Bøger udgivet af John Owen Smith

Walk in the footsteps of Sir Robert Hunter, co-founder of The National Trust, over Hindhead Common and around Waggoners Wells. Plus a short history of The National Trust's acquisitions at the west of The Weald

Flora Thompson has become known almost exclusively as the author of 'Lark Rise to Candleford'. These nature notes, written in the 1920s while she lived in Liphook, Hampshire, predate that work by more than a decade and show many of the characteristics which were to emerge later in her more famous work.

When a railway line opened in 1859, cutting through the hills of south-west Surrey on its way from London to Portsmouth, it presented an enticing new possibility. Now professional people could choose to live among heather-covered hilltops, with their wide views and wholesome air, while still having access to the facilities of the capital, only an hour and a half away by train from Haslemere. Many did so, following the example of the poet laureate himself, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In this book, rich in detail and yet thoroughly readable, Bob Trotter tells of sixty-five other writers who chose to populate the hilltops around Haslemere and Hindhead in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

n the mid-nineteenth century men, women and even children were being transported to other British Colonies for crimes as diverse as stealing a loaf of bread and murder. In 1831, men from the village of Selborne in Hampshire were shipped off to Australia for their part in the Swing riots, and eighteen years later, in 1849, another resident followed. Ellen Heath was sentenced to death for attempting to poison her husband. This was reduced to transportation for life, but how harsh was her life to be, sent away with her baby daughter from family and the only life she knew? This is her story ...

When Canadian troops arrived in Great Britain during the Second World War, they were given quarters in old, cold, damp barracks buildings in the military town of Aldershot. For these young men thousands of miles from home, and in many cases away from their families for the first time, it was a depressing experience.Imagine their joy then, when they found their next station in England was not another military camp, but a charming rural village with pubs, girls, dances - and a welcome for them from the local population.All Tanked Up is the story of their benign 'invasion' of a Hampshire village over a period of four years, told from the point of view of both Villagers and Canadians.For those to whom 'Peace in our Time' came too late.

In 'Lark Rise To Candleford' and 'Heatherley' Flora Thompson wrote the story of her Victorian country childhood and her youth in village post offices. She was sixty when she wrote her well-known books but she had spent a lifetime serving her apprenticeship as a naturalist and a writer. This biography tells the story of her life and her struggles as a writer. Flora Thompson's books opened windows on to the lost world of the hamlet, the village and small country towns.

Philip Brooks mastered the intricacies of medieval Latin to translate the contents of the Winchester Pipe Rolls, and in this book he opens our eyes to the rich source of information found in the medieval and Tudor records. Having had first-hand experience of using traditional farming techniques he is particularly well-informed on agricultural matters. This knowledge has given him a remarkable insight into the world of ox plough teams, hand-sown crops and a community whose very survival was dependent on the produce of the land.Essential reading for local historians and anyone with an interest in how our ancestors really lived.

This is the first in a series of publications through which we intend to illustrate the history of the parish of Headley from different perspectives. In this book, we show some of the buildings, locations and features which have defined the character of the parish up to the middle of the twentieth century. In this book you are taken on a tour of the parish by means of three journeys -the first around the centre of Headley and Arford, the second to Headley Down and beyond, and the third along the River Wey and its tributaries. In doing so, we venture occasionally outside today's civil parish boundaries-but that too is all part of the history of Headley. Further information on the history of Headley may be found on the Internet at website www.headley-village.com/history/

Surrey is a lovely county in which to live-and write. Down the ages, writers of all kinds have sung its praises, and used it as a setting for everything from romantic entanglements to alien invasions. Jacqueline Banerjee is fascinated by the appearance of familiar scenes in their work, and by the whole impact of place on the literary imagination. She encourages us to look again (or perhaps for the first time) at these authors and the beautiful local places that inspired them, and to see them both with fresh eyes. Each chapter has helpful suggestions about how to do our own literary detective work, whether by "reading on," or by exploring the Surrey countryside for ourselves.

Nowadays, when sleep doesn't come readily, I close my eyes and go back over sixty-five years to County Cavan ... I see myself with a bucket in each hand, go through the gate where the cows stand waiting to be brought in for milking. I tread carefully on the seven stepping stones Dad put there so we need not walk in the mud. Past the big puddle with the blue clay streak where we shaped cups and saucers for our wee house. Past the patch of cowslips and over the style into the castle meadow. The grass is longer here, and I search for trembling-grass which, no matter how still the day, shakes and sparkles with a life of its own. Through the old iron gate and into the bluebell wood, with the eggtree hedge on one side. I stop to pop a few of the large white berries between finger and thumb, and suddenly I come out into the sunshine.... I never get as far as the well, because peaceful sleep has overtaken me-it's better than a sleeping pill any day. Jessie Woodger (neé McMahon) was born in 1923 close to where Co. Cavan meets Fermanagh - an area which is now border country between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Here she speaks of the quieter times in which her family still farmed 45 acres after four generations on the land-and of the irreversible changes brought upon them by separation during two world wars.

The author has turned detective. In this book, he discovers the true identities behind the pseudonyms which Flora Thompson employed within her writing to hide the identity of the people and places she encountered 'beyond Candleford Green.'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw were two among many eminent people who were regular customers in her post office at Grayshott-unaware that the shy young lady sending their telegrams would one day rank alongside themselves on literary shelves.But the lesser-known characters also lend their own interest to the story. Who was 'Mr Foreshaw, ' the retired big-game hunter with whom she had tea on Sunday afternoons? And 'Richard Brownlow, ' the young man who met her often, then told her he 'could never marry her'? And 'Bob Pikesley' who taught her how to keep dry in a rainstorm? And the bright-eyed 'Alma Stedman' who kept Flora from 'brooding'?And who was the unfortunate 'Mr Hertford, ' her employer at Grayshott, who eventually stabbed his wife to death shortly after Flora left the village?These and other riddles are answered. There is also a 'lost' chapter of Flora's own work published here for the first time, and the opportunity to follow literally in Flora's footsteps by taking the suggested 'trails' through the Hampshire countryside she came to love so well.

When, as a young girl in County Cavan, the author wanted to have an excuse to give to her mother when she came home from her ramblings, she would tell her, "I've just been over to Connolly's." The Connollys didn't exist-they were an invention of young Jessica's fertile imagination. So, when she came to write her first novels, what better than to make them come to life? In Connolly's Pass, we begin to follow the story of Rosie Connolly. After the tragic death of her husband, she sets about raising her six children in a small Irish village, with her pride in their achievements overshadowed only by the involvement of one of them in the Provisional IRA. In The Connolly Connection, we renew our acquaintance with Rosie Connolly and her family, following them on through bad times and good. These heart-warming stories are told with great charm, and vividly capture the conventions and beliefs of a closely-knit rural community.

These two plays, written by a local historian, tell the story of the Lark Rise to Candleford author in the days before she became famous. In Flora's Heatherley we see her in Grayshott (her Heatherley) at the age of 21 taking the position of sub-postoffice assistant, and staying for two and a half years. She arrived as a young, gauche, country girl, and passed "from foolish youth to wicked adolescence" in the village. She drew disapproval by associating with 'strange' men, and walking for miles alone on the surrounding heaths, and felt more at home having tea with a retired 'big-game' hunter, or learning about local wildlife from a cowman on the common, than walking decorously up and down the village street with the other village girls. The theme of this play is essentially about the conventions of the period, particularly with respect to courtship and marriage, and Flora's difficulty in conforming to them. In Flora's Peverel we see her as a married lady with a husband and children of her own, hoping, against the odds, to "win the fight to write." The Thompsons stayed in Liphook (her Peverel) for twelve years, during which time their third child was born and Flora started to write more seriously than she had before. As a wife and mother she is still battling against the conventions of the day, and her husband's implied criticism of her aspirations to be regarded as an author.

It is not easy to record the history of a parish in a consistent manner, let alone to give an understandable picture of its progress through the centuries. Some information is no longer available, some is inconsistent, some is incomprehensible to the modern eye and mind, and always there is the feeling that such facts as we have are a mere snapshot, and a fairly random one at that, of fragments of the full picture. So we must take our hats off to Canon Tudor Jones who, at the end of his 30-year incumbency as rector of Headley, sat down to write Headley 1066-1966, which is still the nearest we have to a complete history of our parish. The 'some other lover of Headley' who he hoped would 'one day make good' his document has not arrived, or at least has not yet dared to embark on such an exhaustive task. However, the arrival of computers and the worldwide web, which 'TJ' could never have envisaged, has given us the means to bring the particulars and anecdotes of the parish to an ever wider audience in new ways-and while these may not always have the benefit of the same studied learning and deliberation which Tudor Jones brought to his work, they do offer a vast storehouse of facts, figures and images to which he had no ready access. They include tales and photographs sent to us from the four corners of the world by descendants of Headley people who have discovered their roots here using the 'new technology.' Also we have information transcribed from public records now available to be retrieved by all at the mere 'click of a mouse.' In this book you will find the contents of Canon Tudor Jones' book faithfully reproduced, with just the occasional footnote or editorial comment added by me where it seemed appropriate. Following on, I have added as a second section all the articles previously published in the six volumes of Headley Miscellany which were produced annually by The Headley Society from 1999-2005. It now replaces these six booklets-not only a more convenient way of buying the set, but also slightly cheaper. I hope you enjoy your excursion into Headley's history.

For 700 years the small isolated community in the Wey valley at Shottermill was a corner of industry. By the end of the nineteenth century there had existed six watermills which over the years had been used for operations as diverse as corn milling, fulling, iron working, and in particular sickle making, leather dressing, and paper and military braid making. On surrounding commons 'broom-makers' used the natural products of the heathland to manufacture besoms for sale as far afield as London, while yeoman farmers and their descendants used the better land for livestock and arable crops. This second volume on the history of Shottermill covers the period from the appearance of the Simmons family of paper makers in the 1700s to the early twentieth century when it became part of Haslemere. A first volume covers the history of Shottermill from the earliest days through the times of plague, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Civil War to the decline of the local iron industry in the 1700s.

For 700 years the small isolated community in the Wey valley at Shottermill was a corner of industry. By the end of the nineteenth century there had existed six watermills which over the years had been used for operations as diverse as corn milling, fulling, iron working, and in particular sickle making, leather dressing, and paper and military braid making. On surrounding commons 'broom-makers' used the natural products of the heathland to manufacture besoms for sale as far afield as London, while yeoman farmers and their descendants used the better land for livestock and arable crops. This first volume on the history of Shottermill covers the period from the earliest days through the times of plague, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Civil War to the decline of the local iron industry in the 1700s. A second volume covers the history of Shottermill from the appearance of the Simmons family of paper makers in the 1700s to the early twentieth century when it became part of Haslemere.

Written to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Grayshott Civil Parish in 1978, this book tells the history of the village from its earliest beginnings as a minor hamlet of Headley to its status as a fully independent parish flourishing on (and across) the borders of Hampshire and Surrey.

This is the story of one of Australia's Pioneer Women, who spent most of her life in the gold fields of Bendigo.In 1841, aged only 19, Ellen Suter fled poverty and squalor in the back-streets of Portsmouth and set off alone to live in the new colony of Victoria on the other side of the world.In Melbourne, she met and married James Read, a settler from Ipswich, Suffolk, more than twenty years her senior. Over the next 20 years she bore him fourteen children, only five of whom survived.Her story has been pieced together from the accidental discovery of seven letters written between 1853 and 1875 to her brother, William Suter, a papermaker in Headley, Hampshire.