The original toll round house stood in the angle between the Blandford and Wimborne roads, with the Poole road going off to the right. The entire junction has now been replaced by a large roundabout – named the Roundhouse Roundabout for now-obvious reasons. This card was posted to Uplyme in 1907.
Above, Sturminster Marshall’s High Street looked very different in 1906. Sturminster Marshall grew around the Bailey Gate milk, cheese and whey products factory. It was so large it had it’s own station – called Bailey Gate to avoid confusion with Sturminster Newton, further north on the Somerset & Dorset Railway. The factory was started by Henry Tory in 1888 and at one time was the largest cheese producing factory in Europe. The ’Then’ image was taken from the S&D Railway bridge, with the Churchill Arms on the left and Bailey Gate Milk Factory on the right. The original factory warehouse building on the right is gone, though there remains an industrial park on the site, and the Churchill Arms on the left has recently been demolished.
Before sunrise on 24th February 1834 farm worker George Loveless left for work as usual … but it would be three years before he was back with his wife and children again. George and five fellow workers – James Brine, James Hammett, James Loveless, John Standfield and Thomas Standfield – were arrested, charged with making an illegal oath and transported to Australia. They only returned following a public outcry over their treatment. We know now that the real reason for their treatment was that they had made a stand against poor pay and wage cuts by forming a trade union. The Martyrs Arrest 190 event offers an opportunity to connect the historical struggles of the Tolpuddle Martyrs with contemporary worker experiences, featuring insights from speakers and performances by the local socialist choir, Dorset Red, and singer-songwriter Neil Duncan-Jordan. Unite event organizers are collaborating with a Canadian project dedicated to restoring the grave of George Loveless in London, Ontario, where many Martyrs found refuge post-release. This collaboration aims to include a virtual discussion about the restoration effort. John Burbidge, a former farmworker and Unite Branch Chair, reflects on the parallels between the past and present, saying ‘The Martyrs’ arrests were calculated to create fear after pay cuts that left workers unable to feed and house their families.’ He goes on to say how this might be seen to mirror today’s governmental efforts to quash worker resistance against economic injustices. Unite South West Deputy Regional Secretary Donna Williams will be speaking at the event and said: ‘As we reflect on the Tolpuddle Martyrs legacy, the struggles of the past continue to resonate with the challenges workers face today as we continue to fight for jobs, pay and conditions.’ The event will be held in Tolpuddle Village Hall on 24th Feb, 12.30 to 3pm. For more information please contact Unite Branch Officer Alan Daniels – [email protected]
Train drivers are being forced to strike again this month as part of a long-running dispute over pay and conditions. Regrettably, many people’s travel plans will be disrupted as a result. Under the recent Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023, train operators are legally allowed to force striking workers back to work to provide a minimum service level (MSL) that the industry has set at 40 per cent of the normal timetable. However, none of the rail companies are exercising these powers, despite ministers making it clear that they were expected to do so. The reason for this is an understanding that to do so would lead to worse industrial relations with their employees, protracting the dispute and increasing the chance of further disruption. Indeed, an attempt by one train company, LNER, to enforce MSLs was met by ASLEF, the train drivers’ union, calling five additional strikes. Needless to say, LNER withdrew its plans. It is clear that MSLs (which are applicable to health, fire and rescue, education, nuclear energy and border security, as well as transport services) were intended to fan the flames of chaos rather than dampen disputes, so that industrial relations might be weaponised for political gain. The trade union movement has slammed the legislation as a threat to both industrial relations and the right to strike. The Labour Party has committed to repealing the Act immediately on forming a new government. While it seems that the plan has backfired for now, we can be assured that the Tories will not stop there. Indeed, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and the Public Order Act 2022, when taken together, represent a veritable bonfire of many of our rights to peaceful protest – fundamental pillars of a functioning and stable liberal democracy. Pat Osborne North Dorset Labour Party
Milton Abbey School seeks an experienced and competent individual to take on the role of Marketing Officer to work within our busy Development Team and manage all marketing endeavours. This role will be 40 hours a week (all year round), working Monday to Friday with some flexibility required for evening and weekend work when needed to support the marketing efforts by attending school events for example.
The candidate should have previous experience in marketing and possess skills appropriate for the creation of materials. The ability to demonstrate a high level of professional achievement are essential. Knowledge of website and social media management, as well as copywriting and advertising are necessary. Equally important are personality, aptitude and the ability to communicate effectively at all levels.
You will be part of a friendly and supportive team, and training will be available to enhance skills. Staff also benefit from 25 days annual holiday plus bank holidays, free parking and free refreshments and three course hot lunch during term time.
Further details may be obtained from our website or from HR on 01258 882306 or email [email protected]. Applications must be submitted on the school’s application form. The closing date for applications is Friday 1st March 2024 Please note that we are not accepting applications for this position through any employment agency and all applications should be made direct to the school.
Milton Abbey School is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. The appointment will be the subject of an enhanced disclosure from the Disclosure and Barring Service. Additionally, please be aware that Milton Abbey School will conduct online searches of shortlisted candidates. This check will be part of a safeguarding check, and the search will purely be based on whether an individual is suitable to work with children. To avoid unconscious bias and any risk of discrimination a person who will not be on the appointment panel will conduct the search and will only share information if and when findings are relevant and of concern.
Please note that our school is a no smoking site. www.miltonabbey.co.uk Registered Charity No 306318
From kitchen classrooms to hedge health: farmer George Hosford dives into hedge surveying for new farming incentives, and the latest school visit
The young stock are out grazing cover crops. There’s lots of leaf and a good many roots, and they get a fresh hectare every day, so they don’t over-tread the ground
At the end of last year, a few members of our farm cluster group met at Hammoon to learn how to survey hedges. Led by hedge expert John Calder from Dorset Climate Action Network’s Great Big Dorset Hedge Project, we explored a few kilometres of hedges around Adam’s farm. They were in pretty good condition, mostly made up of a healthy mixture of species. There were plenty of trees and we even found hops, which are rare in Dorset. The prime purpose of our visit was to learn what we needed to do in order to take advantage of the hedgerow offer, part of the new Sustainable Farming Incentive standards (SFI). For this, we don’t even have to record the species, but as John pointed out, it can be informative. An old rule of thumb is that the number of tree and shrub species in a 100ft (30 metre) length of hedge can indicate its age, with one species for every 100 years. A single-species hedge is likely to be less than 100 years old while a 1,000 year old hedge is likely to contain ten to 12 species. However, this formula must be used with caution.
The cows are indoors for winter, munching on hay made from the farm’s wild flower margins
For example, it’s anyone’s guess how this is supposed to work if we are surveying our own new hedges, planted last winter, where we were planting up to 10 species within 30m. For the purposes of SFI, we simply have to assess each stretch of hedge around a field according to the Adams formula, which will help us to decide the most suitable management for the hedge in the future, whether trimming, laying, coppicing, gapping up etc. There are bonuses available if you have a tree per 100m of hedge. These can be existing, newly planted, or a suitable hedge plant selected and marked to not be trimmed and allowed to grow up. John and his team have been helping many farmers across Dorset to learn about this, and to get their hedges into SFI. John has put huge amounts of energy into the development of the SFI hedgerow standards, with numerous messages and presentations to DEFRA, RPA etc, and one enduring sadness is the absence of any incentive in SFI to actually plant new hedge. We very much hope this will materialise in the next chapter of releases. For more information see the Great Big Dorset Hedge project here.
Daisy the ewe is known for her patience with school visits – even after all the toast has been eaten
Banished empties The cows are indoors for winter; the plumper ones are munching on hay made from our wild flower margins, the thinner ones are on the lovely, soft, sweet meadow hay – much more digestible with less roughage. Pregnancy diagnosis detected six empty out of 70, which is a bit higher than it should be. The three empties we have kept have been banished to the steep banks of the valley – no nice warm shed for them! The young stock are in two groups grazing cover crops. There’s lots of leaf to eat and a good many roots this year – thanks to the damp autumn, daikon radish and turnips abound. They get a fresh hectare every day, so they don’t over-tread the ground, and leave plenty of green matter in place to grow on in the milder periods.
Reggie has done an outstanding job with his ewes
A new kitchen classroom December saw the inaugural session in our new kitchen classroom. A group of willing participants from Durweston school arrived ready to try out the programme that our friendly teacher Penny had worked out. The plan was for the children, with careful guidance, to prepare and cook a simple vegetable soup, including fresh farm-squeezed rapeseed oil, field-grown potatoes and onions from the garden. They would also be shaping and baking rolls made with 50 per cent homegrown wheat flour, having first seen the wheat being ground into flour. And then, if successful, taste the result. Penny brought along dough she had prepared the day before, using some of our wildfarmed wheat flour, which the children made into a variety of shapes. The bread was very tasty, and considerably more popular than the soup (although I hasten to add that it too was very tasty)! In between the cookery, the children painted farm themed pictures and did a cutting and sticking exercise to help them realise which foods originate locally and which come from overseas. Pictured above is Daisy the sheep on the same school visit. She excelled herself on the last school farm visit of the year – she has such patience and gentle endurance. Everyone wants to stroke her, and she stays on long after all the toast has been eaten. Hands-on experience is an important element of school visits, even in mid-winter. Some of the ewes are wonderful with the children (much more tolerant than with adults!). On the left is Reggie, who was at work over Christmas. All the ewes had a red rump – we changed his raddle crayon, and none turned blue. Let’s keep it that way and have a nice compact lambing period in May.
Employ My Ability offers vocational training for students with learning disabilities and special educational needs and disabilities. One of their students, Maddie Walters, spent her work experience with us, and now writes a regular column – Ed
It’s February, which means Valentine’s Day is nearly here! Since Valentine’s Day is all about loving and giving and sharing love, in this month’s article I thought I would share with you some homemade decor and gift ideas to for your Valentine on the 14th. If you are having a Valentine’s Day party a heart garland is an easy Valentine’s Day decoration to make. This simple pipe-cleaner garland is so sweet and not hard at all to make. One of the easiest ideas you can make is a simple hanging heart decoration – hang it anywhere!
Easy treats Want a romantic sweet treat that is simple to make? Chocolate-dipped strawberries are perfect: easy to make, pretty to look at and oh so yummy to eat!
Hanging Heart Craft Pink String Pink or patterned paper in Valentine colours, cut into heart shapes of various sizes Pink gems optional This craft is really easy because all you have to do is cut five or six hearts from some love-themed paper and punch a hole in the top and the bottom of each heart. Thread the hearts through with pink or red string, hang it up and feel the love!
Galentines Why not spend Valentine’s Day with your best friends? Watching rom com movies or curling on the sofa eating chocolates is always great, but you can celebrate the BFF love and make simple bracelets! It’s really easy and fun to share the making and the giving both. Bracelets can be customised in so many different ways and styles – not just for Valentine’s Day but any occasion.
If craft is not your forte, then maybe look for something special to buy instead. These sweet little charms could be perfect for loved ones and best friends (whispers my personal favourite is the ‘little bit of love’ charm) so you can share the love all year round. I hope you enjoy your Valentines Day, however you choose to celebrate it! Maddie.
should be something to rejoice about , but while caring is love, it also needs effort – veering towards work – and it is mostly unpaid. Many people in North Dorset, as everywhere in the UK, provide unpaid care. At the 2021 census there were approximately 5,500 people providing unpaid care in North Dorset. That’s roughly one in 14 of us. Around 2,400 of us in North Dorset were caring for others, unpaid, for more than 50 hours per week. Consider then the additional numbers of people who are also contending with caring, unpaid, for people with diseases like dementia. A fellow constituent got in touch just last week to share their pain and frustration at the lack of support available to help care for his wife’s increasing needs. Liberal Democrats support increasing the Carer’s Allowance and making respite breaks a statutory right for unpaid carers to ensure they receive the support they need. But this is only part of the answer to a bigger challenge. For years, unpaid care has been one part of the wider failure to come up with a solution for social care. The Dilnot Report concluded in 2011 that the adult social care system was not fit for purpose and required more funding, and if media plaudits are the metric of success then it did a great job. But that report ran into the sand as the coalition government gave way to the current government in 2015. The sorry observation is that all politicians have an idea about what could be done to solve the problem. It’s just that none can work out how to get re-elected when they’ve done it – just ask Teresa May. Local councils that pay for social care are starved of cash, which is taking social care backwards. So, the longer we wait, the worse it will get and the unjust situation we have now will become a broader and much more serious economic problem. Our population is ageing, with proportionately fewer workers over time paying tax to support the current care system. So families will inevitably pick up the burden by increasing unpaid care. This will naturally take more people out of the workforce, further reducing the tax being paid, in a predictable vicious circle. It has to be said that this caring burden also falls unequally on women. Our government has promised everything and achieved nothing for care and carers in England. They say this is a priority, but there is no will and no plan. England is 20 years behind others in the UK. Scotland has a working system that provides means-tested free personal care for over-65s who need it. This law was proposed by Scottish Liberal Democrats and passed in July 2002. In Scotland you don’t have to sell your house before you can have care. Deferred Payment Agreements avoid that prospect. Liberal Democrats prefer the Scottish solution for England too, and it is in our manifesto. Germany and the Netherlands began solving this problem more than a generation ago, through compulsory social care insurance for all adults. Other solutions are available and while we should learn from others, let’s actually decide and act. Today, people are enslaved by the way we fail to deal with social care in England – and it could happen to any of us. Liberal Democrats do have the will and we do have a plan to restore people’s freedom and confidence, to enable people to decide and afford what they need, rather than soldier on unseen, unsung and unvalued. Gary Jackson North Dorset Liberal Democrats
They say there’s no such thing as an honest politician, but that’s an over-simplification. Some politicians are genuinely driven to do their absolute best for all their constituents, particularly the less fortunate ones, and often do so at great personal cost to their private lives. Unfortunately there are others all too willing to accept donations or favours from corporate businesses, and in return they lobby government on behalf of those businesses. The gambling industry, for example, uses this tactic to influence politicians, as do the fossil fuel companies. Polls show that the majority of UK citizens now accept the need for urgent environmental action. The fossil fuel industry has therefore changed tack, and now promotes Climate Delay with the message: ‘Yes, of course the climate is changing, but it’s fine. We still have time, so we can all relax and carry on burning fossil fuels for a while yet’. It’s what we all want to hear, that things aren’t as bad as they seem and that we don’t have to change our lifestyles too much. Seductive. And destructive. Try telling the people whose homes and businesses have already been flooded twice this winter that we don’t have to take urgent action.
Don’t tell us Moving on to New Year resolutions, here’s one I wish all politicians would adopt – Tell the Truth. Don’t tell us you’re committed to protecting the environment, and then abandon it as ‘green crap’. Don’t tell us you’ve an ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal, when you haven’t. Don’t tell us you’re building 40 new hospitals, when you aren’t. Don’t tell us that Rwanda is safe to send asylum seekers to, while granting asylum to Rwandans fleeing persecution from their own government. Don’t tell us you’re on track to reach net zero by 2050, when your Climate Change Committee states that you are not. Don’t tell us more drilling in the North Sea will ensure the UK’s energy supply, when most of the oil and gas will be sold on the global market. Don’t tell us the drop in inflation is thanks to your policies, when the real cause is a global drop in prices. Now, more than ever, we need honest politicians. Ken Huggins North Dorset Green Party
From SAD lamps to simple self-care, Dorset Mind ambassador Lucy Lewis shares some tips for thriving during winter’s gloom
As the days get colder and darker, it is common to notice similar changes in our own mood and wellbeing – the decrease in daylight hours and the arrival of gloomier weather can have a significant impact on our mental health. It’s a phenomenon commonly referred to as the ‘winter blues’ or even Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in more significant cases. But there are some strategies that may help you to manage your mental health during the winter months when the weather becomes melancholy.
Make the most of the daylight One of the primary reasons for winter blues is the reduced exposure to natural daylight. Lack of sunlight can disrupt our circadian rhythm and decrease the production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that plays a crucial role in mood regulation. This can in turn lead to sleep issues, reduced energy and low mood. To combat this: Open your curtains and blinds during the day to let in as much natural light as possible and try to sit near a window when you can Maybe invest in a light therapy box, or ‘SAD lamp’, which mimics natural sunlight and can help improve your mood and energy levels Spend time outdoors, even on cold and overcast days. Just a short walk during daylight hours can make a significant difference.
Maintain a consistent routine The winter months can disrupt our daily routines – it feels easier to stay in bed longer, skip exercise and avoid social activities. However, maintaining a consistent routine can be a powerful tool to manage your mental health. To combat this: Set a regular sleep schedule to ensure you’re getting enough rest. Incorporate physical activity into your routine, even if it just means doing some indoor exercises Make plans with friends or family to stay socially engaged, even if it’s just for a video chat.
Practise self-care Self-care is essential all year round, but it becomes even more crucial during the winter when our mental health may be challenged. Incorporate it into your daily routine: Engage in activities that bring you joy – perhaps reading, painting or playing music. Practise relaxation techniques like deep breathing, meditation or yoga. Ensure you’re getting enough rest to recharge your mind and body. Remember that self-care is not a waste of time; it is productive and important and can help you maintain both your physical and mental health.
Stay mindful of your diet Comfort food becomes far more appealing during the winter months, but a poor diet can negatively affect your mental health. Opt for a balanced diet:
Include plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains in your meals.
Limit your consumption of caffeine and alcohol – they can exacerbate mood swings.
Stay hydrated by drinking enough water throughout the day.
Consider vitamin D supplements if you are not getting enough daylight (discuss with appropriate medical professional first).
Seek professional help If you find that your winter blues are becoming overwhelming and affecting your daily life, don’t hesitate to seek professional help. Talk to your GP if your feel that your daily functioning is being affected by your low mood.
Support for you:
Visit dorsetmind.uk for local mental health support and ways to keep mentally healthy
Call Samaritans on 116 123 for free 24/7 emotional support
Call Dorset’s mental health helpline Connection for support on NHS 111
