When researching some of our properties some unusual stories can come to light. One such is the interesting tale of Pardoe Yates, a businessman of Wilton at the end of the C19 and how this seemingly upstanding gent was exposed to be yet another typical example of Victorian double standards…

In 1895, Kelly’s directory lists Pardoe Yates, J.P., as an alderman on Wilton Town Corporation and a director of the Royal Carpet Works, manufacturers of Axminster and Wilton carpets. His father, Samuel Pardoe Yates, had originally manufactured carpets in Bridgnorth, before buying the Axminster looms and later moving the business to Wilton where he took over the existing carpet factory run by Henry Blackmore, in the 1860s. Yates was initially in partnership with Wills (of the cigarette manufacturing family), as ‘Yates & Co. Ltd.’ Samuel Pardoe was short-lived. His later obituary in the Wiltshire Times reported after his sudden and unexpected death that ‘he paid a visit of several months to the States for business purposes last autumn.’

You may think it’s not for you, but you can still make use of the History Centre, even if you don’t have ancestors that come from Wiltshire. If you are a Wiltshire resident, we have information that can be of use to you relating to where you live. Even if your house is relatively modern (for example the 1960s) we will have maps showing what the site originally looked like and the names of former occupiers. I’d like to take you through just some of the sources we hold to detail what may be available about your house.

The 14th of February is a date which many of us either love or hate, as a time to celebrate romantic love; be bludgeoned over the head with one’s single status; or feel obliged to spend money much too soon after Christmas, depending on your outlook! However it has roots which go back a lot further than the modern commercial jamboree.

An archaeological excavation was undertaken by Wessex Archaeology on an area that was proposed for a new magazine store (planning number S/2010/1865) at DTSL Porton Down. The fieldwork is completed and the initial post-excavation work has been done, so I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of the results. Readers should be aware that some of this blog will talk about and have pictures of human burials, including those of infants.

There had been previous work on this site to evaluate the archaeological potential, so the site had results for geophysics and trenched evaluation. The main features identified through the evaluation and the excavation were two long ditches, one a ‘Wessex Linear’; a small barrow with associated cremation and inhumation burials and a further inhumation burial associated with the smaller ditch.

Just a few of us at the History Centre were at school during the blizzards and Arctic-seeming conditions of early 1963 and can reflect on how slight recent snowfalls seem! It was Wiltshire’s worst blizzard for 80 years and surpassed the really bad winter of 1947. Some snow had fallen on Boxing Day; we missed a white Christmas as usual, while a further 6 inches fell over the weekend on 29th and 30th December. This was a proper Christmas holiday from school; snowmen were built and furious snowball fights peppered the streets and parks, although drifting snow meant that some families had to dig themselves out of their houses. Most people had plenty of food left over from Christmas and coal and wood for the open fires that still warmed most houses. Many people were still accustomed to walking to work and those that weren’t normally didn’t live far enough away to prevent them working.

I am often guided by those twin pillars of research: serendipity and curiosity. It was these two trusty old friends that led me Henry Charles “inky” Stephens (1841 – 1918). While tidying my desk as part of my New Year resolution I was left with just a few paper clips and two rulers on the work surface, which reminded me of a patent I had spotted in our indexes for “the parallel ruler” (yes, sadly someone had invented this before me).  The patent seems to enable …er…two parallel lines to be drawn, more seriously it was used by navigators to draw parallel lines on charts and originally invented by Fabrizio Mordente in 1584 and others sought to improve it. But there was more, with the documents were further patents for inkstands and an adjustable pencil, plus specifications for various ink manufacture and the chemistry behind them. Of course, what I had started to look at was part of an archive relating to the Cholderton estate, once owned by the family and an individual whose single small invention arguably helped change the course of writing.