BOSCOMBE
In 1895 the population in Boscombe was 100. The river used to flood Boscombe’s thatched cottages and cold killed farmworkers’ children. Boscombe’s historic church was regularly flooded, too. Then you had to be buried in Allington.
Boscombe steals the theological limelight. Because of Richard Hooker. Hooker’s face (under its flat hat) looks depressed in the engraving on the wall of St Andrew’s Church. Married to his London landlady, his domestic life, they say, was wretched. From Boscombe he moved to Kent and died young. But that henpecked Hooker wrote the greatest-ever defence of the Church of England. After 400 years, his “Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie” is still prescribed reading for ordinands. Four of its seven cadencefilled volumes, he wrote in Boscombe (1591 to 1595).
Immense trees shade the whitewashed Old Rectory which was home to Richard Hooker. Then it had only one wing. So “mean and deficient” was it, that in 1836 the Rev Christopher Fawcett was given £702 from Queen Anne’s bounty to build a new Regency wing … two high-ceilinged reception rooms, three bedrooms and — sensational at that date — a flush toilet!
At least one Elizabethan manor house has disappeared. Its bowling green can be seen from East Boscombe Farm, itself built as a hunting box by the Eyre-Matchams. The vanished Elizabethan manor house was once some kind of hospital. One Dr John Smith, smallpox inoculator, was based there when in 1771.
Boscombe and Allington became one civil parish in 1924 and were ecclesiastically married in 1971. Today, Allington and Boscombe are merged from The Plough to North End, the two villages are strung out for nearly two miles along the busy A338 “Tidworth Road” — which the old folk called the Turnpike. Now if you are caught up in the fast traffic on the busy road, you may overshoot the workingmen’s club (like the bus shelter) is architecturally unprepossessing. village.
Apparently, Anthony Trollope, on his Post Office journeys, liked to stay at The Close. But the place to visit was Queen Manor. It’s a squire’s country residence complete with exquisite walled garden and ancient deeds. It even has an ancient icehouse for keeping game cool. Colt Hoare thinks the original “Queen”, of Queen Manor was Elfrida (Aelfthryth), mother of King Aethelred, she who founded Amesbury Abbey in 979.
Queen of the Manor in more recent times was the famous Mrs McCann, wife of Lord Radnor’s agent, “who started the WI in her kitchen”. She held amateur theatricals and whist drives in the stone barn behind it. The barn was also to become wartime ARP headquarters. “Mrs McCann was a real lady. She made you feel so happy when you were with her,”
Donum et deo solas quas dederis semper habeas? opes” says the inscription at the Almshouses (alias God’s gift) built by squire John Kent in 1708 for two widows and two widowers. “Each had a separate bedroom, and the doors were tiny.”
A two-roomed lamplit school with bucket lavatories was built by the Eyre’s for 50 children in 1894. It is now just another house.
Alison Kidd. Publisher, Salisbury Journal, 1988.
