2018 I spent 6 weeks in Shipton under Wychwood, courtesy of a Churchill Trust Fellowship.  I noted that Churchill was born on 30 November 1874. I wanted to see the place Jane and Joseph came from.  But the past is irrecoverable, and I could not relate the wealthy communities I saw with how things must have been back then.  And I was struck by the fact that I couldn’t see anyone working the land, and hardly any farm animals.   I learnt about the Ascott Martyrs, and the involvement of the Pratley women.  Maybe that’s where my grandmother and mother got their grit from.

When I came across the Shipton memorial to the villagers who had the misfortune to voyage out on the Cospatrick, I realised what a close call I’d had.  It could well have been Joseph and Jane on that ship.  Jane would not have known about it, as she left on the Lady Jocelyn, on 3 November.  I learnt in an article on the tragedy in the NZ Listener (26 October) that many ships never made it.  How brave they had to be to leave everything behind, risk their lives and face who knew what in this far off land.

Although they had plenty to eat when they got here, life was hard, and very physical.  My grandparents, Arthur and Ruth (one of Jane’s daughters) sold their teashop in Waipawa, and broke in 60 acres 35kms further south, in the still tiny settlement of Norsewood.  The Scandinavians who’d come en masse in the 1870s for the same reasons as the British, had felled the mighty forest.  It took my grandfather and his faithful horse Doris, a long time to pull out all the stumps.  My grandmother had to climb down the steep bank to the river to fetch water, and they raised their first three babies in a couple of small rooms which now comprise our tool shed and outside toilet.

My three older sisters and I now own the old farmhouse and an acre around it.  We spend long weekends there about ten times a year.  We grow vegetables and have a small orchard.  Being close to the Ruahine hills, the climate is quite cool and wet, so only walnuts, quince and apple trees do well.

We have often imagined our grandparents listening to Churchill’s wartime speeches on the old radio.  They were very isolated at the farm, and never travelled much further than the Methodist Church in Norsewood.  It was always cold inside, shaded outside by dark green macrocarpas.  Their views were strict Victorian.  I assume Ruth inherited her bitter hatred of people with money, of Catholics, from Jane, who was ‘in service’ before she left Lineham and fell under the spell of the charismatic Methodist preachers.  Ruth and my mother scoffed at people with culture and education, which was somehow corrupting.  (They always said teachers and nurses made bad housekeepers) They valued their independence, and though they never had much money, they always had good food and were able to feed the itinerant men looking for work during the Great Depression.   A large side of bacon always hung high in the pine trees – out of reach of the blowflies – next to the henhouse.    

Jane and Joseph’s descendants have prospered in a small way.  By world standards we are rich and want for nothing. 

I wonder how she and Joseph felt about being forced by circumstance to leave the home country, never to return.  Even though I was born in New Zealand, when I go to England it feels more like home, and culturally, I guess it is. We idealise English culture and tradition, and prefer the houses, the trees, the flowers.  However, we much prefer our egalitarian society, and less reserved natures. I know where my loyalties lie when the All Blacks play!

Tomorrow is an important day in New Zealand history.  Māori are marching in great numbers from the top of the North Island and bottom of the South Island to meet at Parliament, to object to moves to renegotiate the Treaty of Waitangi (with the Crown).  Our relationship, and emotions about our co-existence and land ownership are still not resolved. 

I send greetings to all the villagers, and the surviving relatives of the poor people lost on the Cospatrick.  I hope to visit the Wychwoods again.

Arohanui,

Glenda Lewis

P.S.

I offer you this (to me) very affecting poem by Minnie Louise Haskins, which King George V1 broadcast in 1939, and was framed by my grandparents. It hung on the farmhouse kitchen wall…I once tried to read it to my fellow writing students, but choked and couldn’t utter a single word.

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’

And he replied:

‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’

So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

Agriculture in the Wychwoods over Time

The Society has recorded many details of farming life in the Wychwoods, through its Journal and Album publications, audio recordings, evening talks and member contributions and research. Here we offer a few links to some of this material, recorded here on the Society website.

A Wychwoods Farming Year 1854–55 | From the Archive

Farming Activities and People

Audio Recordings: Life Memories of Rose Burson

Observations on Ridge and Furrow in Honeydale Field | From the Society Journal No. 7

Our February 2024 Evening Talk: The Effect of Enclosures on Common Right

We were pleased to have a presence at the Shipton Fete on Bank Holiday Monday August 26th, and enjoyed a great deal of interest from a steady stream of visitors to our stand.

The model by the late Arthur Ashton of the sailing ship “Cospatrick” attracted much attention – this was the model’s second outing this year after its inclusion on our stand at the Milton Fete last month.

Having the model in place allowed many visitors to our stand to connect with the story of the ship and it’s link to the memorial of Shipton Green. It was certainly a delight to have conversations with several visitors from Australia, who were aware of their family roots from those early days of emigration to the Antipodes.

Our photograph display included some key images of Shipton’s past, featuring also for the first time, a few of the recently digitised scans of a large number of slides from Shipton fetes in the 1950s and 1970s.

Again, we had many conversations around the fashions of the time, and the changes in the layout and function of Shipton Green over the years.

Four hours went swiftly by, and pre-event publicity had made sure of a good attendance. This was a valuable opportunity for us to understand a little more of which aspects of our local history are of the most telling interest to folk in our community. Thank you to all who came to chat with us.