There is a name that comes up again and again in shepherd Richard Widdows’ latter years. It is that is of farmer Richard Berry. Berry owned the cottage that Widdows lived in during his retirement for the final three decades of his life in Great Rollright, adjoining the church’s lychgate. Berry not only provided Widdows and his family with a roof over their heads, but also at a time when there was no state pension ensured he had much needed financial support in his role as Guardian of the Poor for the parish. For instance, in March 1897 Widdows was listed as a recipient of aid from the Major Charles Hall Memorial Charities for which Berry was trustee. Berry’s support extended beyond Widdows’ immediate physical needs. It was Berry who in 1907 wrote to the King’s Private Secretary to inform Edward VII of Widdows’ ‘102nd Birthday’ and solicited a message of congratulations from the monarch in return. After the shepherd’s death, it was Berry who launched the appeal for a tombstone to be erected in St Andrew’s churchyard in Widdows’ memory. In March 1910, readers of the Oxfordshire Weekly News were asked to send their ‘subscriptions’ for a headstone directly to the attention of: ‘Mr R. Berry, Church End House, Great Rollright.’
One in a long line of Richard Berrys
Born in 1849, Richard Berry was from a long line of farmers called Richard Berry: since the early 17th century, the eldest son of the Berrys had been christened ‘Richard’. Historian RW Jeffery traces members of the Berry family back to the 16th century in Great Rollright (see above). The Berry family’s fortunes flourished during the middle of the 19th century and the ‘golden years of agriculture’ when farming benefited from improvements in production, efficiency and yields and a run of good harvests. In this period, Berry’s father, Richard Berry, farmed the most land in the village and had ‘control of nearly half the parish’s cottages’. In the 1861 census return, he is recorded as farming 1174 acres and employing 26 men and 4 boys. The Berrys occupied one of the most elegant and comfortable houses in the village, the 18th-century Church End House. At the time of the census, they lived there with four of their own children, a dairy maid, house servant, a governess and two nephews, listed as scholars. Richard Berry junior was presumably educated at home with his male cousins.
By 1882, when Berry married his wife Caroline and inherited the farm from his father, the ‘great depression’ in British agriculture had set in. Despite Britain’s expanding urban population and growing market for food, an influx of cheap American and Russian grain slashed wheat prices: the price of bread dropped by half in the second half of the 19th century. The situation was exacerbated by extreme weather conditions and poor harvests in the last three decades of the century. Farmers across the country struggled to the point of bankruptcy, particularly those who were paying annual rents to landowners. In the 1870s, tenant farmer William Fletcher, Widdows’ employer for over thirty years, fell into arrears on his rent. He was forced to leave Manor Court Farm. In May 1880, the remains of his 21-year lease with Brasenose College was auctioned off at the Crown and Cushion Hotel in Chipping Norton. Consequently, Widdows lost his job and his home in the Coombes. It was at this point Berry stepped in, providing the shepherd with a cottage in the village.
Public Service
During the 1880s, 1890s and 1900s, Richard Berry’s name regularly crops up in the Great Rollright’s column of the Oxfordshire Weekly News in association with the offices he held in public service: Guardian of the Poor, Parish Councillor, Rural District Councillor, Church Warden and as a member of the Chipping Norton Board of Guardians. It is apparent that Berry was more than a committee man and actively embraced his social responsibilities. For instance, it was reported that in 1886 he lent his wagon to transport children from the Chipping Norton Union workhouse to Great Rollright to provide them with a day out in the country as a treat. He hosted a generous harvest dinner with roast beef and plum pudding and a band with dancing for his ‘men and their wives’. He played a decisive part in persuading the Great Western Railway to create a siding at Rollright Holt in 1887 when they opened the single line between Chipping Norton and Banbury (defunct since 1962), greatly improving the village’s transport links. In 1905, he also applied to the Postmaster General on behalf of the Parish Council to have a telegraph service installed in the village.
While Berry acted on the behalf of his local community his own financial situation was closing in on him, as described by Carol Dingle in Farmhouses and Cottages of Great Rollright: ‘Richard Berry was forced to take out a loan from a trust fund set up by his father while his overdraft was mounting at the bank, both of which he was unable to repay. The trustees foreclosed and Church End Farmhouse and farm were sold to Brasenose College in 1899. But an agreement with the college made in 1900 allowed him to stay on as a tenant and rent the farm for an annual rent of £180.’ Though Berry was fortunate to be able to remain at Church End House, money worries must have been an unrelenting anxiety. Being forced to sell his home, which had been in his family for so many generations, must have resulted in significant emotional distress.
Personal loss
Inauspiciously, it is reported in the pages of the Oxfordshire Weekly News that in June 1910, three sheep belonging to Richard Berry were struck by lightning. In the following month the paper reported the loss of his wife Caroline, who was eleven years his junior, to ‘a long and painful illness’. The Berrys had three children together: Eveline, Edith and Richard Hugh, a solicitor’s clerk.
In February 1914, prior to the break out of the First World War, Richard Hugh enlisted as a private with the Royal Fusiliers. In April 1916 at the age of 31, and recently married, he died of a war related illness on the French Front: acute gastritis after contracting scarlet fever. He is remembered in a tribute in the Oxfordshire Weekly News for his ‘genial disposition and jovial countenance’. By this time, Berry himself was also not in good health, exacerbated by his son’s death.
Leaving Great Rollright
In 1915, Berry was sixty-six and no longer able to cope with the oversight of the farm. As a tenant of Brasenose College, retiring from the farm’s management also required him leaving his home. Berry left Great Rollright to live in Headington in Oxford. Having lost his wife, his son and his farm, he finally lost the village and the people that he loved to serve. He died three years later. In an obituary in the Oxfordshire Weekly News on 20 November 1918, he was remembered primarily for his kindness: as ‘a somewhat reserved man’ whose ‘chief aim in life being to study the interests of the inhabitants and promote and carry through anything which was likely to increase their welfare and happiness’. Berry’s kindness had afforded Widdows security and stability in his twilight years; comforts that were denied to Berry in his old age.
With thanks to Carol Dingle who first drew my attention to the plight of Richard Berry.