The Salisbury & Dorset Junction Railway was built to consolidate the LSWR's domination of Hampshire and south Dorset, and to keep the GWR away from Bournemouth. It also gave Salisbury businessmen a more direct route to Poole and Weymouth. Almost half of the 18½-mile route was in Dorset, with less than five miles apiece in Wiltshire and Hampshire. Passing through three counties, it traversed contrasting landscapes and served a wide if thinly populated agricultural area.

The water meadows between Downton and Fordingbridge produced cattle, milk and watercress. South-west of Fordingbridge, the clay soil had given rise to brick and tile manufacture centuries before the coming of the railway, enabling these industries to expand and distribute their wares over a much wider area. Year-round passenger traffic on the line was at best erratic, but the line provided a useful diversionary and holiday route.

In the circumstances, it is not surprising that the line became a victim of the Beeching axe in 1964, but since then the population of the towns it served has grown considerably. If it had remained open, the line would now be very useful, particularly for travel to Salisbury and the Bournemouth-Poole conurbation.

Softback: 128 pages with 150 photographs
273 x 215mm, 978-1-905505-19-7, £17.95

Full details are on the Kestrel Railway Books website:
http://www.kestrelrailwaybooks.co.uk

Local History Book

Google may offer millions of books to download on to your PC but you won’t find our history of Downton there. However you can buy the latest CD edition of Downton, 7000 Years of an English Village either at Downton High Street Post Office or the Library.

Costing £7.50 it has most of the original text, updated, and some of the pictures. It is in Microsoft Word 97-2003 (.doc and .jpg)

The purchaser may print one copy for their personal use.

All profits go to the Downton Museum and Archive.

DOWNTON BUILDINGS ARCHIVE

by Richard Nash

The aim of the Downton Buildings Archive website is to record as much information about the buildings and other physical features located within the modern parish of Downton as possible. The site is operated with the agreement of the Downton Museum and Archive, which aims to record, preserve and exhibit various aspects and artefacts of village history.

The initial idea arose when people began to donate photographs, copies of old sales details and other items relating to buildings to the Archive. It was thought that a folder containing this type of information could be made up for public access purposes.

However, there is more information becoming available about the buildings of Downton all the time, and it was therefore decided that a website, which can be changed and added to as and when necessary, would be an appropriate means of presenting this.

In fact, although there are one or two pub stories included, most of the information initially posted on the website has already been published. The donations to the Archive have not yet even been looked at in this respect - I am particularly looking forward to delving into a box of material about The Bull, donated by Sally Scott-Newman.

Many of the newer (by which I mean post war) properties do not have a great deal of information posted as yet. However, I thought it was important to include all of the buildings in the village because, as far as I am concerned, if a house was built on the site of a Roman Villa, the railway or Wick House Estate land, this is equally as interesting as if it were once a shop, a pub or the workhouse.

I would be keen to hear from Downtonians old and new, historians or buildings enthusiasts who may have information, material, photographs, stories – anything of interest really about the items listed. I know there is plenty more out there and I need your help! Please e-mail me if you have any additions, corrections or comments.

DOWNTON'S INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALLER: HAROLD FLEMING (1887-1955)

Contributed by Richard Nash

Harold Fleming was born in Duck Lane Cottages, in the Wick area of Downton, on 30 April 1887. His parents Frederick (a dairyman) and Jane and three elder siblings, Edward, Ellen and Edith, had also all been born in the village. By the time of the 1891 census the family had moved to Short Lane in Andover, and by 1901 to Market Street in Swindon, where Frederick worked as a butcher.

The young Harold was a sporting all rounder, excelling at football, cricket, tennis and golf. He attended Sanford Street School before following his brother Edward to the Great Western Railway Works. He then moved to Warminster to study at the Theological College.

While playing football for his local church team, St Mark’s, Harold was spotted by Swindon Football Club’s secretary/manager Sam Allen and was invited for a trial. Following just one reserve game, in which he scored twice in a 4-0 win over Salisbury, Harold was offered a contract. Seven days later, on 19 October 1907, he made his first team debut against Luton, scoring one goal, creating two others and missing a penalty as Swindon won 4-0 again. Harold finished the season as the club’s top scorer with 17 goals in 30 appearances.

Nominally playing at inside right, Harold was an individualist, who drifted about in the forward line. Ball control and balance were his main attributes. Edgar Dawes, who himself later became a Swindon player, recalled watching him: “He couldn’t head and he couldn’t shoot, but he had the most amazing ball control and body swerve I have ever seen”.

Although the modern descendant of the Southern League has long been a part of football’s ‘non-league’ pyramid, at the time of Harold’s career it was the professional southern equivalent of the Football League, which then only consisted of clubs from the north and midlands. The Swindon club was therefore playing in an Edwardian version of today’s Premier League.

By kind permission of
'Robins Remembered'

Harold was to help the club to two Southern League championships and two FA Cup semi-finals. In the second of these, against Barnsley in 1912, he was subjected to some rough treatment, culminating in a keen to the groin. The Daily Express justly, if rather pompously, complained that “to stop a clever opponent by maiming him is not football as understood in the south”.

Harold was so badly injured that not only did he miss the end of the match, and a replay, but was out of action for a full ten months. Because of this he was unable to play in Swindon’s close season tour of Uruguay and Argentina, although he gained a reputation as an after dinner speaker at the many banquets the club were invited to.

During World War I, Harold served as a physical training instructor based in Cambridge where, in 1918, he married fellow Swindonian Grace Haskins. Grace’s father Walter was a boot manufacturer and with his help Harold later produced his own design of football boot, which he sold at a sports shop he had taken on in Swindon’s Regent Circus. Grace and Harold had one child, a daughter named Meriel, born in 1920.

After the war was over Harold continued playing for Swindon, including in the club’s first ever Football League match, scoring four goals in a 9-1 victory over Luton in 1920. He also played regularly for the Southern League representative team. He eventually retired in 1924, by which time he had scored 202 goals in 295 appearances for Swindon.

England also benefited from Harold’s skills. He actually played eleven times for his country but caps were not awarded for matches against continental opposition at that time, reducing his official total to nine. Even so, given the limited number of international matches played at the time, this was quite an impressive total.

Harold’s greatest day perhaps came in 1912, when he scored a hat-trick against Ireland. In all, he scored nine goals for his country and had it not been for World War I, would undoubtedly have made many more appearances. To this day he remains the only man to have represented England at full international level whilst playing for Swindon.

Although Harold had initially considered entering the Church, football caused him to abandon this idea, but he remained a devout Christian throughout his life and refused to play on Sundays, Good Fridays or Christmas Days (a full programme of matches was regularly played on 25 December until well into the 1950s). Following his retirement he remained a popular figure around Swindon and in the late 1940s and early 1950s contributed a series of articles to the football club’s annual handbook. He also represented Wiltshire at Minor Counties Cricket.

Harold died on 23 August 1955 at the age of 68. Meriel Fleming never married and continued to run her father’s shop after his death. She died at the age of 71 in 1992.

In April 2005 a collection of Harold’s medals came up for auction at Bonhams in Chester. Following a public appeal for funds, six of the medals were purchased by Swindon Town Football Club for a total of £4000. Overall the auction raised £13491, more than double the estimate of £5000. A further Bonhams auction held in Chester in March 2007 saw three of Harold’s England caps (awarded for matches against Wales in 1910 and 1913 and Scotland in 1914) sold for £540 each.

Harold Fleming is one of the greatest players in Swindon’s history. He is remembered in the name of a street in the town, Fleming Way, which runs from the County Ground (the football club’s home stadium) to the County Hotel. He has also been immortalised in a bronze statue by local sculptor Carlton Attwood, which stands in the foyer at the County Ground.

The inscription to the statue reads: ‘To the inspiring memory of Harold Fleming, the great footballer and gentleman, who played for Swindon Town between 1907-24, and was capped nine times for England'.

BBC Wiltshire have unearthed some footage of Harold Fleming. If you would like to view it click here.

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