The Iffley History Society
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Iffley People Continued 
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Lists Iffley has two sources from the 1830s: the schedule of land allotted at enclosure in 1831, and a schedule of properties affected by a proposed railway in 1837. Surnames appearing in these two and not in the above registers: 1831 Fell Lock Lockhart Salter Twopenny 1837 Bayley Bowerfoot Buckland Bull Forrest Haynes (Haines) Leake Rainsford Salmon Watkin New Surnames From Other
Records 1853-1901 1853 ER Benson 1861 C Basson Cobb Cunnington
Dixon (Dixen, Dicksey) Hinton Noble Palmer Partridge Romsey Tibbles Walford 1871 C Barter Belcher Brewer
Clayton Clifford Combes Croame Crundall (Crundwell) Garden Gillam Ind
Ives Ma(u)nder(s) Matt Mattingley Merriman (Merryman) Millard Mostyn-Owen
Pollard Rowley Stimson Surtice Wickson (Wixon) 1881 C Bowden Draper Ford Golby
Lever Peck Shipperly 1890 ER Savin(g)(s) Titcombe
Treadaway Whitten 1900 ER Millstead Some of the above represent
families which had developed into village dynasties by 1914, notably: IFFLEY PEOPLE Juliana de Saint Remy
was Robert's daughter. By 1189 she had inherited Iffley manor, still held
from Geoffrey de Clinton. She gave away the advowson to Kenilworth Priory,
a foundation which de Clinton favoured. (She may have thought they were
better placed to do battle with the likes of Oseney Abbey than she was.)
It is in Juliana's time that we find the first reference to Iffley Mill;
she gave eighteen pence rent from it to two local religious foundations. Annora was an anchoress
- a nun who lives a life of prayer alone and not in a community. She lived
in a cell beside Iffley church c1232-42 and may have paid for the Early
English sanctuary. She was a widow, a daughter of the De Braose
family who had fallen foul of King John. Sir Richard Abberbury built Donnington Castle near Newbury and was a favoured supporter of Richard II (1381-99) who gave him the manor of Iffley. On 1393 Abberbury founded almshouses in Donnington and endowed them with rents from Iffley manor. Deeply involved in the bitter conflicts between Richard II and the House of Lancaster, he lost his influence and status when Richard fell. John de la Pole was
the second Duke of Suffolk, succeeding at eight years old his father,
William, who was murdered by political enemies in 1450. William (and his
father Michael) had fallen out with warlike contemporaries by urging peace
with France. John was born in Ewelme, the manor which his mother Alice
had inherited from her father Thomas Chaucer. It was from Thomas (a rising
star, unlike Abberbury) that John inherited Donnington and its almshouses;
he renewed the foundation. His coat of arms appears in a fine perpendicular
window in the nave of Iffley church. John married Elizabeth, sister of
Richard III, in 1460. He died in 1491. Arthur Pitts was a sixteenth-century
churchman, Archdeacon of Oxford, who died in 1579. This was a difficult
time for Catholics who refused to adopt the new, Protestant, doctrines
and accept the Queen as Head of the Church in England. His family lived
at Iffley rectory and suffered for their faith; Arthur Pitts the younger
spent time in the Tower. Barton Holyday was Archdeacon
of Oxford 1626-61, spanning the reign of Charles I, the Civil War and
the Commonwealth. Not surprisingly, he sought escape in writing poetry.
Holyday lived at Iffley rectory where he died in 1661 "of the epidemical
fever that rageth now abroad". His second wife died two months later;
she is buried at Iffley but he, as an archdeacon, is buried at the Cathedral. Thomas and Sarah Nowell
married in 1764; she was the daughter of Sir Thomas Munday, upholsterer
and former mayor, and he was principal of St Mary Hall (now part of Oriel).
They came to Iffley in 1767 to live at The Manor House. They founded a
charity to educate poor children; the education was basic and the aim
was to fit the children for work in "good service", an ambition
otherwise beyond them. Sarah died in 1800 and Thomas a year later. Their
charity developed throughout the nineteenth century and still exists. The Danbe family was
involved with Iffley lock and/or mill on and off from 1767. They were
a Sandford family originally and had married into the family of Hill,
Sandford millers. Danbes were at Iffley mill until 1846. After the death
of Robert Danbe in 1789 his sister Elizabeth was the lessee, then Ann
another sister, then nephew Robert. Robert and Charlotte his wife had
a son, Robert Perceval, baptised in 1848, but the family did not return
to the mill; the baby's father is just "gent" in the baptism
register. Edward Marshall (later Marshall Hacker) came to Iffley as tenant of the Rectory estate in 1803. His wife Mary Ann Burton was the daughter of a previous vicar; she remembered Iffley with affection and wanted to come back. When Edward became parish priest himself (1819) he was already a prosperous man, able to acquire the Rectory estate and leave it in his will for the support of future parish clergy. He was active in setting up the parish school in 1838, and marked the event by planting the chestnut tree outside the church gate. Edward died in 1839 at 64. His daughter Mary remained a pillar of the Iffley charities until her death in 1901. His son Edward (d.1883) wrote "An Account of the Township of Iffley". John Henry Newman, later
Cardinal, was vicar of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, in the 1830s. Littlemore
was a detached part of that parish and its people had to go into town,
or use the neighbouring churches in Sandford or Iffley. Newman campaigned
for Littlemore, urging that it should be a parish with its own church;
against much opposition he carried the day, and the church of SS Mary
and Nicholas was consecrated in 1836. From 1833-36 Newman's mother Jemima
and his sisters lived at what is now Grove House, on Iffley Turn. There
he visited them, and from there they attended the foundation-stone ceremony
in Littlemore. Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. John Parsons owned The Old Bank in Oxford High Street and lived at Hawkwell House in Iffley. From there he brought his son Guy for baptism in Iffley church in 1837. The house was his "country place" offering good shooting, and good farmland on the arable slopes above Church Way. Parsons was energetic in local charities and in support of the parish school. He fought Acton Warburton (see below) tooth and nail in the 1850s. He pulled down hovels and built good stone cottages for his farm workers and outdoor servants (83-9 Church Way). "Hawkwell" has been demoted to staff quarters for the hotel which has transferred its name to a neighbouring villa. Thomas Acton Warburton
became parish priest of Iffley in 1853. He came of a clever, energetic
Anglo-Irish family; his brothers George and Eliot made it to the Dictionary
of National Biography. Thomas had published work on the Normans (Rollo
and his Race) and took on a Norman church with relish. He was active (and
confrontational) in local charities and made a huge impression on village
life, not least for his churchmanship which was very "high".
Warburton left for a parish in Dulwich in 1876. The Strong family lived
at The Elms (now the Hawkwell House Hotel) where Henry Strong, bank manager
and ex-Indian Army, was marrying off his daughters between 1858 and 1869.
His fourth daughter Emily (1840-1904) married Mark Pattison in 1861; he
was Rector of Lincoln College and 21 years her senior. This strange alliance
is said to have inspired George Eliot in creating one aspect of Dorothea's
character for "Middlemarch". Emily (or Emilia) spent much time
in Italy and France studying art and publishing her findings. During her
time in England she developed a concern for the rights of women at work.
Pattison died in 1884. In 1885 Emilia married Sir Charles Dilke, who had
been the accused in an unpleasant divorce case. Restoring his reputation
became one of her causes. Joe Wilson was born
in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1854 and came to Iffley to teach in the parish
school in the 1870s. He stayed here for the rest of his life as schoolmaster,
choirmaster, lay clerk and grist miller. His first wife Mary Alice also
taught at the school, and they lived in the Nowell school house. Mary
was the daughter of Robert Moore Jefferies who operated Iffley Mill 1880-94,
with Wilson holding the lease from Lincoln College. The Wilsons had four
children. In 1886 Mary died. Joe married again in 1887 and had a second
family - of whom Katherine, or Kitty, married into the Oxford family of
Wyatt with a draper's shop at Carfax. The Wilsons now lived in the mill
house and rented out the grinding to different millers after 1894. The
mill burned down in 1908 and the family moved to a nearby villa called
"Mill Hill" (now demolished). Joe Wilson died in 1916. Edward Cordrey (1884-1972)
was born into a cottage family as one of thirteen children. The family
came from Littlemore, where they first appear in the late eighteenth century.
In 1901 Edward was still living at home and working as a printer's compositor.
On his marriage he moved to Hurst Street but he remained fascinated by
Iffley. He wrote a collection of memoirs; working as he did at Mowbray's
it seemed natural to him to go into print, and the artist C.E.Brock whom
he knew through Mowbray's provided illustrations. "Bygone Days at
Iffley" came out as a booklet in 1956, to be sold in aid of the church,
and was reprinted in 1981. The village he recalls is that of 1890-1914,
still surrounded by fields but rapidly changing. Edward's daughter Jean
Cordrey did much to make her father's collections available. She left
the copyright of "Bygone Days" to the parish church. John Allen (1857-1934) came from Northern Ireland to join a Cowley engineering company, Eddison and Nodding. Allen bought the company in 1897; he expanded what had been the Oxford Steam Plough Company by diversifying into motor vehicles, and his sons followed him in the business. George Allen ("the Major") was also an aviator who was interested in aerial photography; he was killed in a road accident in 1945. J J Cullimore Allen ("the Captain") remained part of the Iffley community all his life. Members of the family lived at Wootten and at The Elms (see Strong above). Hannah Pearsall Smith
(1832-1911) came to Court Place as a widow with her son Logan, in 1906.
She was famous as a Christian evangelist in her native America and in
Britain. Logan was known as a writer, his sister Alys was married to Bertrand
Russell. The worlds of literature and philosophy came together at Court
Place, in the shape of distinguished visitors. One of them, George Santayana,
used Iffley as the setting for part of his novel "The Last Puritan".
The family left in 1911. Sir George Forrest (1845-1926) retired from service in India to live at what is now Grove House on Iffley Turn. He wrote on the history of India, and both he and his wife gave serious attention to the Iffley community. In 1918 Sir George set up a Memorial Institute in memory of the 21 Iffley men killed in the first World War. This meeting-place and library was in a cottage annexe at first; it was later installed in a corrugated-iron Memorial Hall which (says Cordrey) Sir George referred to as the Burmese Elephant. Elephant or no, it provided a venue for the community until demolition in 1973. Sir Alan Gardiner came
to Court Place from Hampshire in 1947, in winter blizzards. He was a distinguished
Egyptologist, known for his work on Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. In his
will Sir Alan said he would like Court Place to be offered to Oxford University.
The University bought the house in 1964 and has used it as graduate accommodation. |