We are fairly sure this is the 1960s but we have very limited information on this Market Lavington School photo.
An infant class at Market Lavington School with Mrs Elisha in charge
Mrs Elisha is at the back – right end. She retired in 1968.
The only captions with the photo say ‘Front row, 3rd from left – Withers’ Also ‘4th from left S Ayliffe’.
The venue is definitely outside Market Lavington School.
Once again we hope our readers can tell us more.
Here we have a photo of a group of men from the Congregational Church sitting down to a meal together.
Dinner treat for Congregational men in about 1965-70
We think the photo dates to between 1963 and 1972 and we believe that the location is The Manse.
The men were clearly being looked after by four waitresses.
It looks as though the photo was taken just before the chaps started tucking in to their starters. It looks as though they had a choice – typical of the period – of grapefruit or prawn cocktail.
We know who some of the men are and we’ll start with the chap nearest us on the left and work round clockwise.
Harry Hobbs
Not Known
Bill Askey
Not Known
Dave Burt
Pastor Bertram Powner
Dickie Burt
V Sainsbury
Not Known
Not Known
Not Known
Not Known
We do not have any names for the women.
Do let us know if you can name any of the people or can tell us the occasion.
We have recently acquired this postcard which we believe was taken by Peter Francis, probably from his upstairs window which was above his Church Street shop. The picture, however, shows the crossroads and High Street.
Along Market Lavington High Street in the 1960s
Let’s start on the left.
Here we have what had become the Post Office. Oh dear! The Parsonage Lane sign was falling off.
Let’s hope it was quickly refixed.
It looks as though A R Rees had the shop. The Stop sign is actually for the end of Parsonage Lane. In those days, with no Grove Road, Parsonage Lane had to cater for traffic in both directions.
Looking a little further up the street – we think it says Little on what closed as the Newsagent last year and we can clearly see that Lloyds Bank were in business as well.
It’s just possible that people might be recognised.
Looking a bit further round, we’ll start with that light – a single street lamp suspended over the middle of the cross roads. Beneath it, the car looks like a 1950s built Austin. We can see that the Agricultural Engineers had removed the buildings on the corner of the Market Place and we also see a Midland Bank sign on the next building. There is also a Walls ice cream sign there. A Pepsi sign adorns the corner of Chapel Lane.
A couple of girls with a dog are just rounding the corner onto White Street. It’s possible they could be recognised.
What a great picture of Market Lavington High Street about 50 years ago.
Today we look at a photo which shows houses on Canada Rise nearing completion.
Building Canada Rise – circa 1968
A group of workers chat about what the next task should be.
Workers and their vehicles
The two vehicles nearest the camera both carry an F registration plate which means they were registered between August 1967 and July 1968. Scary to think that is almost 50 years ago.
These days, of course, the houses all look mature, with settled gardens. Quite a few have sprouted extensions but they still look solid and dependable.
These days we think of Northbrook as a road to nowhere. It’s a road that goes out of the back of the Market Place, down to the stream also called Northbrook and then up to the sands where it just stops. Footpaths radiate off in at least five directions from the end of the road. Probably, in days when most movement was on foot, Northbrook was as main a road as any other. This picture is well into fairly recent history.
Northbrook in the late 1960s
The location here is still clear although there are many changes. The photographer was on the high footpath parallel to the road but keeping pedestrians away from it as they walk away from the Market Place.
The date is open to a bit of speculation but we put it at the second half of the 1960s. One good bit of dating evidence is the Ford Anglia Car – one of those with the oddly sloped back window. These were manufactured between 1959 and 1968. But we also turn to our old friends TV aerials for help. The cottages near that car appear to have 625 lines aerials. BBC2 was the first station broadcast in 625 lines. It went on air in 1964. However, other houses have 405 lines TV aerials. Colour TV started – only on 625 lines – in 1967 and a big royal event, the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 persuaded huge numbers of people to get the new technology. So dating by TV aerials gives us between 1964 and 1969 for this photo.
At the top of the hill we have the Northbrook houses up on the sands including Northbrook Close.
Northbrook Close
In the foreground on the left are some semi-demolished cottages. Northbrook was once lined with small cottages most of which had gone by the time this photo was taken – but interesting to note those remains.
Demolished cottge remains on the side of Northbrook
In the middle distance we can just make out the Tudor Cottage although it has a tree in front of it.
The Tudor cottage is just visible
Tommy Burden lived there at this time. His Wilts CC lorry is recognisable.
Lavington had a railway station. It was by the bridge which the A360 road uses to get under the line. The road has traffic lights to control the road traffic under that bridge.
A station was more than a halt. Stations had facilities including the ability to handle parcels and, often, freight. Lavington had both. Parcels were handled on passenger trains, but a yard and sidings were needed for larger items of freight. This included milk at Lavington. This photo of the station was taken from the goods yard. It was taken in the 1960s, not long before closure.
Lavington Station from the goods yard in the 1960s
The goods shed is on the left with the main running lines passing behind it. We can’t tell you anything specific about the carriage and guard’s van on the right. Back then, many goods trains were made up of wagons with no brakes. The guard, in his heavy van, was part of the driving team. He needed to know when the line was going uphill or down dale so that he could apply his brake to keep the troublesome trucks in order. That’s why a guard’s van is often called a brake van.
Further into the picture we can see there was a coal storage area.
Davis and Co had the coal yard
We can see that Davis and Co made use of a coal yard at the station. They were the Market Lavington coal merchants.
We can also see the impact steam trains had on infrastructure. Look at the blackened paintwork on the station footbridge. That’s filth from steam engines on London bound trains.
The telegraph pole with, potentially about fifty wires is also a reminder of times past. Such sets of wires often made use of railway line sides and so a view from a carriage window was often of wires.
This is living memory, but methods of working fifty years ago seem impossibly outdated now.
The Old School was built in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. No doubt its three classrooms seemed perfectly adequate then. Class sizes could be huge and pupils sat at their desks all day.
But times changed. School leaving ages were successively raised up to 15 which meant more pupils had to be housed. Curricula got more adventurous too and that required more space. Over the years some classes were farmed out to other buildings and then, when the old school house became available, the school moved into it. Part of it became the space for arts and crafts and that’s what we see children doing here.
Arts and crafts in the old school house in about 1963. This is now the kitchen in the museum.
On the left we see a lad painting a castle keep. A girl behind him also has a paintbrush in hand. At the back, the lad in jeans with the big turn ups is wielding a drill whilst the lad on the right is sawing.
On the back wall some shelves are filled with sailing yachts and other boats. The windowsill appears to have a small motorbike engine on it.
We think this photo dates from about 1963.
This room had once been the kitchen when the room was a house. These days it is our kitchen display room at the museum.
The presence of Lavington Hill and Salisbury Plain is a draw for photographers, keen to get what looks like an aerial view of Market Lavington. This one dates from the 1960s so is fifty years old now.
Market Lavington from the Downs – 1960s
This would be taken from somewhere near where the reservoir is now. We can see the road down Lavington Hill wending downwards from near the bottom left corner. The village itself looks distant and is not amazingly distinct. We can make out St Mary’s church near the left.
The village and the church
Perhaps most interesting is the farm trailer on the recently cultivated strip.
The trailer on the hill
This now has the look of something from past times, which, indeed, it is. A small two wheeled trailer is laden with small bales of the kind that a single person can manhandle. The load looks like hay but these days that area is always arable so it is more likely straw. For comparison let’s look at a bit of May 2015 grass cutting.
2015 farming – poles apart from the methods of the 1960s
A huge 4 wheel drive tractor is travelling at high speed (20 mph?) through a field being cut for silage. It cuts a huge swathe on each pass. One cutter is in front of the tractor and two others are to the side and behind. The tractor cab roof bristles with lamps. A field of several acres is cut in a quarter of an hour. This would all be beyond the imagination of the 1960s farmer.
The photo we see today was taken by former Market Lavington resident, John Brooke. John lived at 10 Parsonage Lane also known by its original purpose as the Racquets Court.
It’s a tall building and offers something of a bird’s eye view over part of the village. The photo dates from the 1960s.
A view from Number 10, Parsonage Lane in the 1960s
We are looking along Parsonage Lane, over the crossroads and then up onto Lavington Hill.
You may wonder why Parsonage Lane is so called. The answer is that the Parsonage used to occupy the space where numbers 6 and 8 now stand. For reasons not known, but the subject of many rumours, the Pleydell Bouverie family decided to demolish the old Parsonage and replace it with the pair of semi-detached houses seen in this photo. The rather Tudor style chimneys on these 19th century homes is a good local sign to indicate ‘built by the Manor folk – the Pleydell Bouveries’.
The lovely piece of topiary had originally been the work of Edwin Potter. We note that in this high summer picture it casts a deep shadow on the next door house. These days the topiary has grown out but the same tree or a replacement will still cast those shadows. Both gardens look beautifully maintained.
Further down and on the right side of the photo we see the thatched cottage. That’s still retains its thatched roof.
Looking along Parsoange Lane
Beyond we can see parts of White Street and up onto Lavington Hill.
Now that’s a quality colour photo for the time it was taken.
There was a photographer’s shop in Market Lavington for about 100 years. Originally Alf Burgess and then his sons had premises almost next to the co-op. When Peter and Bessie Francis set up their business it was on Church Street and it is those premises we look at today.
Bessie Francis stands outside the photography shop on Church Street in this 1960s view
Here we see the premises some 50 years ago. Bessie stands at the door of quite substantial premises which, apart from the shop contained a portrait studio and the darkroom with all its equipment. Peter and Bessie were, of course, photographers as well as shop keepers. They lived over the premises.
The door between the two windows looks absurdly small which may remind us that people are much taller on average, now, than they were even 100 years ago.
The impression from this photo is of a vibrant and thriving business.
By the time the Francis duo retired and sold the business, the writing was probably on the wall for a shop of this kind in a village and not surprisingly the shop closed down leaving the premises as more of a private house. And so this is the 21st century view of the premises.
The same premises in the 21st century
In truth, it still looks much the same and the windows certainly indicate its former shop status. In some ways the buildings either side which we can see have changed more.
These days, of course we are all happy mass snappers with a multi-purpose phone/camera/music player. We do not need experts to help us process our pictures or a regular supply of photographic film. Oddly, in these days of truly mass photography, shops selling equipment for this near universal hobby have all but vanished. If we want equipment we probably research on the internet to find what we want, or maybe make use of a hypermarket or superstore.
Times, inevitably, change.
Market Lavington Museum 