113-117 High Street

  • c. 1927/8 postcardare and College farm
  • 1980. College Farm
  • Date not known. College Farm
Archive Notes:

Old Chequers and College Farm in 1927 and 1980.

113 High Street and 115 High Street. This was the Chequers Inn which was trading as such in 1630 or, maybe, earlier.It had closed by the time of the 1911 census when it was lived in by a Thomas Messenger, a retired jobbing gardener (Ancestry census pages 214 and 215). In the 1920s, 113 High Street had become a grocery and sweet shop. From 1926, it was run as a shop by Mrs Sally Keen (nee Gomm) selling groceries and sweets. By 1939, it was a shop run by Robert Green (Bob Green), then in the late 1950s the Bowen family until c. 1961. The memories of their daughter, Leslie Bowen, of her school days in the Bell Lane School and of Miss Wren and Miss Flood are found in record 536. Later Mary Blake and Percy Blake acquired it for development purposes at least 1965 (see record 1799). By the end of the 1960s, both were houses and the Gomm family lived in one of these.

College Farm. This is marked on a map of 1593 but appears to have been rebuilt in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, believed to have been in 1768. Thomas James Robbins, son of James Robbins, was living here in 1891, 1901 and 1911 and it was in the attic here that James Robbins’ notebooks were found. Later it was the home of William Tombs, one of the pioneers of Local Government in Wheatley.

See record 981 for more photos and for details of All Souls College ownership of the farmhouse and the adjacent cottage.

The set of 1927 postcards is at record 2509

There is a copyright image from Sites and Monuments Records from 1987-9 held on https://www.pictureoxon.com/

 

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