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Iffley People Continued 
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| Supplementary Lists Iffley has two sources from the 1830s: the schedule of land allotted at enclosure in 1831, and a schedule of properties affected by a proposed railway in 1837. Surnames appearing in these two and not in the above registers: 1831 Fell Lock Lockhart Salter Twopenny 1837 Bayley Bowerfoot Buckland Bull Forrest Haynes (Haines) Leake Rainsford Salmon Watkin New Surnames From Other
Records 1853-1901 1853 ER Benson 1861 C Basson Cobb Cunnington
Dixon (Dixen, Dicksey) Hinton Noble Palmer Partridge Romsey Tibbles
Walford 1871 C Barter Belcher Brewer
Clayton Clifford Combes Croame Crundall (Crundwell) Garden Gillam
Ind Ives Ma(u)nder(s) Matt Mattingley Merriman (Merryman) Millard
Mostyn-Owen Pollard Rowley Stimson Surtice Wickson (Wixon) 1881 C Bowden Draper Ford
Golby Lever Peck Shipperly 1890 ER Savin(g)(s) Titcombe
Treadaway Whitten 1900 ER Millstead Some of the above represent
families which had developed into village dynasties by 1914, notably: IFFLEY
PEOPLE Juliana de Saint Remy was Robert's daughter. By 1189 she had inherited Iffley manor, still
held from Geoffrey de Clinton. She gave away the advowson to Kenilworth
Priory, a foundation which de Clinton favoured. (She may have thought
they were better placed to do battle with the likes of Oseney Abbey
than she was.) It is in Juliana's time that we find the first reference
to Iffley Mill; she gave eighteen pence rent from it to two local
religious foundations. Annora was an anchoress
- a nun who lives a life of prayer alone and not in a community. She
lived in a cell beside Iffley church c1232-42 and may have paid for
the Early English sanctuary. She was a widow, a daughter of the De
Braose family who had fallen foul of King John. Sir Richard Abberbury built Donnington Castle near Newbury and was a favoured supporter of Richard II (1381-99) who gave him the manor of Iffley. On 1393 Abberbury founded almshouses in Donnington and endowed them with rents from Iffley manor. Deeply involved in the bitter conflicts between Richard II and the House of Lancaster, he lost his influence and status when Richard fell. John de la Pole was the second Duke of Suffolk, succeeding at eight years old his
father, William, who was murdered by political enemies in 1450. William
(and his father Michael) had fallen out with warlike contemporaries
by urging peace with France. John was born in Ewelme, the manor which
his mother Alice had inherited from her father Thomas Chaucer. It
was from Thomas (a rising star, unlike Abberbury) that John inherited
Donnington and its almshouses; he renewed the foundation. His coat
of arms appears in a fine perpendicular window in the nave of Iffley
church. John married Elizabeth, sister of Richard III, in 1460. He
died in 1491. Arthur Pitts was
a sixteenth-century churchman, Archdeacon of Oxford, who died in 1579.
This was a difficult time for Catholics who refused to adopt the new,
Protestant, doctrines and accept the Queen as Head of the Church in
England. His family lived at Iffley rectory and suffered for their
faith; Arthur Pitts the younger spent time in the Tower. Barton Holyday was
Archdeacon of Oxford 1626-61, spanning the reign of Charles I, the
Civil War and the Commonwealth. Not surprisingly, he sought escape
in writing poetry. Holyday lived at Iffley rectory where he died in
1661 "of the epidemical fever that rageth now abroad". His
second wife died two months later; she is buried at Iffley but he,
as an archdeacon, is buried at the Cathedral. Thomas and Sarah Nowell married in 1764; she was the daughter of Sir Thomas Munday, upholsterer
and former mayor, and he was principal of St Mary Hall (now part of
Oriel). They came to Iffley in 1767 to live at The Manor House. They
founded a charity to educate poor children; the education was basic
and the aim was to fit the children for work in "good service",
an ambition otherwise beyond them. Sarah died in 1800 and Thomas a
year later. Their charity developed throughout the nineteenth century
and still exists. The Danbe family
was involved with Iffley lock and/or mill on and off from 1767. They
were a Sandford family originally and had married into the family
of Hill, Sandford millers. Danbes were at Iffley mill until 1846.
After the death of Robert Danbe in 1789 his sister Elizabeth was the
lessee, then Ann another sister, then nephew Robert. Robert and Charlotte
his wife had a son, Robert Perceval, baptised in 1848, but the family
did not return to the mill; the baby's father is just "gent"
in the baptism register. Edward Marshall (later Marshall Hacker) came to Iffley as tenant of the Rectory estate in 1803. His wife Mary Ann Burton was the daughter of a previous vicar; she remembered Iffley with affection and wanted to come back. When Edward became parish priest himself (1819) he was already a prosperous man, able to acquire the Rectory estate and leave it in his will for the support of future parish clergy. He was active in setting up the parish school in 1838, and marked the event by planting the chestnut tree outside the church gate. Edward died in 1839 at 64. His daughter Mary remained a pillar of the Iffley charities until her death in 1901. His son Edward (d.1883) wrote "An Account of the Township of Iffley". John Henry Newman,
later Cardinal, was vicar of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, in the 1830s.
Littlemore was a detached part of that parish and its people had to
go into town, or use the neighbouring churches in Sandford or Iffley.
Newman campaigned for Littlemore, urging that it should be a parish
with its own church; against much opposition he carried the day, and
the church of SS Mary and Nicholas was consecrated in 1836. From 1833-36
Newman's mother Jemima and his sisters lived at what is now Grove
House, on Iffley Turn. There he visited them, and from there they
attended the foundation-stone ceremony in Littlemore. Newman was received
into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. John Parsons owned The Old Bank in Oxford High Street and lived at Hawkwell House in Iffley. From there he brought his son Guy for baptism in Iffley church in 1837. The house was his "country place" offering good shooting, and good farmland on the arable slopes above Church Way. Parsons was energetic in local charities and in support of the parish school. He fought Acton Warburton (see below) tooth and nail in the 1850s. He pulled down hovels and built good stone cottages for his farm workers and outdoor servants (83-9 Church Way). "Hawkwell" has been demoted to staff quarters for the hotel which has transferred its name to a neighbouring villa. Thomas Acton Warburton became parish priest of Iffley in 1853. He came of a clever, energetic
Anglo-Irish family; his brothers George and Eliot made it to the Dictionary
of National Biography. Thomas had published work on the Normans (Rollo
and his Race) and took on a Norman church with relish. He was active
(and confrontational) in local charities and made a huge impression
on village life, not least for his churchmanship which was very "high".
Warburton left for a parish in Dulwich in 1876. The Strong family
lived at The Elms (now the Hawkwell House Hotel) where Henry Strong,
bank manager and ex-Indian Army, was marrying off his daughters between
1858 and 1869. His fourth daughter Emily (1840-1904) married Mark
Pattison in 1861; he was Rector of Lincoln College and 21 years her
senior. This strange alliance is said to have inspired George Eliot
in creating one aspect of Dorothea's character for "Middlemarch".
Emily (or Emilia) spent much time in Italy and France studying art
and publishing her findings. During her time in England she developed
a concern for the rights of women at work. Pattison died in 1884.
In 1885 Emilia married Sir Charles Dilke, who had been the accused
in an unpleasant divorce case. Restoring his reputation became one
of her causes. Joe Wilson was born
in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1854 and came to Iffley to teach in the
parish school in the 1870s. He stayed here for the rest of his life
as schoolmaster, choirmaster, lay clerk and grist miller. His first
wife Mary Alice also taught at the school, and they lived in the Nowell
school house. Mary was the daughter of Robert Moore Jefferies who
operated Iffley Mill 1880-94, with Wilson holding the lease from Lincoln
College. The Wilsons had four children. In 1886 Mary died. Joe married
again in 1887 and had a second family - of whom Katherine, or Kitty,
married into the Oxford family of Wyatt with a draper's shop at Carfax.
The Wilsons now lived in the mill house and rented out the grinding
to different millers after 1894. The mill burned down in 1908 and
the family moved to a nearby villa called "Mill Hill" (now
demolished). Joe Wilson died in 1916. Edward Cordrey (1884-1972)
was born into a cottage family as one of thirteen children. The family
came from Littlemore, where they first appear in the late eighteenth
century. In 1901 Edward was still living at home and working as a
printer's compositor. On his marriage he moved to Hurst Street but
he remained fascinated by Iffley. He wrote a collection of memoirs;
working as he did at Mowbray's it seemed natural to him to go into
print, and the artist C.E.Brock whom he knew through Mowbray's provided
illustrations. "Bygone Days at Iffley" came out as a booklet
in 1956, to be sold in aid of the church, and was reprinted in 1981.
The village he recalls is that of 1890-1914, still surrounded by fields
but rapidly changing. Edward's daughter Jean Cordrey did much to make
her father's collections available. She left the copyright of "Bygone
Days" to the parish church. John Allen (1857-1934) came from Northern Ireland to join a Cowley engineering company, Eddison and Nodding. Allen bought the company in 1897; he expanded what had been the Oxford Steam Plough Company by diversifying into motor vehicles, and his sons followed him in the business. George Allen ("the Major") was also an aviator who was interested in aerial photography; he was killed in a road accident in 1945. J J Cullimore Allen ("the Captain") remained part of the Iffley community all his life. Members of the family lived at Wootten and at The Elms (see Strong above). Hannah Pearsall Smith (1832-1911) came to Court Place as a widow with her son Logan, in
1906. She was famous as a Christian evangelist in her native America
and in Britain. Logan was known as a writer, his sister Alys was married
to Bertrand Russell. The worlds of literature and philosophy came
together at Court Place, in the shape of distinguished visitors. One
of them, George Santayana, used Iffley as the setting for part of
his novel "The Last Puritan". The family left in 1911. Sir George Forrest (1845-1926) retired from service in India to live at what is now Grove House on Iffley Turn. He wrote on the history of India, and both he and his wife gave serious attention to the Iffley community. In 1918 Sir George set up a Memorial Institute in memory of the 21 Iffley men killed in the first World War. This meeting-place and library was in a cottage annexe at first; it was later installed in a corrugated-iron Memorial Hall which (says Cordrey) Sir George referred to as the Burmese Elephant. Elephant or no, it provided a venue for the community until demolition in 1973. Sir Alan Gardiner came to Court Place from Hampshire in 1947, in winter blizzards. He
was a distinguished Egyptologist, known for his work on Tutankhamun's
tomb in 1922. In his will Sir Alan said he would like Court Place
to be offered to Oxford University. The University bought the house
in 1964 and has used it as graduate accommodation. |