Printed in Berks & Oxon Advertiser
3rd June 1938
Eliza Eldridge born 1854 Warborough.
Married William Tutty 1877 Warborough.
Died 1949 Warborough
Small, snowy-haired, and incredibly frail, Mrs Eliza Tutty received me sitting up in her little four-post bed, which looked older than she herself. ‘Set down quite close, my dear’ she said. ‘I can hear nicely, but, you understand, I can’t see you’. Outside the wet, cold May twilight deepened, the rain lashed on the leaves of a tree near the window, through which music of the glorious bells of Dorchester came, softened and mellowed by the distance. In the quiet room, a little old lady sat in a far deeper twilight, and with her hand in mine, told me little bits of her beloved Warborough.
‘I’m not a Dorchester woman’ she began. ‘Why, no, I was born and bred in Warborough round about when the Crimea war was on. I remember a man went from Warborough. A foot soldier he was, wore one of those tall, black hats. Very handsome he looked. Young men, yes, and old men, too, those days, were all clean shaved, very much as they are today, but after that war, when all the soldiers came home with beards, they came the fashion, and our last dear old King was one of the last to wear one. They had a Jubilee for him no so long ago, didn’t they? pursued Mrs Tutty. Ah, but the teas as they had they were just nothing to the other Jubilee. I remember two of them in Warborough for Queen Victoria and at the first one, and mind you, I was over 30, we had races, and there was a cruet and a copper kettle. Now I had a kettle, and I wanted that cruet, but of course, that being so, I won the kettle. So having one, I sold it to a lady for 5/-
Three dinners we had when I was a girl. Lovely dinners they were, one for peace, and one each for Jubilees. Two in Appleby’s Barn and one Shrubb’s
‘Several parsons, I remembers’. ‘Parson Smith (his son, Mr Norman, lives at Shillingford), and Parson White. Parson Chalker, he married me’.
Isn’t the green at Warborough lovely? She asked. ‘They’ve always thought a power of the green, and when I was little, the earliest I can remember was cricket there in top hats. I believe they plays football there now’ she said, regretfully, evidently having a lingering penchant for cricket in top hats. ‘Parson White, he fell down dead in the pulpit, and quite a young man. Warborough always was a lovely village, and except for the new houses over to the Old Bell, and the Greet Hall, and the War Memorial, there’s very little difference except as they keep the edges of the roads tidy nowadays and has that horrid tarmac!’
I felt that she had talked enough, and crept away, and as I went down the stair, I could the gentle old voice murmuring of top hats and copper kettles.
