In March of 1898 Mary Huxley brought two of her sons to be baptised at the Church of St John the Baptist, Wickhamford. She did this on separate days, the 8th and 29th, and in the Baptismal Register there is no father’s name and, against both entries, is recorded “Married woman living apart from her husband”. The first child was given the name “Albert Huxley” and the second was entered as “Richard Hardiman Huxley”.
Elizabeth Huband was baptised in Wickhamford on 30th June 1799. She married twice and had four children by each husband. She emigrated to Australia in 1855 and died in Brisbane in 1876.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, Wickhamford Manor was occupied by a branch of the Holland family of Cropthorne. At that time the Manor was usually referred to as Manor Farm.
Dr H. L. Heath lived in a house on the top of north side of Longdon Hill in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a General Practitioner and Surgeon working from premises in Bengeworth and practised in Evesham from 1926 to 1948.
Harry Leslie Heath’s paternal grandfather was Thomas Heath who was recorded in the 1871 census as living in Oldbury Road, Harborne. He worked as a commercial traveller in wines and spirits. With his wife, Henrietta Letitia, he had three children by this date – Harry Edwin, aged 4, Amy Florence, aged 3 and one-year-old Beatrice.
Norris Haines, often known by the nickname ‘Buckley’, was a chauffeur and gardener to the Lees-Milne family of Wickhamford Manor and then Hody’s Place. He worked for the family from 1906 until Helen Lees-Milne’s death in 1962.
The Lees-Milne family lived at Wickhamford Manor during the early twentieth century. James Lees-Milne (1908 - 1997) was a writer with a special interest in historic houses. From 1936 to 1950 he worked for the National Trust and played a key role in the first large-scale transfer of country houses from private ownership to the National Trust.
This collection of pictures was kindly lent to us by Simon Lees-Milne and by June and Jeremy Ryan-Bell.
In 1913, only nine days apart, two sisters by the name of Moulbery were married in Wickhamford Church. An older sister had been married in the Evesham area in 1906, and all three were to live in the village for some time. Researching the background of this family has been difficult due to numerous alternative spellings of the surname over the period 1825 to 1915. In this article, for simplicity, the spelling MOULBERY will be used throughout, but with the version used at the time in parentheses.
George Percy Watson Osler was born in Brockenhurst, Hampshire in mid-1883, the son of Frank Watson Osler and his wife, Bessie. According to the 1891 census, Frank Osler was living on his own means and ten years later his son was a pupil at a boarding school at Steep, near Petersfield. In the 1901 census he was recorded at the school as ‘Percy Osler’.
For a short time between the 1871 and 1881 censuses Wickhamford Manor was rented to farmer John Phillipps and his family. The surname spelling, with two final ‘p’s is unusual, but helpful in tracing the family.
In the late 19th century, Wickhamford Manor was owned by the Trustees of the late John Pickup Lord and rented out to tenant farmers. The property was operated as a farm with a range of buildings at the back of the Manor around a large yard. Between the Manor and the Churchyard was a large stone barn. The outbuildings around the Manor were demolished at the end of the 19th century, but would have been in situ when the Pope families were in residence at the Manor.
