Swindon, Wiltshire
The Swindon we know today is 'New Swindon', the town that developed after
the Great Western Railway built its engineering works there. The original
town is about a mile to the South East of the new town. Our family's connection
with Swindon is with 'Old Swindon'. According to the 1861 census, this
is where Richard SIMMONDS,
my great great great grandfather, was born in 1811. He must have left
by 1839 because this is when his daughter, Mary, was born in Ealing.
 Swing
Riots - 1830
Richard SIMMONDS could have been living in old Swindon when the Swing
Riots affected the area.
Hobsbawm and Rudé (2001,
p124) explain:
On the 23rd [of November], the riots reached their greatest intensity.
Twenty-five Wiltshire towns and villages appear in the indictments;
and disturbances spread north to the area outside Swindon; to further
villages along the Hampshire border; and, above all, they now penetrated
more deeply into the interior of the county around Marlborough and Salisbury
Old
Swindon - 1831
Maybe he was still living in old Swindon when the Topographical Dictionary
of England described it as follows:
SWINDON, a market town and parish in the hundred of KINGSBRIDGE, county
of WILTS 41 miles (N.) from Salisbury, and 81 (W.) from London, containing
1580 inhabitants. This place is mentioned in the Domesday book, but
nothing further from its ancient history is on record.
The town is pleasantly situated on the summit of a considerable eminence,
commanding extensive and beautiful views of parts of Berkshire and Gloucestershire:
the principal street is wide and contains some good houses; and many
of the inhabitants being persons of easy circumstances, the general
aspect of the town is prepossessing: there is a good supply of water,
which is of excellent quality.
No branch of manufacture is carried on. The market is on Monday, for
corn etc. and on every second Monday for cattle; the latter is termed
the great market. Fairs are held on the Monday before April 5th, the
second Monday after May 12th, the second Monday in September and the
second Monday after September 11th, for cattle of all kinds, pedlary,
etc. The petty sessions of the Swindon division of the hundred are held
here.
The living is a vicarage, in the archdeaconary of Wilts and diocese
of Salisbury, rated in the king's books at £17, and in the patronage
of the Crown. The church, dedicated to the Holy Rood and situated at
the South Eastern extremity of the town, is a small unadorned edifice,
with a low tower; the interior is neatly fitted up. There are places
of worship for Independents and Wesleyan Methodists.
The free school, which was established in 1764, was founded by the
gentry of the town and neighbourhood, and is supported partly by an
endowment of about £40 per annum, arising from several bequests,
and partly by voluntary contributions; there is a house for the master,
and about forty boys are instructed in reading, writing and arithmetic.
Some very extensive quarries are worked in the immediate vicinity, the
stones raised from which are usually very large, and of excellent quality.
The Wilts and Berks canal passes about half a mile from the town, and
a reservoir, covering about 70 acres, for its supply in dry seasons,
has been constructed about a mile and a half from it, and is partly
in this parish, adding much to the beauty of the scenery.
The
Great Western Railway
Cattell and Falconer (1995) tell us that within
10 years of the 1831 description, the Great Western Railway (GWR) board
of directors, acting on advice from Daniel Gooch and Isambard Kingdom
Brunel, had chosen Swindon as the location of its main works. They chose
a site over a mile North of the old town. This was described by Richard
Jefferies (1875, 569-70) as
The poorest in the neighbourhood; low-lying, shallow soil on top of
an endless depth of stiff clay, worthless for arable purposes, of small
value for pasture, covered with furze, rushes and rowen.
Cattell and Falconer explained that there was no history of heavy industry
in the Swindon area and that workers would have poured in from all over
the country. The GWR started building the Railway village at New Swindon
in 1842. A church and schools followed. They go on to say (p. 67) that:
By 1851 the total population of the ecclesiastical district of St Mark,
which included the village and hamlets of Westcott and Eastcott, was
2,468, wheras that of the remainder of Swindon parish, including the
old town, was 2,411.
Swindon stone, from quarries in Old Swindon, provided stone for the station,
cottages, Baptist chapel, infants school, church and parsonage. Old Swindon
also provided bricks, tiles and other building materials.
Christ
Church
Although New Swindon's population had overtaken that of Old Swindon,
the original town was growing too. Christ
Church's web site tells us that in 1851 Holy Rood church had become
inadequate and was replaced by Christ Church.
References
Cattell, John and Falconer, Keith (1995) SWINDON,
The Legacy of a Railway Town, English Heritage, Swindon.
Christ Church - Swindon web site http://www.christchurchswindon.co.uk/
[accessed 23 December 2004]
Hobsbawm, E. and Rudé, G. (2001b)
'In Hampshire and the West Country' in Captain Swing, Phoenix Press,
London.
Genealogy and Swindon, Wiltshire, England web site - http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~jimella/swindon.htm
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