Quartered in Avebury
A selecton of people who have quartered (lived or stayed) in Avebury over the years.
01
Frederick John Kempster
•In 1904, when he was 15 years old, Kempster (1889-1918) came to live in Avebury with his sister, Ruth, and her husband.
•A congenital knee problem led to his growing until he was 2.37 m / 7’ 9.3” tall, weighing 170 kilograms / 370 lb and with an arm span of 2.55 m / 8’ 4.5 and he came to be known as The Avebury Giant.
•Ivy Hockey, whose father ran The Red Lion, recalled how he “used to let me sit on his knee and pass a half crown (a coin with a 3.2 cm diameter) through the ring he wore on his little finger.” Her father gave him rides in his convertible car with the hood down, so that he could sit up straight.
•A basket-maker by trade, Kempster later became a ‘professional giant’, taking part in a Parade of Giants at the coronation of King George V, in 1911, and touring Germany as part of theatrical company at the outbreak of World War 1.
•Having made his way home, he contracted influenza while on tour in 1918 and died, aged 29.
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02
Nora Stewart & Leopold Jenner
•As a divorcee and supporter of the suffragettes, Nora Stewart (1868-1952) was an emancipated ‘New Woman’ but also an expert in needlecraft, who revived the seventeenth century art of stump work, which creates a three- dimensional effect.
•Lepold Jenner (1869-1953) was a champion polo-player, fencer and army officer who, having served in Egypt, Gallipoli and France during World War I, was promoted to lieutenant-colonel at the end of a long and distinguished career.
•The two married in 1899 and moved into Avebury Manor in 1902. Over the next thirty-three years, they restored the house, landscaped the garden and built the West Library.
•By 1935, the Jenners could no longer afford to live in the Manor, so they first leased and then sold it to Alexander Keiller but they returned to the house they loved in death, as they are buried together in a consecrated space created where the Manor garden adjoins the graveyard of St. James Church.
The epitaph on the memorial plaque above their vault reads: ‘She was in all things the most perfect wife
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03
John Rawlins
•In 1919, Rawlins (1893-1979) moved his family and business to Avebury and built a wooden garage on the plot by the Cove.
•Having bought a dynamo, glass cells and a reel of wire, he installed “electricity throughout the entire village, bit by bit, snaking poles and wires around Avebury and its stones” in the 1920s, as his daughter, Marjorie, recalls in her memoir, Butcher, Baker, Saddlemaker, 1999.
•Later, Keiller persuaded him to move his business and home to the north side of Avebury, rebuilding the garage where Rawlins Park now stands.
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04
The Evacuees
At last they came to a village and cheerful voices were telling them to get off. They filed into a large Nissen Hut and people from the village and men in R.A.F. Uniforms helped them with their bags and cases. The R.A.F. men were from a Barrage Balloon Unit which was billeted in the village. The children were very tired but soon felt better when they were handed hot cocoa and biscuits.
A man came round the tables where they were sitting: he had papers on a clipboard and he took their names and ages. He told them he was the billeting officer and he was arranging homes for them.
People came into the hut and spoke to the man, telling him they would take a girl or boy etc. He wrote their addresses next to names of children and the children were led away by the people who would be looking after them.
The boy was still clutching his sister's hand and she wouldn’t go without him as her mother had told her. At last there were only three children left - the boy, his sister, and another girl. They sat waiting for quite a while, but no more people came in. The billeting officer said he would take them home with him.
Leonard Middleton was one of seventy children evacuated to Avebury in 1939.
This is an extract from his account of the day when they arrived
They walked down the darkened road and into a tree-lined driveway, and then saw a small house. The billeting officer, whose name was Mr Windsor, unlocked the front door and told them to go in. Mrs Windsor greeted them and said they must be tired and ready for bed, to which they readily agreed. She took them upstairs and showed them where they were to sleep; the two girls would sit in a room together, and the boy could sleep in a little room at the back. On hearing this the boy looked a bit fearful as he had never slept in a room on his own before. It must have been midnight and the boy couldn't get to sleep. He kept hearing noises and a dog howling. He got out of bed and looked out of the window, then he wished he hadn’t looked, because right outside his window was a graveyard. He dashed back to bed and got right under the covers, but he could still hear the dog howling and he was frightened. he felt something crawling up his leg and jumped out of bed with fright, only to see a little Yorkshire Terrier, which jumped on his bed.
He cuddled the dog and soon fell fast asleep.
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05
William Beveridge & Jessy Mair
•Beveridge (1879-1963) is best known for the Social Insurance and Allied Services report, known as the Beveridge Report, which was the blueprint of the welfare state.
•In 1928, his partner and cousin, Janet Philip (1876-1959), known as Jessy Mair, first rented and then bought a cottage and outbuildings on Green Street.
•For more than a decade, Beveridge, Jessy and their guests, including a young Harold Wilson, worked there every summer, John Rawlins having routed electricity to the cottage from his garage near the Cove stones.
•William and Jessy, who was instrumental in researching, drafting and publicising the Beveridge Report, married in 1942, within weeks of its publication.
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06
Ludovic Kennedy & Moira Shearer
•Kennedy (1919-2009) was a broadcaster, writer and human rights campaigner with a particular interest in miscarriages of justice and the legalisation of assisted suicide.
•Shearer (1926-2006) was an actor, ballet dancer and creator of many ballet roles, who starred in The Red Shoes (1948), The Tales of Hoffman (1951) and Peeping Tom (1960), among many other films and plays.
•Although Kennedy regarded the standing stones as ‘boring’, the couple moved to Avebury in the 1980s and lived here until 2002, playing an active part in village life.
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07
Julian Cope
•Cope (1957- ) was the singer and songwriter in The Teardrop Explodes.
•Since 1983, he has followed a solo musical career and written memoirs, novels and two studies of prehistoric sacred sites, The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European,
•Cope and his famiy lived in Avebury while he was working on One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel in the 1990s.
08
Peter Lawes
Peter made a film called 'Avebury Bits and Pieces' in1938 - the Film was a michelamy of scenes showing life in Avebury - his father was a landlord at The Red Lion. A UNIQUE "home movie" showing the pre-war restoration of the Neolithic stone monument at Avebury. The 9.5mm reels of film, last seen in 1953, had been passed on to Mr Lawes' nephew, John Hockley of Devizes, who put them away for safe keeping in a biscuit tin, re-discovering them in 2000.
