After retiring from the Ministry of Defence in 2017, Martin Gething has been a volunteer with the National Trust at Clouds Hill for the last six years. Discovering little was known about the pre-WWI history of Clouds Hill, he has extensively researched its history from the 18th century onwards.
The tiny Clouds Hill cottage, near Bovington, is preserved in the care of the National Trust as a memorial to T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – and is essentially ‘frozen in time’ in the mid-1930s. Nevertheless, it had a separate life as a farm labourers’ tied cottage throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.
Rather like the BBC television series on A House Through Time, this talk will build up a picture of the families who called Clouds Hill home over a period of more than a century, bringing to life a typical Dorset rural community that is so often invisible in documented records.
The story of the cottage draws extensively on the archives at Dorset History Centre, and in particular the Estate Papers of the Framptons of Moreton, together with information from The National Archives, the British Library and the British Newspaper Archive, and genealogical resources.
The talk will be held in Hope United Reformed Church at 8 Trinity Street. Doors open at 2.00 pm and the talk will start at 2.30pm.
Tickets will be available on the door and are £2.00 for members of the Friends and £3.00 for visitors. (Exact change would be appreciated, if possible).
