South Petherton an historic hamstone village in South Somerset.

The large village of South Petherton is just off the A303 around 5 miles east of Ilminster in South Somerset.  In 2011 the village had a population of 3,367, having increased from 2,781 at the time of the 1981 census; it will be interesting to see the figures from the 2021 census.

The information board near the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul tells us:

“Situated in fertile arable country, South Petherton stands above the River Parrett, near The Fosse Way.  It was granted a Market Charter by King John in 1213. 

Agriculture has always been the basis of the community although South Petherton was the site of an important mint in the eleventh century and of the Sturton bronze foundry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as being home to glove making and cider production.

The historic heart is cantered around the fifteenth century church and the market square.  There are fine old houses throughout South Petherton including Giles Daubeney’s  “King Ina’s Palace” with parts dating back to the fourteenth century, and “Hayes End Manor” dating from 1610.”

Of the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul Pevsner writes: “The church lies at the highest point of the little town, a large spreading building crowned by a tall a and prominent crossing tower.” 

The Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the South Somerset village of South Petherton.

The memorial in the churchyard to those who fell in World War One is approached up steps flanked by pillars on which there are memorial plaques to those lost in World War Two.

The War Memorials to those who fell in two World Wars in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul in the South Somerset village of South Petherton.

Field Marshal Lord Harding*, a notable veteran and commander of the British Eighth Army, was born in South Petherton at Rock House in Palmer Street.

Rock House in Palmer Street, South Petherton. The birthplace of Field Marshal Lord Harding.

*Views from Somerset: Field-Marshal Lord Harding of Petherton. Commemorated at Taunton Castle's Museum of Somerset. (viewfromsomerset.blogspot.com)

"Best Foot Forward" by Somerset born Colin Hodgkinson. The autobiography of the RAF's other legless fighter pilot of World War Two.

I recently read Colin Hodgkinson’s autobiography Best Foot Forward (Odhams Press Limited, London. 1957).  The story of the RAF’s other legless fighter pilot of World War Two.

Hodgkinson was born in Somerset in 1920 and grew up on the Mendip Hills.  He lost both legs after a flying accident in early 1939 while training to be a naval pilot. 

Inspired partly by Douglas Bader, the RAF’s legendary legless fighter pilot, Hodgkinson transferred to the RAF early in the war with the aim of fulfilling his ambition to fly in combat.

He eventually flew Spitfires under the command of some of the RAF’s most successful leaders, including the renowned “Johnnie” Johnson.

By November 1943 he was a flight commander in 501 Squadron when the oxygen supply failed in his Spitfire during a high altitude weather reconnaissance mission over France.  His aircraft crashed and he was so badly injured that he was repatriated to Britain.

As he was being transported on a stretcher across Germany on route to Sweden, he witnessed the lynching of four US airmen by a crowd in a railway station.  He feared he would be next if the vengeful mob saw his uniform.  Luckily for him his uniform and stretcher was covered by a blanket.

After the war Hodgkinson flew jets with 501 and 604 Squadrons of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force.

In 1957 he appeared on the BBC’s This is Your Life - before the famed Douglas Bader.

The book is a remarkable story of courage and determination. It also includes his account of an eventful family life on and around the Mendip Hills between the two world wars.

It is well worth reading.

Walter Bagehot, influential mid-Victorian political journalist, born and died in Langport, Somerset.

I recently came across a twitter spat between Tim Montgomerie, conservative political activist and journalist, and Sky News presenter Kay Burley.  Apparently Mr Montgomerie tweeted: “Throughout Sky News we have pundits posing as reporters.”  This brought a reply from Ms Burley which was, shall we say, uncomplimentary.  I think I side with Mr Montgomerie!

Be that as it may, the exchange reminded me of a visit to Langport where I came upon the grave of Walter Bagehot, the esteemed mid-Victorian political journalist, in the churchyard of All Saint’s Church on The Hill.

The west tower of All Saints' Church on The Hill in Langport, Somerset.  The church is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

Walter Bagehot was born in the ancient Somerset town of Langport in 1826.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Langport thrived as an inland port serving barge-hauled merchandise on the River Parrett.  

Walter was the son of Thomas Watson Bagehot, a leading Langport merchant, who had interests in banking and shipping.  He studied at University College, London, and in 1852 he returned to Langport to enter his father’s business. 

At the age of 31 he married Eliza, the daughter of James Wilson, founder and editor of The Economist.  When Wilson died in 1860 while in Calcutta advising the Indian government on its finances, Bagehot succeeded him as editor.  For the next 17 years, until he succumbed to pneumonia at the early age of 51, he wrote The Economist’s main article.

Writing on political, economic and social affairs, he was one of the most influential journalists of his day and had leading politicians among his friends, including William Gladstone, the first Liberal prime minister. 

It is said Bagehot did not persevere in a political career because he was not a good speaker and failed in his attempts at being elected to Parliament.  I wonder what he would have made of Twitter!

Walter Bagehot died in Langport on 24 March 1877.  He is buried in the churchyard of the town's All Saints' Church.  His headstone is on the right, to the left is that of his father and mother.

Admiral Sir James Somerville, commander of Force H, the squadron which crippled the Bismarck, at rest in a Somerset churchyard in the village of Dinder.

In the shadow of Somerset’s Mendip Hills, just north of the A371 between Wells and Shepton Mallet, is the little village of Dinder.  Within the village is Dinder House, formerly a manor house dating from the twelfth century, rebuilt by the Somervilles in 1801.  It remained their family home up until the death of Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Somerville on this day in 1949.   

Sir James Fownes Somerville was born in Weybridge, Surrey, on 17 July 1882, the second son of Arthur Fownes Somerville of Dinder and his wife Ellen, daughter of William Stanley Sharland, of North Norfolk, Tasmania.  The Somervilles were related to that great naval family, the Hoods.

Somerville joined the RN in 1897 and became a lieutenant in 1904. He qualified in the vital new field of wireless telegraphy in 1907.

He was fleet wireless officer during the Gallipoli campaign where his outstanding work in ship to shore communications brought him the award of the DSO.

In 1921 Somerville was promoted to captain and commanded the battleships HMS BENBOW, HMS BARHAM and HMS WARSPITE.  Following the mutiny by seamen in ships of the Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon on 15 and 16 September 1931, Somerville and Captain James Tovey, another future admiral, undertook an enquiry to establish its causes.   

During the Spanish Civil War Somerville spent two years as senior British naval officer off the Spanish Mediterranean Coast.  In 1937 he was promoted to vice-admiral and subsequently became Commander-in-Chief East Indies in October 1938.  However, in July 1939 he was forced to retire with suspected pulmonary tuberculosis, a diagnosis he contested.

The outbreak of World War Two soon saw Somerville back in the service of his country.  After overseeing the development of naval radar and its rapid installation aboard ships he gave valuable assistance to Admiral Ramsay who oversaw the Dunkirk Evacuation.

After the defeat of France Somerville took command of Force H, a squadron based at Gibraltar to act as gatekeeper to the Mediterranean and operate in the Central Atlantic as necessary.  He then commanded what was, in my opinion, one of the most inglorious and mistaken actions ever undertaken by the Royal Navy.   Somerville was tasked with arranging, either by negotiation or force, the demobilisation of major units of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir near Oran in French Algeria.  When talks failed Somerville, with the insistence of Churchill, ordered his ships to open fire on the anchored French warships.  The bombardment resulted in the deaths of 1,297 French servicemen, the sinking of one capital ship and heavy damage to another.  Somerville himself described it as a “filthy job”.

Many senior officers in the Royal Navy thought at the time, and after the war, that the order from Churchill and the War Cabinet to open fire on erstwhile allies was wrong.  Stephen Roskill in his Churchill and the Admirals (Pen & Sword Books Ltd. 2013) writes:  

“While working on my war history I had many interviews and much correspondence with Cunningham, Somerville and North, the three admirals concerned in the attack on Oran and related plans.  None of them ever budged from the view that, given more time for negotiation, the tragedy could have been averted.  On 9 January 1950 Cunningham wrote to Admiral Lord Fraser, then First Sea Lord, that 90 per cent of senior naval officers, including myself, thought Oran a ghastly error and still do.”

In May 1941 Force H was called on to help the Home Fleet in the hunt for the BISMARCK.  Somerville’s masterly handling of his squadron led to HMS ARK ROYAL’s Swordfish aircraft crippling the BISMARCK with torpedoes thus allowing Admiral Sir John Tovey’s battleships to catch and sink her.

In 1940 and 1941 Somerville’s ships regularly and successfully supported vital convoys to Malta, but after flying off reinforcements of aircraft to that besieged island HMS ARK ROYAL was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine  U81 on 13 November 1941.

Following Japan’s entry into the war Somerville was sent to the Far East in February 1942 to command a reformed Eastern Fleet.  Many of his ships were obsolete and his fleet was in no condition to confront the powerful Japanese carrier group which forayed into the Indian Ocean in the spring of 1942.  All Somerville could do was to retreat out of range of the Japanese until they withdrew to the Pacific for their next confrontation with the American Navy.

It was not until the spring of 1944 that Somerville was able to undertake offensive operations.  By this time his fleet had been reinforced by more modern units including the aircraft carrier HMS ILLUSTRIOUS and, operating alongside the American carrier USS SARATOGA, air strikes were launched against Japanese oil installations on Sumatra and Java.

In August 1944 Somerville left the Eastern Fleet to take up the post of Head of the British Admiralty delegation in Washington, a position he held from October 1944 to December 1945.  He made a great success of this mission and even became friends with the blunt and short-tempered Admiral Ernest J. King, the anglophobic American chief of naval operations.

On leaving the Royal Navy in 1946 he retired to Dinder House becoming Lord Lieutenant of Somerset.  He died in Dinder on 19 March 1949 of a coronary thrombosis and is buried there in the village churchyard of St. Michael and All Angels.   His wife Mary, whom he married in January 1913, predeceased him in August 1945.

Sources.

Churchill and the Admirals, Stephen Roskill (Pen & Sword Books Ltd. 2013)

Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies.

https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36191

Ernest Bevin born in the village of Winsford, Somerset on this day in 1881. A giant of British politics during war and peace.

At the present time we have a Labour Party leadership which appears unenthusiastic, and that’s putting it mildly, about Britain’s membership of NATO and the retention of nuclear weapons.  Furthermore, on March 7 an article in The Telegraph by Steven Swinford informs us that “Britain’s equality watchdog has announced a formal inquiry into the Labour Party’s handling of anti-Semitism cases amid claims that the party broke equalities law.” *

In such circumstances we should remember the contribution made by Ernest Bevin, a patriotic anti-communist who was a giant figure in the Trade Union Movement, Labour Party and British Government both in time of war and peace.  Today is the anniversary of his birth in the village of Winsford which sits within the borders of Exmoor National Park 10 miles southwest of Minehead in Somerset.

Ernest Bevin was born at Winsford on 9th March 1881.  His mother, Diana, was married to William Bevin, an agricultural worker who, by 1877, had deserted his family.  Therefore Ernest Bevin’s father is not known.  He was one of 7 children.

After his mother’s death he lived with his sister and her husband.  Bevin left school in 1892 and worked on farms until 1894 when he moved to Bristol to join his brothers, Jack and Albert.

In Bristol he worked mainly as a conductor on trams and as a van driver until becoming a paid official of the Dockers Union in 1911.  While in Bristol he attended chapel, becoming a Sunday School teacher and Baptist preacher.

By May 1920 he was Assistant General Secretary of the Dockers Union and as his trade union role was centred on London he moved there with his wife, Florence Anne Townley.

Bevin played the major role in creating the Transport and General Workers Union from the merger of 14 unions with his own Dockers Union as its core.  The new union came into being on 1 January 1922, with 300,000 members.  Bevin was elected General Secretary and by the late 1930s he was leading the largest union in the country, with 650,000 members.

He took a determined stand against communist challenges to trade union leadership and was suspicious of the egotism of intellectual socialists.

In May 1940 Bevin was top of the list of Labour figures who Churchill wanted in his War Cabinet and he agreed to become Minister of Labour and National Service in Churchill’s coalition government.  He became an MP for the first time in June 1940 being elected unopposed for Central Wandsworth.  Bevin was a staunch supporter of the war effort and believed “it is a social obligation to defend your own homestead”.

He so successfully mobilized and directed labour into essential war industries that Britain achieved a higher level of civilian mobilization than any other of the nations at war.  Bevin oversaw a great extension of collective bargaining, wage regulation, trade union membership and general transformation of working conditions.

Possibly second only to Churchill in the wartime government, Churchill himself looked upon Bevin as a possible successor should anything happen to himself.

After the war Bevin became Foreign Secretary in the Labour government and formed a close association with Prime Minister Attlee which contemporaries said was one of the most successful political partnerships in English history.  He had a deep distrust of communism and the Soviet Union, was firmly committed to the British nuclear deterrent, and played a key role in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

Failing health caused him to be replaced as Foreign Secretary in March 1951 and he died at his home in Westminster on 14 April 1951.

*https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/03/07/labour-faces-formal-inquiry-handling-anti-semitism-amid-claims/

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Hugh Montague Trenchard, 1st Viscount Trenchard. Commemorated in London and Taunton.

Hugh Montague Trenchard was born in Taunton, Somerset in 1873.  This month saw the anniversary of his birth on February 3 and that of his death on February 10.  

A poor and unenthusiastic student, he eventually joined the Army in 1893 after having failed the entrance papers for the Royal Navy.

Served in the Boer War in 1900.  He was critically wounded and lost a lung.  Eventually he recovered from his wounds and returned to South Africa in 1901.  His talents came to the attention of Kitchener and other senior officers.

Trenchard learnt to fly before the outbreak of World War I.  He commanded flying units on the Western Front and rose to command the Royal Flying Corps in France.  Trenchard strongly supported constant offensive tactics although they led to very high aircrew casualties.

In 1918 Trenchard was appointed Chief of the Air Staff and so became the first head of the RAF, a new service resulting from the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service.  He spent the next 10 years building the solid foundations and institutions required to form a powerful future air force.

Between 1931 and 1935 he was a reforming Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, but after he left office his more controversial plans were dropped.

He spoke powerfully on air matters before and during WWII and was a strong and enthusiastic advocate of strategic bombing.

Known as “The Father of the Royal Air Force” Trenchard died in 1956.  He is commemorated by a statue in Embankment Garden outside the Ministry of Defence in London and a plaque marks his birthplace in Taunton.  He is also commemorated on Trenchard Way in Taunton.

Field-Marshal Lord Harding of Petherton. Commemorated at Taunton Castle's Museum of Somerset.

A few weeks ago while wandering around the centre of Taunton I came across the Museum of Somerset in Taunton Castle.  Tucked away in the entrance courtyard is a modest bust commemorating Field-Marshal Lord Harding of Petherton, someone I had vaguely heard of due to his connection with the Somerset Light Infantry, but other than that I knew little about him.  I decided to do some research.

The commemorative bust of Lord Harding of Petherton in the courtyard of Taunton Castle's Museum of Somerset.

Allan Francis Harding was born at Rock House in South Petherton, Somerset, on 10th February 1896.  His father Francis Ebenezer Harding was a clerk to a local firm of solicitors and his mother was Elizabeth Ellen Harding (nee Anstice).  Both parents came from large families - Francis was one of eight children and Elizabeth Anstice one of thirteen.  The Hardings and the Anstices were descended from yeoman farmers and tradesmen who had lived in and around South Petherton for hundreds of years. 

The plaque on the wall of Rock House.  

Rock House in South Petherton, South Somerset, birthplace of Field-Marshal Lord Harding. 

At the age of 10 Harding went to Ilminster Grammar School, leaving at the age of 15 to work as a boy clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank in London.  Many of his colleagues were in the Territorial Army and they encouraged him to join them.  Harding applied for a commission and became a Second-Lieutenant in the 1/11 Battalion of the London Regiment, a battalion of the 2nd (London) Territorial Division, in May 1914.

After the outbreak of World War One Harding’s battalion became part of the 54th (East Anglian) Division.  In July 1915 it embarked for Gallipoli to act as a reinforcing division.  Harding first saw action on 15th August when he was wounded in an attack on Turkish positions.  After the withdrawal from Gallipoli he remained in the Middle East, participating in General Sir Edmund Allenby’s victorious campaign against the Turks in Egypt and Palestine.  He ended the war in command of a battalion.

After the First World War Harding served in Britain and India.  While home on leave from India in 1926 he fulfilled a promise to visit a fellow officer’s mother who lived in the Somerset village of Long Ashton near Bristol.  There he met her daughter Mary, the step-daughter of Charles Harrington Fry of the famous chocolate manufacturing family, and married her the following year when his battalion returned to England.

The autumn of 1940 found Harding in the Middle East where he joined the staff of General Sir Archibald Wavell and was involved in the planning and execution of Operation Compass the offensive which led to General Richard O’Connor’s crushing victory over the Italians in the Western Desert.

At the end of March 1941 Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel launched a counter-attack with his newly arrived German forces which led to the capture of several British commanders including General O’Connor and his successor Lieutenant-General Philip Neame.  Harding took command, stabilized the situation and, with the Australian Major-General L.J. Morshead, organized the defence of Tobruk.

During Operation Crusader, which ended in a victory over Rommel’s forces on Christmas Eve 1941, Harding was Brigadier General Staff, to Lieutenant-General A.R. Godwin-Austin commanding 13 Corps.

On 21st January 1942 Rommel counterattacked and by 6th February the British had lost all the gains made by Crusader.  Godwin-Austin asked to be relieved of command as he had fallen out with his superiors over tactics.  Harding, who admired and supported his commander, left 13 Corps to become Director of Military Training at GHQ Cairo.

Harding took command of the 7th Armoured Division on the 17th September 1942 in time for the Second Battle of El Alamein.  Four months later, while in pursuit of Rommel’s forces on the road to Tripoli, he was badly injured when a shell exploded in front of his command tank as he stood atop it spotting for his artillery.  His wounds were very serious and he was evacuated back to England with his future on active service in doubt. 

While making a remarkable recovery, Harding bought a 130 acre farm with dilapidated farmhouse near Nether Compton in Dorsetshire.  He and his wife and son moved in in time for Christmas 1943.  So complete was his return to fitness that he was offered the post of Chief of Staff to General Sir Harold Alexander commander of the 15th Army Group, sometimes known as Allied Armies in Italy.  On New Year’s Day 1944 he flew from an airfield in North Devonshire to take up his new post in the Mediterranean.  Harding served on Alexander’s staff until March 6th 1945 when he was given command of 13 Corps, and was in that post when the fighting in Italy ended.

During his time in Italy Harding was knighted by King George VI.  He chose to be known as Sir John Harding, John being the name he had used throughout his time in the Army.

After the Second World War Harding’s appointments included, Commander-in-Chief Far East, Command of the British army of the Rhine, Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1952 to 1955, and Governor of Cyprus 1955 to 1957.  In November 1953 he had been made Field-Marshal. 

On retirement he accepted several directorships including that of Plesseys, the telecommunications equipment manufacturer, of which he became chairman in 1967.  He was also the first chairman of the Horserace Betting Levy Board.

Lord Harding died at his home in Nether Compton on 20th January 1989.    

Sources: 

Harding, John (Allan Francis) first Baron Harding of Petherton. (ODNB) https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/40129

Harding of Petherton, Field-Marshal, Michael Carver (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1978).

Dilemmas of the Desert War, Michael Carver (B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1986).  

Margaret Bondfield first woman Cabinet Minister. Commemorated on a Blue Plaque in Chard, Somerset.

All the recent media reporting of bullying and harassment of women staff and MPs in Parliament reminded me of a Blue Plaque on a wall next to the entrance to The Guildhall in Fore Street in Chard, Somerset.  It commemorates Margaret Bondfield who was born in Chard and became the first woman cabinet minister.

The Blue Plaque next to The Guildhall in Chard commemorating Margaret Bondfield, the first woman Cabinet Minister.

Margaret Grace Bondfield was born on 17 March 1873 in Chard, Somerset.  She was the tenth of eleven children born to William Bondfield, a foreman laceworker, and his wife Anne Taylor.  She became a shop assistant working in Brighton at the age of fourteen and joined the National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks and progressed to hold prominent positions in the Trade Union Movement.  She was elected as MP for Northampton in 1923, after two previous attempts, to become one of the first three woman Labour MPs.  She failed to retain her seat in the 1924 General Election but returned to Parliament after winning the Wallsend by-election of 1926.

After Labour’s 1929 election victory she became Minister of Labour, the first woman cabinet minister and privy councillor, a position she held until 1931.  After losing her Wallsend seat in the 1931 General Election she never returned to Parliament, but continued to play an active role in public life including undertaking speaking tours in North America for the British Information Service between 1941 and 1943.

Feeling “no vocation for wifehood or motherhood”, she devoted her life to the Trade Union Movement and died unmarried in 1953.

The Guildhall, Fore Street in Chard, Somerset.

Margaret Bondfield must have been a remarkable woman having succeeded in public and parliamentary life long before “women-only short lists” and “gender equality” were ever thought of.  

Source:

https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31955

The statue of Admiral Robert Blake in Bridgwater, Somerset. Oliver Cromwell's "General at Sea".

I have tried several times to take a decent photo of Admiral Robert Blake’s statue in Bridgwater, but it has always been in the shade.  My latest attempt, below, is my best to date as it is silhouetted against a pleasing clear blue sky. 

The statue of Robert Blake, Cromwell's "General at Sea", in Bridgwater, Somerset.  Erected in the town centre, it was unveiled 1900. 

Robert Blake was born in Bridgwater in 1598, one of 13 children.  A graduate of Oxford University he is said to have become a merchant and travelled the continent.   He became Bridgwater’s MP in 1640.

Blake played a prominent role in the English Civil War, early on being a key figure in the siege of Lyme Regis in Dorsetshire where Royalist forces, although outnumbering the Parliamentarian defenders by six to one, were held at bay until the town was relieved.
 

As Colonel Robert Blake he commanded Parliamentary forces successfully defending Taunton which was besieged by Royalist forces from July 1644 to July 1645.  Blake famously declared he “had four pairs of boots and would eat three pairs before he would surrender”.

Appointed as Oliver Cromwell’s “General at Sea” in 1649, he set in train the expansion of the fleet to become the largest England had possessed up until that time. 

The Commonwealth built 210 new warships by 1660.  He produced the Navy’s first ever ‘Rules and Regulations’ and reorganised tactics which would become the foundation of English Naval Tactics in the age of sail.  Little wonder he was known as the “Father of the Royal Navy".

During the English Civil War he blockaded and eventually defeated the Royalist Fleet of Prince Rupert of the Rhine.  He won victories against the Portuguese, Dutch (First Anglo Dutch War, 1652-1654) and Spanish (Anglo-Spanish War, 1654-1660).

He died at sea off Plymouth in 1657.