The old Tudor building on Cheap Street is far more than meets the eye of the casual shopper, says Roger Guttridge.

It’s one of the finest old houses in Sherborne, passed daily by hundreds who rarely give it a second thought or glance. But step inside the half-timbered Abbeylands in Cheap Street and it turns into the Tardis. Not in design, of course – there is nothing even vaguely resembling a space-travelling police box – but in scale.
“How many boarders do you have?” I asked housemaster Rhidian McGuire after he explained that Abbeylands is a boarding house for Sherborne School.
“Seventy-four.” “Seventy-four?” I doubtfully exclaimed, suddenly realising that there must be far more to this
building than meets the eye. In fact it stretches back and back and back from Cheap Street, towards the main school buildings. To my architecturally uneducated eyes, the grade II-listed building looks unmistakably Tudor, but the date of 1649 above the front door confused me (the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, died 46 years earlier). That construction date was also the year of Charles I’s execution, and the Commonwealth of England.
Troubled times.
The Dorset volume of Newman and Pevsner’s classic series on The Buildings of England suggests the dating is not that straightforward; the entrance porch includes features “that one would call Jacobean, and a hoodmould which looks Early Tudor”. “That must surely be reused,’ say Newman and Pevsner, adding that
the porch “must have originally belonged to the next-door house”. The Old Shirburnian website provides further illumination, confirming that Abbeylands – so named because it stands within the precinct of Sherborne Abbey – is a combination of two separate properties. It has been in continuous use as a boarding house since 1872, and staff and housemates are celebrating the 150th anniversary this year.

Sherborne School originally rented Abbeylands from the descendants of former headmaster John Cutler
and bought it in 1921 for £4,187. The Old Shirburnian site also confirms my suspicions of a Tudor connection, adding that the half- timbered frontage on to Cheap Street ‘dates from the late 16th century and has a projecting upper storey and three gables’.
The premises were at one time occupied by the Sherborne Coal, Timber, Corn and Cake Company, which was dissolved in 1921. I wonder if the steamroller powering up Cheap Street in this circa 1900 picture was about to pick up some coal from the shop. These days you can only drive down one-way Cheap Street and
you’re unlikely to spot a steam- powered vehicle.

There’s nothing like a naughty vicar story to set tongues a-wagging, and the Rev W M Anderson certainly did that, says Roger Guttridge.

The rector of Durweston and Bryanston was already low in diarist Julietta Forrester’s
stimation, and when he eloped with a parishioner, his reputation went through the floor.
“Received a letter from Mrs Oborne saying that Rev W Anderson had gone off on Wednesday with Mrs Axford, Lord Portman’s coachman’s wife,” Julietta noted on January 25, 1912.
“There had been talk about them for some time. He said he had loved her for 17 years! It seemed incredible!
”‘I never thought of Mrs A behaving so but Anderson was bad enough for anything! I believed he had sold his soul to Satan over the Durweston Ghost!”
This was a reference to Durweston’s headline-making poltergeist, the subject of this column in our October issue. Anderson was among those who took the spooky events of 1894-95 seriously, unlike the sceptical Mrs Forrester. Even before the poltergeist, Julietta – wife of James Forrester, agent for Lord Portman’s Bryanston Estate – was not enamoured with the rector.

Lord Portman was disgusted
After his first service at Bryanston in 1893, Julietta wrote: “I liked his appearance and voice. I wish I had liked his sermon.” In 1895 she complained that Anderson was neglecting the Bryanston half of his flock. And when Durweston and Bryanston played Blandford at cricket that same year, she commented that “our rector,
Mr Anderson declined to play because he was afraid of the weather!” It appears that God was not on their side either.
After Blandford declared their innings at 300 for 9, the Durweston and Bryanston XI were skittled
out for 70. Fast forward 17 years to 1912. On February 3, Julietta noted that Lord Portman was “very
disgusted” with Anderson ‘after all he had done for him, paying for him to go abroad etc”. She added: “About two years ago, on hearing of the intimacy between Anderson and Mrs Axford, Lord P spoke to the former about it but A denied all the charge.”
Anderson’s more charitable parishioners might have forgiven his inability to resist the lure of love but less
forgivable was the theft of his curate’s pay packet, and money from the Coal Club fund to finance the elopement. He had also “left his wife his mother and his sister destitute”, according to Julietta.

No welcome in Halifax
Her diary continues: “Axford had spoken to Lord P about a divorce but as he had actually seen his wife off by train when she left him (because people should not say they had parted bad friends or that he had
driven her from home!), Lord P told him he had connived at the elopement and therefore would be unable to obtain a divorce. “The two [Anderson and Mrs Axford] had first gone to Halifax to her brother’s but he refused to take them in and where they went then did not appear to be known.”
Two years before his death in 2014, Pete Sherry, a grandson of James and Mrs Axford, told me the hostility to the runaway couple was such that a crowd threatened to tar and feather them as they waited on the
platform at Blandford station. Pete, of Maperton, near Wincanton, confirmed Julietta’s claim that they were turned away at Halifax and added that they then spent six months at the Pump House in Bath.
According to Julietta, Mrs Axford made a brief return to Bryanston hoping to collect the younger of her two daughters, Constance. The child refused to leave. “I suspect Auntie Con hung on to my mother and said she
wouldn’t go,” Pete told me. On February 17, Julietta noted her fear that Anderson would continue drawing his
rector’s stipend as long as he was ‘let alone’.
She added that his ‘unfrocking’ would be costly and had to go through the ‘Court of Arches’.

A quiet end
From Pete Sherry, I learned that after leaving Bath, the elopers went to Montreal, where Anderson eked out a
living as an artist. After his death just seven years later, Mrs Axford worked as lady-in-waiting to the Molson
family, owners of North America’s oldest brewing company.
She eventually returned to England with a substantial pension from Molsons of £7 10s a week. She lived in
Worcestershire until her death aged 98. James Axford, a diminutive man of less than 5 feet in height, retired in 1923. He subsequently lived with his elder daughter, Winifred, and her family at West Orchard and later Maperton, where he died in 1936 and was buried in the churchyard in an elm coffin made by his own hand.
Pete recalled: ‘He was a terrific horseman and taught me to ride ponies.
“He never talked about my grandmother. He was very strict about that and paid a solicitor to make sure she never got in touch with the family.
“We used to get dollars from ‘Auntie in Canada’ and I guess that was my grandmother.” After James Axford’s death, his estranged wife was accepted back into the family, being introduced not as Winifred’s mother but as ‘Auntie’.
• Roger Guttridge’s book Dorset: Curious and Surprising includes chapters on The Runaway Rector and
The Durweston Poltergeist.

by Roger Guttridge