Colerne From 1916

A Memory of Colerne.

My grandparents lived in Colerne, my mother Minnie Louise Rowe was born there around the 1880s and my father William Simpkins lived in Colerne with the Aust family from when he was a baby. I was born in Bath in Kingsmead Road in a nursing home, we used to visit my grandmother Rowe in Colerne, she lived in Rose Cottage. In Colerne's High street on the Bath end was a very small shop and on the right side of it was an alleyway which led to my grandmother's garden. The cottage was on the left, and the toilet which was a bucket-style toilet was on the right. This was used for fertilising the garden, and helped grow a wonderful patch of rhubarb which we ate stewed or in pies when we went to visit. She also had several apple trees which we used to harvest.

The next cottage down from my grandmother was lived in by a little old man about 5' 4" called Ike Tanner who was considerably older than my grandmother.

Further down the High Street on the left hand side, set back from the road, was a pub, I can't remember its name, the licensee was my mother's uncle and his name was Frank Gaisford. My mother worked there for a while as a barmaid before I was born. Frank had at least 2 sons, Frank and Tom, Frank ran the pub with his father, Tom was a wheelwright with a yard in Avon Street, Bath, his wife was called Annie and they lived in Vernon Park, Twerton. During the First World War, whilst my father was fighting in France, just after I was born, my mother and I lived with them and my mother worked for the Bath Gas Company in the accounts department

Further down the High Street on the right hand side was a lane which led down to a cottage where one of my aunts, Ginny Knight, lived and I only remember her as a big gangly woman. Opposite her on the other side of the lane lived my mother's brother and his wife, Uncle Tom and Aunty Linda Rowe, they had a son called Victor about the same age as me who I played with when we visited. He was gassed during the Second World War which gave him pulmonary trouble and finally died of lung problems in Bristol in the 1950s.

We used to go occassionly to a smallholding about a mile or so outside Colerne. We'd go down the High Street to the Church and turn right onto a track and the Walmsleys lived there, I don't know if they were relatives or not although it seemed to me at the time that everyone was related to each other.

My mother had another brother, Frank Rowe (possibly a carpenter). He lived on the opposite side of the road to my grandmother, slightly closer to Bath, he had five children, the only one I can remember was called Betty who was about a year older than me so would have been born about 1914 or 1915. She married and went to live on the south coast, possibly Plymouth.

I can remember wandering around the churchyard in Colerne and when my sister Judy (Deane) died, my parents paid for a 3 person grave site and Judy was buried there. I think my father William is also buried there but not my mother. I don't know exactly where she was buried as I had emigrated to Australia and my sister Joyce organised her funeral.

My mother's other brothers were called Jude and Edgar. Jude was a wanderer, he liked cycling and he announced that he was going to cycle to London and that was the last they heard of him until the 1960s when my mother had a letter from his wife in Birmingham to say he had just died. She had discovered after he died that he came from Colerne and had an extended family. Jude turned out to be the managing director of Rolls Royce. Edgar, for whom I was named, was Minnie's youngest brother and when my father came back from the war, he went into partnership with Edgar, who had also been in the services and they bought a market garden at St Catherine's in Bath. Eventually their partnership ended and they both opened seperate shops in Bath.

When I visited Colerne as a child, the only sealed road that I can remember was the main Bath Road, High Street, all the other roads were tracks.

I can remember going with my father by train to Corston and walking the rest of the way to Colerne across country with my father stopping to tickle trout in a stream we were following. He caught about 4 of them. We climbed a hill towards Colerne and stopped at a horse trough. I remember putting the now dead trout in the trough and trying to get them to swim. Then we went on up the hill and eventually came to the Aust's cottage on the Bath road just outside Colerne where my father was always treated like a long lost son. We gave them the trout which they cooked and we all feasted on them. They had a dry wall running alongside the Bath road from which we collected snails, cooked them on the open fire in their cottage and ate them.

About Me
After the Second World War, I moved to Portishead and then Bristol and eventually emigrated by yacht to Australia in 1968 which we have documented in a blog.

---

---