Tales from the Test Valley

This is just one of many stories he has researched and published over the past 44 years on the Sombornes (Kings, Little and Up). They now total no less than 108 separate pieces – and there are others in the pipeline.

It all started in the late 1970s when, after an early career in various locations – including three years in Borneo – he and his wife settled for a charming cottage in Kings Somborne. By profession a chartered quantity surveyor, he was working in the HCC Architect’s Department and had special responsibility for the conservation of old buildings. He is the author of Conservation of Clay and Chalk Buildings, published in 1992.

Like many an incomer he wanted to learn more about where he had chosen to live and went to evening talks by Kevin Stubbs, director of the Test Valley Archaeological Trust and instigator of the Lower Test Valley Archaeological Study Group, alias the Romsey History Society.

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The talks had been set up following enormous interest raised locally by the discovery of a Saxon grain dryer when a pipeline for natural gas between Southampton and Lincolnshire was being laid through Little Somborne.

At the end of the evening sessions, in 1978, Kevin suggested that they set up a local group and so the Somborne & District Society (SDS) was born, with Paul Marchant as chairman and eight others including Gordon on a steering committee.

The obvious hunger for finding out more about the area was demonstrated with the very first meeting, which attracted an audience of 60. Talks and visits on a variety of subjects were arranged, including one to the nearby Chilbolton observatory which Gordon remembers as “a weird experience as we all stood on the huge dish – and it moved”.

After a while the SDS Newsletter (more of a journal that a newsletter) was published as a quarterly and it is in this – which has now clocked up 171 editions – that a vast number of articles on the locality have been published, many by Gordon.

Back issues can be found in the Hampshire Record Office (reference PER457), whilst Kings Somborne is fortunate in having an almost complete run of its parish magazine from 1895.

In 1989, eleven years after it had started, SDS published Celebrating Somborne edited by Paul Marchant, reprinted in 2007 (available from 01794 389034). Written by a large number of contributors, it covers many aspects of the past, including links with John of Gaunt, the Andover-Redbridge canal, the eminent educationalist Richard Dawes, the Southampton to Andover railway of 1865 and much else.

It made great use of 650 or more items in the Edwards Papers held by the Hampshire Record Office (ref. 2M37). Amongst other things, these tell the story of Compton Manor, which much later was owned for more than 40 years by the pioneer the aviator Sir Thomas Sopwith until his death at the age of 101 in January 1989.

From small beginnings, SDS has therefore flourished and currently has a membership of 120, with meetings attracting audiences of as many as 70.

The articles written by Gordon cover a huge range of topics. They include the great gale of 1930, the arrival of the telephone in 1920 (the vicar was given the number 1), a local attempted murder of 1909 (albeit with a toy gun), the Iremonger family of blacksmiths, the first council houses and the air show of 1934 put on by Alan Cobham's Flying Circus.

On a local arsonist, he said: “In 1887 there was a serious fire at the Manor of Somborne Regis, owned by Magdalen College [Oxford] for many centuries. The house was restored and still stands, with timbers dating from1301. An arsonist faced charges, but he was acquitted as he said he was drunk and asleep at the time of the fire.

“King Somborne’s greatest fire was in 1895 and involved the barn at Garlic Farm, now known as Hoplands. Described by the press as ‘one of Hampshire's biggest barns’, it was a total loss.”

Other subjects include King Somborne’s proposed bypass of 1938, parish epidemics, a celebrated local tailor Charlie Reeves and Richard Wake a local pioneering North American colonist. Also covered is the local village band, which started in the early 1880s – in fact, there were two bands, one affiliated to the temperance movement and the other not adverse to a drink or three! After WWI they joined together but only played on until about 1920.

Like many local history groups, SDS has known moments when remarkable finds were made. An eighteenth century map of the entire village in colour with much detail turned up in a house in St James Terrace, Winchester, and formed the subject of another of Gordon’s articles. It is now held by HRO.

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His booklet Winton Cottage and the Goffe Family was based on finds in Leicestershire, where the family had moved. It describes in great detail the story of a house which first appears on William Godson’s map of 1734. The original dwelling was built of pulverised chalk with a thatched roof and destroyed in a fire in 1856. Eight years later a nearby coachman’s cottage was converted into a new house. It’s a story – all too familiar – of builder’s underestimates and changes of plan but eventually led to the basis of the existing house.

As well as a succession of ‘builders’ tales’, the booklet charts four generations of the Goffe family, starting with the yeoman father of the successful Winchester grocer and wine merchant, Edward Goffe, who in about 1865 moved with his family from the city into the the new house.

It soon became a bourgeois household in a country village, with a piano, oil paintings, a packed book-case and chintz curtains. His son and grandson were also named Edward, the first becoming an architect and the second owning a shop at 102 High Street, Southampton, specialising in typewriters. It was destroyed in the 1940 blitz.

The grandson was also a keen entomologist, with a special interest in diptera (two-winged flies). His letters on the subject are held by the library of the Royal Entomological Society and his specimens by Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Gordon said: “When I tracked down the material in Leicestershire – my home county – I thought I would be able to go through it in an hour or two, but there was so much that the owners had to winnow it out over a period of about 18 months! It was an enormous effort, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and it probably gave me more pleasure than anything else.”

Another of his projects led to Up Somborne and Rookley, a book of more than 200 pages published in 2016, charting in enormous detail the history of a small rural community.

After 44 years, Gordon is still full of ideas. He said: “I’m never short of subjects to write about. I find it very relaxing doing the research in the winter evenings.”

For more on the Sombornes, visit: www.thesombornes.org.uk. For more on Hampshire, visit: www.hampshirearchivestrust.co.uk and www.hantsfieldclub.org.uk.

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Kimberley Barber