This month Barry Cuff has chosen two chilly postcards , both sent with Christmas greetings
his rather brief and formal greeting was sent on 22nd December 1906 to Cardiff.
The gates of the Bryanston Estate are instantly recognisable even today – in 1906 they led not to a school, but to the private home of the Portman family. The house beyond the gates had only recently been completed, in 1894, for the 2nd Viscount Portman, who declined to live in his late father’s residence (Knighton House) and commissioned a grand new mansion.
This postcard, with its snowball fight, was taken just 12 years after the new house was completed, when the family were enjoying the high point of the estate’s wealth – a flurry of construction across the estate, included the distinctive red-brick cottages that remain today.
But the fortunes of the Portman dynasty began to shift after the First World War. A rapid succession of deaths brought heavy death duties that even this estate couldn’t absorb. The mansion was closed up, its contents auctioned off in 1925 in a sale that lasted two full weeks. It stood empty until 1927, when it was sold – along with several cottages and grounds – for £35,000 to JG Jeffreys, the young, innovative Australian schoolmaster who opened Bryanston School the following January.
‘A Very Happy Xmas to Mr & Mrs Carlton Riches with kindest regards from M Wichwood [Pag?], Old Bank House, Blandford’
This postcard, sent 22nd December 1925, captures a rare but much-loved Dorset winter pastime: skating on Ashmore’s village pond. Though the scene is captioned, it would have been instantly recognisable to locals even without it – the surrounding cottages look much the same today.
Ashmore remains the highest village in Dorset.
In colder winters, like that of 1925, the pond would regularly freeze deep enough to skate on – a tradition now largely lost to warmer winters.
The message on the back of this card – sent to Miss Price in Canterbury – is brief but seasonal:
“With compliments of the season. From J. & R. Coward, Ashmore.”
