Dorset Council supported films in certain village halls, and these remained popular into the early 1980’s, says local guide Paul Birbeck.

Imagine a world with few domestic cars, telephones or television. No mobile devices, computers. internet or social media platforms. What would you do for entertainment? How would have spent your time and keep in touch with friends and relations?

Many people remember such times, some – those who hanker for a simpler, less complex lifestyle than we live today – with affection. My memories of growing up in the 1950’s are formed of climbing trees, playing sport, walking, cycling and exploring with friends. If the weather was poor we played board games and cards. The dark brown radiogram, record player and the crackly black & white TV in the corner of the lounge were the height of modernity. By the early 1960s, Saturday mornings often involved walking under the railway arches below Oxted railway station to the Odeon cinema, where eating popcorn and watching children’s films were more than satisfactory. Trailers for the adult blockbusters, screened in the afternoon and evening, only tempted young teenagers to unsuccessfully try and pass off as 18 years old to gain entry…

Early cinema in Dorset

In late C19th Dorset, early commercial cinemas, or picture houses, opened in Bournemouth and Christchurch and were the first to show short cinematic film programmes. By the 1930’s, cinema houses had started to open in most market towns and people began to ‘go to the pictures’

As the Hollywood film industry evolved through to the 1950s, Dorset’s town cinemas were supplemented by rural properties like chapels and village halls which were modified to enable the latest films to be shown. The film stars were the idols of the day.

Mobile cinema

In remote rural areas, travelling showmen provided Bioscope Booths at travelling fairs, enabling more people to see moving pictures for the first time. Mobile cinema units travelled around the county. These vehicles carried a self-contained generator and mounted projector which projected on a rear view translucent screen. In his book ‘A Century of Cinema in Dorset 1896-1996’, film enthusiast Peter Dyson describes evidence of such units touring the BV on a regular basis into the 1960’s.

In 1976 Dorset Communities Council supported a scheme which supported preferential booking rates for selected films in a number of village halls. These remained popular and well supported into the early 1980’s.
Today, cinemas had some success in fighting the competition of television, but they have never regained the influence they held in the 1930s and 40s, and audiences have dwindled. In the 1990’s we saw a boom in out-of-town multiplex cinemas, and the few remaining town cinemas invested in digital projection facilities capable of producing screen images that rival the sharpness, detail and brightness of traditional film projection. Only a small number of more specialist cinemas retained film projection equipment.

Now most people see films on television, via satellite or subscription on demand services. Streaming film content on computers, tablets and phones is common, proving more convenient for modern audiences and lifestyles. However, it is still possible to find evidence of the old movie houses in the towns around the Vale. For example, Sherborne once had four cinema facilities. Physical evidence has long disappeared, but posters, old photographs and contemporary personal memories are still shared on social media. In contrast, the Tivoli Theatre in Wimborne has survived and flourished to ensure the ‘Magic of film’ lives on.

by Paul Birbeck

If you think our modern TV soaps are racy, you should have lived in north Dorset in the 19th century, says Roger Guttridge.

An editing error in last month’s Looking Back column affords me an excuse to indulge in an historical tale that is rather close to home.

The insertion of brackets around my first reference to the ‘former Traveller’s Rest’ in my story on the Dorset and Somerset Canal gave the impression that this long- lost pub and the present-day Fiddleford Inn occupied the same building.

They definitely did not, although I confess that the BV editor is not the first to make this assumption.
I have read similar claims elsewhere, including in promotional flyers published by the Fiddleford Inn itself. Although I say it myself, no- one is better placed than I to unravel the story of Fiddleford’s pubs.
The present-day Fiddleford Inn was not a pub at all until the late 1960s, although it was a brewery in the 19th century and probably also the 18th.

It features in one of the family legends told to me by my maternal grandfather, Jim Ridout, about our smuggling ancestor Roger Ridout.

The story goes that Roger beat up an Excise officer who dared to inquire about the contents of a jar that the gang leader was carrying from the brewery to his home in Okeford Fitzpaine. It actually contained fast-acting yeast and the smuggler shook it vigorously, pulled out the stopper and directed it into the officer’s eyes.

Smugglers outwit the law

Roger Ridout’s mother, Susannah Appowell, was a Fiddleford girl, and the smugglers stored their contraband at Fiddleford Mill.

As to the brewery, this was owned by the Adams family for much of the 19th century, and they substantially extended it, adding an archway which gave wagons access to the back yard. During my childhood, the arch was still there, closed to the road by a large green gate.
The outline of the arch can still be seen around the Fiddleford Inn’s front door.
The building was a private house, known as Archway House, until about 1967, when it changed its use to become the Archway House Hotel.
I was 17 then and living next door in a house called Woodview.
This is now Forest View, though I can’t imagine why, as the wood that provides the view has not become Piddles Forest. This property hosted Cressey’s tannery in the mid-19th century.

The Archway House Hotel was initially unlicensed but acquired a liquor licence within two or three years and became the Fiddleford Inn in 1972.
It was Fiddleford’s first licensed hostelry since the closure of the Traveller’s Rest almost 90 years earlier.
The latter pub was set back slightly from the main road, a couple of doors along from Archway House.
The house is known today as Traveller’s Rest but in my childhood was a village shop called Fiddleford Post Office, run by my great-grandparents and grandparents from 1894 to 1965.

The pub that wasn’t…

My great-grandfather, Colour Sergeant James Hilliar Ridout, was working as a racecourse steward in Dublin in 1894 when a relative wrote to say that the Traveller’s Rest had become vacant.

The former Scots Guardsman famously enjoyed a tipple and thought he was on to a winner, so he upped sticks and moved his large family (plus hens and rooster!) to Fiddleford.

He thought he was taking over a pub so imagine his disappointment when he arrived to find that the Traveller’s Rest had lost its licence a few years earlier.

Thus thwarted, James and wife Harriet instead opened a shop and two years later added the Post Office. James returned to his native Okeford Fitzpaine when he wanted a drink, and was often heard singing Onward Christian Soldiers as he staggered home to Fiddleford after a pint or five. He was once cautioned for being intoxicated while on Post Office duty but behaved himself after that.
The Traveller’s Rest was previously called the Bell and dates back at least to 1753, when the landlord was William Dawson.
Fiddleford had two pubs at that time. Widow Ann Churchouse ran the Royal Oak, though the exact location of this hostelry is unknown.

by Roger Guttridge

The Old School house in Sturminster Newton reflects fascinating local history, some of it personal, says Roger Guttridge.

It’s a private house today, appropriately named The Old School, but the building in Penny Street, Sturminster Newton, has seen more than its share of uses across almost 200 years.

My ‘then’ picture above dates from 1910 and shows a crowd gathered outside for the declaration of the poll to elect the MP for Dorset North.

There were two general elections that year, both won in Dorset North by Conservative Sir Randolph Baker with a majority of 149 in January and 32 in December.

On both occasions his sole opponent was Arthur Wills, who had first won the seat for the Liberals in a by-election in 1905 and retained it in a general election the following year. Sir Randolph was the defeated candidate in those previous elections.
The Old School, whose mighty buttresses tower imposingly above Penny Street, was built in, or a little before, 1835 by the Rev Thomas Lane Fox.
He wanted to educate ‘the poor boys of this parish’, many of whom would have transferred in 1835 from the mixed Church School in what is now St Mary’s Church Hall.

It later became the Secondary Modern School and in my primary school years in the late 1950s it doubled as the canteen for pupils of the Junior School in Bridge Street (now the William Barnes School).

Every lunchtime we would file along Church Lane to claim our ‘school dinners’, cooked in, and served from, the later extension to the L-shaped Old School building. I remember that a large portrait hung on the wall of the larger hall section, where we ate.

I’ve always imagined that this was a picture of William Barnes, the poet, but this may be my memory playing tricks.

What is now the Old School’s garden was the school playground in the ’50s and I recall that there were classrooms and offices around the perimeter, now all gone.
My mother, Connie Guttridge, worked in the canteen until recruited as secretary to headmaster, Stanley Tozer, in preparation for the move to the new Secondary Modern School in Bath Road, which opened in 1960 and became the High School in 1968.
For a few years after 1960 the Old School hall hosted social events such as meetings of the Silver Thread Club.

by Roger Guttridge