Review of Who Were We? Connecting the lives of a 19th century Dorset community by Andrew Pastor, Village Voices, £14.95 paperback

ON EVERY page of the new Drimpton Village Voices book Who Were We? there’s something that catches the eye. The question that’s asked about cider comes on a page that (I swear) I opened at random.

Page 303 – which records the life of a woman called Susan Jeffery who actually leaves Drimpton in the early 1860s to  live on Ham Hill in Somerset, where Ham Stone comes from. Susan sets herself up as a laundress. ”But of more interest is her growing family,” writer Andrew Pastor notes. By 1880 she has nine sons, but there’s no sign of any husband or live-in partner.

“What should we think? What can we say? Should it matter? It is just that we wonder who the fathers are, for surely there has to be more than one. Were the neighbouring women of Ham Hill at ease with Susan in their midst? Most of them were living conventional lives. They had acquired husbands and most managed to keep them. Among her neighbours in 1871 there had been no single men. Among them in 1881, there were none either.

“Surely, some of the wives must have looked at their husbands and wondered at the very least. These men, stonecutters and masons, were doing heavy, physical work which no doubt helped them work up a thirst. Who knows what a man who has drunk a lot of cider might get up to? Susan, now aged 40, was still attractive – or was she simply welcoming?”

This short section reveals a lot about Who Were We? It is, for a start, a brilliant book – the best local history book I’ve seen for many years. It’s been written by Andrew Pastor, but his use of the first-person plural (What can we say?… we wonder…) isn’t just a stylistic affectation. It reflects the enormous team effort that’s gone into researching this book, and the way that team members have thought about the people whose lives they have been investigating. Census returns (1871, 1881, etc) have provided basic details, supplemented wherever possible by other sources of information (eg, local newspapers, court records, museums…) Where need be, researchers have gone beyond county boundaries (and national borders).

But the key thing about this book is this: researchers have also used their imaginations, to interpret and to speculate and to try to bring people back to life: to reintroduce them to us in a humane and fascinating way. That’s one reason for the book’s subtitle: “Connecting the lives of a 19th century Dorset community”.  That means connecting those lives to us – posing questions to us (What should we think?). It also means seeking to recreate how people’s lives then were connected, even if it’s sometimes difficult or even impossible to work out exactly how they were, as with the puzzles over the identities of Susan Jeffery’s paramours.

Dorset in the 19th century was different. In the video clip coming up, Andrew Pastor pulls out of the quiet surrounding his Drimpton home some of the noise and grind of the past: you can watch the video by clicking on the link in the next line.

Andrew Pastor on YouTube

One of the things Mr Pastor refers to is that Drimpton - which now has just one farm – once had several. The photograph below shows, on the far right, what’s reckoned to be farmer Alfred Ben, dressed up for a wedding in 1902.

It’s a very striking picture, for all sorts of reasons: the whiskers, the top hats, the watch chains, the stillness and self-possession of the two old men, the stiff black shine of the women’s dresses, the almost military assurance of the woman on the left… But they all seem, behind the fence, to know that there’s a barrier between them and the future, whereas the girl in white, not so much in focus in front of the fence, seems ready to step up towards the camera, into the 20th century, towards us. She will grow into better definition; she knows what things were like, and she will seek to make them different again.

I am very grateful to Drimpton Village Voices for permission to reproduce a selection of photographs from Who Were We? Others include an extraordinary picture of 

Netherhay’s oldest resident round about 1908, Ann Hallson, who was then 95. Counting backwards, that means she would have been born during the Napoleonic Wars, in about 1813, before the Battle of Waterloo.

Ann was – it’s thought – a domestic servant, then a flax spooler  at Yarn Barton in Broadwindsor, then a flax winder and a handloom weaver, and then, finally, a pauper. She is listed in the 1881 census as “kept by parish”. Her fortunes fell as those of her neighbours rose. Andrew Pastor notes that her neighbours in Broadwindsor High Street now included “agricultural labourers, of course, but also factory workers, a dairyman, a thatcher, a master baker, a dressmaker, a stonemason, a cordwainer and his shoemaking  apprentice, as well as Police Constable Custard and his family.

“Did Ann smile at the sound of his name?”

Perhaps, in the 1880s, she did, but this picture, remember, was taken circa 1908, by which time Ann had moved to Netherhay, and you wonder – looking at this – what it would take to make her smile now. Her hands seem to retain the memory of decades of hard work – look at her index finger edging forwards – but her face seems closed-up and impassive and her clothes seem to enshroud her.

She had a child, back in the 1830s, but never seems to have married.

Andrew Pastor devotes three pages to her. He writes, finally: “She has made her way through life in a family where the women have looked out for and cared for each other as best they were able to…

“Deprivation and poverty cannot weaken family solidarity. In fact, they may have strengthened it.”

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