Bakers of Warborough
Key to family members:
F – Thomas Richard Bullock M – Mary Jane 1. Eleanor Annie (Nell), 2. Hilda Mary, 3. Amy Etna, 4. Cyril James, 5. Lydia Winifred (Winnie) 6. Frederick George, 7 Phillip Joseph, 8. Robert Redvers, GD – Gwendoline, Dog – unknown
Thomas (Tom) Richard Bullock (1860-1917)
Tom was born in Hurst, Berkshire, the son of John & Eliza. John died in 1861 and Thomas appears on the census living with his grandparents in Appleford in 1871. At the time of his marriage to Mary Jane Halliday he was living in Warborough. He ran the village bakery until his death aged 58 in July 1917
Mary Jane, born in Dorchester in 1858 and was the daughter of George, a beer house keeper and Agricultural labourer & Mary.
She and Tom were married in Dorchester in October 1879.
Tom & Mary had two children who died young and are not on the photo but are both buried in St Laurence Churchyard.
(1894-1895)
Tom was an active member of the community, a Parish Councillor and a member of the Cricket Club.
Mary died in November 1912 and she and Tom are buried in St Laurence Churchyard Warborough.
Eleanor Annie (Nell) (1880-1956)
Nell was born in Warborough in August 1880. On the 1901 she is listed as being a mother’s help. She married Phillip Lowe in Warborough in 1904, a land agent’s assistant and they lived in Cowley Oxford They had one daughter, Mary Eleanor and Nell died in 1956 in Oxford
Hilda Mary (1883-1972)
Hilda was born in December 1883. The 1901 census says she is a teacher (school) so presumably in Warborough and in 1911 she is a School Mistress, County Council. She married Herbert Locke, an auctioneers clerk from Middleton Cheney in 1911 and they moved to Banbury. They had two children, Gwendoline (pictured) and Richard James. Hilda died in 1972 in Banbury.
Amy Etna (1886-1958)
Amy was born in May 1886. She was a private nurse and never married but worked in Devon & Dorset, where she died before being brought home to be buried in Warborough.
Lydia Winifred (1887-)
Lydia was born in April 1887 and the last confirmed listing of her is in 1911 when she was in Warborough ‘assisting in the family business’
Frederick George (1892-1961)
Frederick was born in 1889, the fifth child of Tom & Mary. He was working in the family business in 1911 but at the time of his marriage to Winifred Marsh in 1918 he was a Gunner. When his father, Tom became an invalid, Frederick applied to be released from his military duties so that he could run the family business. Although not fully discharged he was given time to carry on the bakery business.
Friday October 12 1917.
Frederick and Winifred had a daughter, Margaret, in 1920 but Winifred died in 1923.
In 1925 Frederick married Ethel Hitchcock. Frederick continued to run the bakery with his brother Cyril.
During WWII Frederick was a Special Constable and was the Auxiliary Bread Officer for the Bullingdon Area. The bakery was used to make meat pies that were sold at the village school and the ovens were used for cooking meals on Sundays for the residents.
The bakery closed in 1957.
Frederick died in 1961 and Ethel in 1972, both in Warborough.
Cyril James (1895-1978)
Born in December 1895, Cyril worked in the family business. In 1911 Cyril was with his sister Eleanor where he is listed as a confectioners apprentice. When he married Dorothy Evelyn Fletcher in 1918 his occupation was given as a Ships Baker on SS Virginian which at the time was in dock at Liverpool, where they married. The 1921 census shows the family, Cyril, Dorothy & daughter Joyce living in Wallasey and working as a confectioner for I D Smith Confectionery. Dorothy’s father had run the Stores in Warborough before moving to Shillingford and becoming a wholesale confectioner.
Between 1921 and 1925 when their son Thomas was born the family returned to live in Warborough. By the time of the 1939 census Cyril is at Thame Road, living in one of the cottages opposite the Bakehouse and is a baker, his daughter is a butcher’s clerk. Their son, Thomas went on to be a teacher at the school and was also a scoutmaster, of the 1st Warborough Scout Group and represented the District at the World Jamboree in Austria in 1951.
Cyril died 1978 and Dorothy in 1987.
Philip Joseph (1898-1980)
Philip was born in 1898 in Warborough but on the 1911 census he is living with Eleanor in Oxford.
Philip was a Bombardier in the Royal Field Artillery and a letter home from the front was quoted in the local newspaper.
Bd Bullock, one of the Warborough men at the front, who after describing the anxious work he has taken part in in the trenches, gives an account of a cricket match in which he scored 30 runs showing that the game learned on the Village Green is not forgotten even within sound of the fiercest artillery action on record.
Philip is not found on the 1921 census but in 1939 is lodging in Banbury with William & Florence Cave, he is an Assistant Manager at United Dairies.
He married Florence in 1962 and died on 25th December 1980 in Bodicote.
Robert Redvers (1900-1981)
Robert, the youngest of Tom & Mary’s children was born in February 1900. In 1921 we find Robert living in Wealdstone where he is a Pastry Cook working for James Gilham, a Master Baker.
In 1926 he married Elizabeth Minchington in Weymouth and their son, Anthony was born in 1928. The family are still in Weymouth at the time of the 1939 register and Robert is now a Baker/Confectioner. Elizabeth died in 1948. Robert remarried in 1950 to Mabel Hatcher. He died in Weymouth in November 1981.
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The Bakehouse
From W&S Society Newsletter 2 – January 1992 written by Mrs Margaret Heather nee Bullock
The Bakehouse on Thame Road was originally the village Bakery and the room now used as a dining room was the Bakehouse and included a large bread oven which extended into a lean-to stone building on the end of the house. Next to the oven in the Bakehouse was an open fireplace – four bricks and a bar, with a wide chimney, and it is understood that there is a Bacon Room up the chimney where sides of bacon were smoked and then brought down and placed on a wooden rack which was attached to a large beam in the ceiling of the Bakehouse. There was a small shop at the front with a stable door.
Also, at the front of the house, at the far end, there used to be a building which extended to the path, and this many years ago was a butcher’s shop.
It is believed that the house was built in 1772. Possibly owned by a Mr Reynolds, who sold it to Mr Tom R Bullock who carried on the Bakery business until he died during the First World War, when his son Frederick Bullock took over the business, and in the early 1920s he built a new Bakehouse in the grounds. He was later joined by his brother Cyril Bullock, and they continued the Bakers and Confectioners until the Bakery was closed down in 1957
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Pauline Fletcher, when she recalled her childhood remembers the ovens were used at the weekends to cook the villagers dinners.
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Millie Pritchard, nee Tyler remembered – On Sundays my father, on his way down to bellringing, would hand our baking dish of meat and potatoes, and a plum-duff pudding, which would last us a week, to Mr Bullock at the Old Bake House, where it would be cooked. Later on, Mr Bond would ring the ‘pudding bell’ and we, along with many other families, would run to collect our Sunday dinner.
Researched by Lynda Raynor 2024-2025
