On 9 January 2023, Laurence Waters gave a very well-attended talk on The History of the Railway from Didcot to Oxford.

The Great Western Railway was founded in 1833 to build a line connecting Bristol to London, with Isambard Kingdom Brunel appointed engineer. Brunel was a believer in the advantages of a broad gauge (7 foot) track and it was not until 1892 that GWR wholly moved to the standard gauge. A branch line to Oxford was envisaged in the original GWR plans but a shortage of money, and opposition from some quarters, led to this idea being scrapped. However, in 1843 Parliament passed the Oxford Railway Act and in June 1844 GWR’s line connecting Didcot Junction (as it was then known) to Oxford was opened. At Culham Brunel built a brick and stone station, which is now a listed building. The station in Oxford was located at Grandpont, close to a wharf on the Thames. The line was later extended northwards, reaching Banbury in 1850 and Birmingham in 1852. In the latter year, the station at Oxford was moved to its present location. In 1854 a spur was built to link Abingdon and Oxford. The station at Radley opened in 1873 as a new junction station for the Abingdon branch.

 In telling the story of the Didcot to Oxford line, Laurence showed many fascinating pictures and photographs of its stations, locomotives and people, from the earliest years to the present day. It was striking to see the large numbers employed at the stations and also to learn that horses were widely used on the railway for shunting. Didcot played a crucial role in this, being the location of the feed store for the horses of the entire GWR network.

Reports of previous meetings

On 14th November 2022 Liz Woolley gave a fact-filled talk: From Axtell to Zacharias: the Men who built Oxford.

Oxford expanded greatly in the 19th century and Liz Woolley’s talk introduced us to the men who shaped the development of the city in the Victorian era. They were builders, craftsmen, architects, and other professionals, as well as speculators, large and small. Several of them played multiple roles in business, politics and local government, George Parsons Hester being an example. He was a solicitor and later Town Clerk of Oxford who bought Osney Island in the early 1850s. He paid £65 per acre and quickly sold, for around £800 per acre, 125 plots to be developed by local builders. Thanks to its proximity to the new railway stations, the scheme was, for Hester at least, a great success. But the island was prone to flooding and the houses were very small and sometimes of poor quality.

Other notable builders of Oxford included the architect Samuel Lipscomb Seckham, who designed Park Town, which was completed in the early 1860s. In contrast to Osney Island, where the houses were occupied mostly by railway workers and other artisans, Park Town was marketed to the middle classes. William Wilkinson was another very successful architect, who was responsible for the Randolph Hotel and for the development of North Oxford on land owned by St John’s College, work which, following his retirement, was completed by his nephew, H W Moore. Walter Gray was a speculative property developer who played a central role in the development of North Oxford as the broker between college, architect and builders. Gray exemplified the close links between property development and politics: he was elected a city councillor in 1881, served four times as Oxford’s Mayor, and was knighted in 1903. Other notable builders and tradesmen included Thomas Axtell, a stonemason and partner in the firm of Symm & Co, which closed in 2020, and Thomas Henry Kingerlee, whose firm continues to the present day, under the fifth generation of family ownership.

Reports of previous meetings

On 10 October 2022, Lizzy Rowe gave a talk: Keble College and ‘The Light of the World’ by Holman Hunt. She began by recounting how Keble came to be founded. John Keble was the author of ‘The Christian Year’, published in 1827, a best-selling collection of religious poems. He was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford and, together with Pusey and Newman, was a central figure in the Oxford Movement. Following his death in 1866, his friends decided to found a college in his memory. Thirty-five thousand pounds were raised by public subscription and Keble College opened in 1870. The design, by William Butterfield, is in the high Victorian Gothic style, and uses brick rather than the traditional stone. It has long proved controversial. The chapel, also by Butterfield, was added in 1870, following a donation by William Gibbs.

William Holman Hunt’s painting, ‘The Light of the World’, hangs in a side chapel in Keble. Hunt was a leading member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and the painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854. It was given as a gift to Keble by its original purchasers. The picture shows Christ seeking admission at a door and is laden with religious symbolism. Two later versions believed to be by Holman Hunt exist. The larger, from 1900-1904, was purchased by the social reformer Charles Booth. Booth viewed the painting as a religious rather than artistic artefact and he arranged its exhibition throughout the British Empire where it met with huge interest, sometimes bordering on hysteria. This version now hangs in St. Paul’s Cathedral. ‘The Light of the World’ continues to be a very popular and much reproduced work of art.

Reports of previous meetings

On 11 July, in the welcome cool of the church, Tom Crook related how inadequate sewers in London led to the Great Stink of 1858.

In the 1800s, as the population grew, there were blockages in the sewers, intolerable pollution in the Thames, and outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera.

An enlightened lawyer, Edwin Chadwick, led an Inquiry into the ‘Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain’. Their report, published in 1842, recommended better water supplies and public sewers. Unfortunately, the first attempts, for example in Croydon, failed because the new sewers were narrow pipes, which blocked.

In the hot summer of 1858, the Great Stink in the Thames became unbearable in Westminster, and the Government empowered the Metropolitan Board of Works to put into effect a plan prepared by their chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette for a huge network of local and giant main sewers, pumping London’s sewage to outfalls at Beckton and Crossness. One sewer ran under the newly created Thames Embankment. Bazalgette’s scheme worked, and still works. With hindsight, it would have been better to separate foul and rain-water drainage – as London and many other places around the country are now finding out.

Note from The History of Radley: In Radley, mains water was brought to the village in the 1940s and mains sewerage in the 1950s. Before then villagers relied on wells and cess pits.

Reports of previous meetings

On 13 June 2022, Hubert Zawadzki spoke about The Land of the White Eagle: The Story Of Poland. The White Eagle is the symbol of Poland and Hubert recounted how its appearance on the Polish flag changed during the country’s history, reflecting its shifting boundaries and political vicissitudes.

Poland’s emergence dates from the 10th century, with the adoption of Christianity in 966. In 1385 it united with Lithuania and there followed 300 years during which their federal union thrived and religious tolerance was established. Yet it was also in this period that serfdom was consolidated, lasting until the 19th century.

In the final decades of the 18th century, Poland’s fortunes waned as its more powerful neighbours, Prussia, Russia and Austria, divided the country among themselves, with the Polish state disappearing in 1795. The 19th century was a period of failed insurrections and high emigration, especially to the USA, but also great artistic and scientific achievements (many by Poles living in exile).

Poland re-emerged after the first World War, only to be divided between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939 and occupied for most of World War Two by the latter, with devastating effects. From 1945 to 1989 Poland was a satellite of the Soviet Union.

Over the past 30 years, as an independent country, Poland has forged closer ties to the west, joining the EU in 2004 and enjoying rapid economic development. Hubert concluded that, despite these successes, recent history has left deep scars and a politically polarized society; there may be a bumpy road ahead.

Reports of previous meetings