A Victorian Rector and Nine Old Maids: 100 Years of Cotswold Village Life

by Michael Boyes (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.26

  Few visitors descending the winding road through the village of Little Rissington on their way to Bourton-on-the-Water are likely to notice the former rectory perched on the brow of a hill beside the path to the church. Yet this was for more than half a century home to a remarkable rector and his extensive family, nine of whom were girls. Amazingly, not one of the Revd Robert Le Marchant's daughters married, but they lived to ripe old age in the little Cotswold village in which their parents had settled in mid-Victorian times. As if this story of the 'nine old maids' were not enough, Michael Boyes' exhaustive research reveals yet more surprises. Robert Le Marchant was a Guernseyman from a leading island family who married Eliza Tupper, also from an illustrious Guernsey line. Robert trained as a doctor and spent three years in the profession before forsaking medicine for the Church. He concerned himself with the welfare of the poor, not only through his charitable work but also as a member of the Stow Board of Guardians responsible for the nearby Union workhouse. He worked alongside Dr Moore, founder of Bourton Cottage Hospital, to combat the scourge of typhoid in Bourton in the 1870s. Fortunately, with patience and persistence, Michael Boyes has tracked down a wealth of letters, diaries, journals and photographs. From these and other records we learn a great deal about the privations of the village people, conditions in the workhouse, life below stairs in the Rectory, the practice of medicine in Victorian times, the growth of organised games, the work of the Church, and of the inflexibility of the social order in which the rector's family - seemingly too hard up to own a pony and trap - were restricted in their dealings with their affluent neighbours. However, it is to the doings of the rector's younger daughters that the reader is especially drawn. They 'disdained the chains of modern society', preferring instead to spend their winter days following the hounds on foot and in summer wandering over the fields in search of birds' nests, butterflies and wild flowers. Spurning their parents' pleas to find themselves suitable husbands, the girls took up energetic sports, and they kept within the Rectory an impressive menagerie, including a troublesome monkey. They read widely and, exploiting their new-found freedom, ventured as far as Cheltenham and Oxford on their bicycles. In later life they traveled regularly to the Continent. Their father died in 1915, aged 95, leaving his daughters sufficiently well off to hire a taxi once a month during the 1930s to take them on a shopping spree to Harrods. Little wonder that elderly villagers still recall the old maids from the Rectory with affection decades after the last surviving sister passed away.