February 2025, on Labradors etc
TALES FROM THE HILLS
(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)
One memory leads to another. At the Flower Show a few years ago, somebody pointed out that the oldest of our fifteen-odd silver cups (the one for the Best Kept Garden) had been won by the same person for the first three years running. That person was ‘J Fosbury.’ A couple chatting with us remembered J Fosbury: he was a gamekeeper, and he lived at Keeper’s Cottage on the Woodhay road. They said he was the brother of our baker (the one with the stone oven at Combe), and of Elsie Fosbury who lived beside The Plough.
The couple who remembered J Fosbury were themselves remarkable for having been married in Ashmansworth church by the very last resident vicar of Ashmansworth: the Revd Leonard Greensides. He left in 1963, and the vicarage was sold.
We were then joined by the daughter of the villager who’d given that cup sixty years earlier. Her father used to lend his heavy roller to Major Green for the cricket pitch, and she herself used to keep the score.
All of which brought us to Labradors. As well as presenting silver cups and lending heavy rollers, our benefactor raised Labradors in the village, dogs of such high quality that they won prizes throughout the world.
We lost our resident vicar in 1963, but Crux Easton had already lost its resident rector back in 1921. The very last of them was Charles de Havilland – a name familiar in these tales. But familiar names are inevitable in tales of a small village, where just eighty villagers must play all the parts.
Speaking of Labradors, it was a short step from the sublime Labradors of Ashmansworth to Crux Easton, and a gun-shy Labrador called Rubbish named, with affection, by a subsequent owner of Crux Easton Rectory, Diana Mitford.
With Crux Easton Rectory sold, the villagers rallied round the church. Fifty years later the two churchwardens were Lord Boyd-Carpenter and Mr John Greenaway, with Major-General Blomfield CB, DSO as treasurer. A cabinet minister and a major-general, though both retired, were fairly impressive stalwarts for any church; but no more impressive than Mr Greenaway himself, who had farmed the land and kept the inn, and had lived there all his life.
We may have lost both our resident incumbents but, thanks to the villagers, we still have both our churches.
Agricola, February 2025