The post that follows is based on the memories of Jenny and her husband, Tony, as they cast their minds back three decades and more to a past when village life was not quite the same as it is now.
Jenny married Tony Fell in 1966 in
her home town of Coventry, honeymooned in the Scillies, and then settled in the
village of Hellidon in Northants with its population of around 140 and fifty or
so houses. They had two children. In 1974, Jenny determined to take on the role
of village postmistress when the matter of the vacancy was raised at a parish
council meeting. By the time of the millennium in 2000 she had researched,
written and published ‘Three Ells in Hellidon’, a rather fine history of the
village. Today, in 2017, she and Tony are members of that small group – half a
dozen or so - who have been resident in Hellidon for around half a century.
There is not much that escapes the eyes or the ears of a key villager such as
the postmistress. Jenny and Tony
remember Jago very well.
 |
| The English Village - Jago Stone (1986) |
Jenny’s story begins with the man
who in the late 1970s became the licensee of the only surviving public house in
Hellidon. His name? Rowland Thomas, the village squire whom Mark, my anonymous source, first met in
1974. Rowland was the only child of wealthy parents who had bought Hellidon’s
Leam Farm and its estate in 1948, having lived there as tenants since the early
1930s. Rowland’s parents had had a commitment to Hellidon. Their son was born in
the village in 1936. When Rowland married, his
parents had a small house built
for themselves on the estate and moved in, leaving the main Georgian house for
their son and his new bride to occupy. Their marriage produced two daughters
but ended – as the swinging sixties melded into the seventies – in divorce.
Rowland was, as Jenny says, ’a bit
of a rebel’. ‘A one-off, certainly’. No one, however, could doubt his generous
nature. By the 1970s, new pond areas had been blasted and created on the
estate. There, villagers could fish for trout. A tennis court was built, also
with access for locals. Most summer evenings the lawn was laid out for croquet.
All who were interested were invited to play. Rowland had charisma as well as
money and played the flamboyant country squire with aplomb. The story of
Rowland at the wheel of a plough, clad in a velvet jacket, will have had its
origin in truth.
The scene is set in Jenny’s account
for the entrance, stage left, of the artist, jester, and general master of
ceremonies at the court of Rowland - Mr Jago Stone.
 |
| Detail from The English Village - Jago Stone (1986) |
Rowland Thomas and Jago Stone were
two of a kind. They were both rebels, thriving on being different and
non-conforming. They shared a sense of mischief. Both were hedonists making the most of the
sexual licence that each man lay claim to in their social circle. The two of
them cooked up a cunning wheeze – a summer art school, no less. Rowland owned
one other cottage in the village having previously sold a row of Hellidon cottages
to a builder for development. This single cottage was to provide the
accommodation for those attending the art school. Jago by now was resident at Leam
Farm.
Cue the village gossip that puts
the seamy and sexual gloss on the word all my sources use to characterise the
artist and the squire: ‘flamboyant’. Jago was flamboyant. Rowland was
flamboyant. The social life of the court-circle was flamboyant. The gossip, as
reported, takes us into a mythic world where Jago was ‘brushing up his
technique’, the art school becomes an excuse ‘for a bit on the side’, and
Jago’s reputation as a hedonistic artist flourished. A man whose paintings
could be ‘paid for in the bedroom’.
Could but not necessarily. The art-school experiment was short-lived,
possibly only one or two summer-times.
Jago talked in his 1983 Sunday
Express interview with Denis Pitts about his rejection of the London art world.
‘I belong in the villages’, he claimed. ‘That’s where I’m going to spend the
rest of my life and do you blame me?’ Jago gave that Sunday Express interview,
five years before he died, sitting on a bar-stool in a public house called ‘Up
the Garden Path’ in the Wiltshire village of Manton, near Marlborough. The pub
is now closed and converted into half-a-million pounds of private residential
property. Times change. But Jago always knew where he felt most at home. His
love-affair with the English village outlasted any other. And the English
village inn was a key part of this mythic world.
 |
| Detail from The English Village - Jago Stone (1986) |
Ever since the Napoleonic Wars
ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, there had been two inns in Hellidon.
One – the Barley Mow – was shut in the early 1970s; the other – the Red Lion -
remained. Much to the concern of his
accountant, Rowland bought the Red Lion from Hunt Edmunds Brewery of Banbury in
the late 1970s. For at least seven years, up till its sale by auction in the
summer of 1986, Rowland ran it at a loss as a free house. He not only rescued
the pub but also converted an attached barn into a well-appointed dining and
function room. Rowland’s acquisition added another location to his inventory of
residences for playing out his role as village squire. He rarely set foot
behind the bar – he left that to a list of volunteers – but Rowland presided,
surrounded by friends. Jago, of course, was one those volunteers.
For Rowland, financial realities
determined that he closed the doors on his village inn idyll in 1986, a decade
before he was diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease aged 60. He died two years
later in 1998. Motor Neurone disease is degenerative and after his initial
diagnosis he went once more to his Swiss ski resort, Kitzbuhel, where some
years previously he had been given the ‘Freedom of the Town’. By the end of the
illness, paralysed in body but still with his sense of hearing, he could
communicate meaning only through a blink of an eye.
For Jago, the final last orders
call in the Red Lion came just two years before his own death in 1988. I
suspect that he too shared with Rowland the constrained grace of sensing he was
terminally ill for a year or two before the end. Rowland went back to his
beloved Switzerland. Jago fell in love again and this time found peace.
---------------
To be continued next week ...
No comments:
Post a Comment