The Great Rollright historian: Reginald Welbury Jeffery (1877–1956)
From Oxford fellowship to 'incapacitation'
The first step I took in my local history research was to order a copy of RW Jeffery’s The Manors and Advowson of Great Rollright (Oxfordshire Record Society, 1927). The only copy available from Abe Books was a facsimile edition printed by Skilled Books in India. Six weeks later, a beautiful slim hardback volume with a leather binding and bible paper pages arrived. I had not expected to be wooed by Jeffery’s almost century-old tome. Half of the pages are filled with footnotes. (This will set off alarm bells for any kindred editors.) The footnotes also have subnotes! Despite the piling up of sources on the page, Jeffery remains in control of the narrative at every stage and has a clarity and warmth to his voice – he compassionately describes the abject poverty of agricultural labourers in the 1830s. Moreover, Jeffery’s footnotes are indexed along with every useful noun in the book.
What beams from the page is a brilliant and magpie-like mind that is patient enough to sift and collate thousands of original archive documents and then to assimilate them into a meaningful and lively text, peppered with some lovely turns of phrase. He justifies his approach in the introduction: ‘There was no “History” of any kind to be found, so that for every fact and statement I have felt obliged to give a reference.’ What we have in Jeffery’s book is local history – a historical account of a single village – elevated by the time and intellect applied to it to a history of wider economic, social and political significance.
So how did Jeffery, an Oxford fellow and history lecturer, come to focus his attention on Great Rollright?
The new tenants of Church End House
Built in 1725, as a farmhouse, Church End House, in Great Rollright, remained in the Berry family for almost two centuries. When in 1899, farmer Richard Berry’s debts caught up with him after two decades of grinding agricultural depression, Brasenose College stepped in and bought the farm and the house. A tenant in his familial home for 17 years, Berry finally vacated the house in 1915 when in his mid 60s he found the farm too much for him.
As Carol Dingle describes in Farmhouses and Cottages of Great Rollright (2022), this provided an opportunity for the college to thoroughly refurbish the house: ‘It ensured it had the most up to date water supply from rainwater tanks and piped spring water and a renovated drainage system. It was redecorated throughout, and new sinks and cupboard added.’
With renovation works complete in 1916, Reginald Jeffery moved into Church End House with his wife Ursula and 10-year-old daughter Honor. They represented a new generation of occupant in Great Rollright, without links to the land, living in comparative comfort. Jeffery had a car making him one of the first commuters into Oxford.
Jeffery was Hulme Lecturer in Modern History at Brasenose College. Born in Bradford in 1877, Jeffery attended Bradford Grammar School. There is a hint of snobbery even in Jeffery’s obituary in The Brazen Nose (vol X, no 4, 1956), when he is referred to as ‘the third son of a Yorkshire solicitor’. He came ‘up’ to Brasenose in 1895. Remaining in Oxford after his graduation with a second-class degree, his lectureship at Brasenose, and eventual fellowship in 1922, were hard won. He took on private coaching and was a lecturer for the O.U. Extension Delegacy – offering teaching to adult learners outside the traditional Oxford undergraduate community – and taught women students. Not the most prestigious of appointments in the early 20th century! He edited the diaries of General William Dyott and authored two works for the student or general reader: The History of Thirteen Colonies of North America (1497–1763), 1908, and The New Europe (1789–1889), 1911. It was, however, his deep interest and enthusiasm for the history of the college and its estates that brought him into the centre of Brasenose life. An incipient desire to write a history of the college’s Oxfordshire estate must have been factored into the move. By 1917, he had already completed an outline for a work on Great Rollright in six chapters.
Honor and Ursula
In 1904, Jeffery married Ursula Rous. Ursula is described by his friend BC Boulter, fondly, in a passage in his obituary as ‘the beautiful daughter of another West Riding family’. Before their move to Great Rollright, the couple idyllically divided their time between Oxford and a small house in Thornton-le-Dale, North Yorkshire, where they entertained students and friends.
Born in 1906, their daughter Honor contracted poliomyelitis (polio) as a young child. Though she survived, she was left blind and her legs paralysed. Boulter describes how Ursula dedicated herself to the care of her daughter: ‘travelling with her to doctors, her legs always in irons; massaging her, interesting her in birds and flowers, and in fellow-sufferers’. The strain, however, proved too much and, in 1925, ‘Ursula, exhausted, died’ at the age of 48.
Jeffery, who had just completed the draft of his book on Great Rollright, was left devastated. He moved back to Oxford with Honor, who taught herself Braille and with the aid of a guide participated in numerous activities. Although Jeffery at first seemed to be functioning, working in his rooms in college, it became apparent that he was not sleeping. He had suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1935, he resigned his fellowship at Brasenose on account of ill health. He spent the remaining twenty years of his life in ‘incapacitation’, in the words of his college’s obituary, in the Warneford Hospital in Oxford. Until her death in 1954, Honor visited Jeffery every week in hospital.
Rest in peace
In his introduction to The Manors and Advowson of Great Rollright, Jeffery describes local history as a source of ‘mental relaxation and even reinvigoration’. It is apparent that during a period of grief, in which he was battling ‘ill-health’, the finalisation of the book for publication provided a source of ‘real pleasure’ and consolation. Jeffery left Great Rollright an important legacy – a thoroughly researched history of a quality and depth that is exceptional for what was then a poor and isolated agricultural community. Jeffery’s fondness for the village is borne out by his decision to be buried with his daughter beside his wife in St Andrew’s churchyard. In Boulter’s words: ‘Now all three are laid in the churchyard at Rollright. Lovely and pleasant they were in their lives, and in death they are not divided.’
With thanks to Carol Dingle and Brasenose College Archives for all their help providing key documents and photographs.
That's rather lovely but also rather sad. Especially as it seems as if Honor went on to be fiercely self sufficient and perhaps Ursula could have stepped back a bit maybe ... who knows.