Edmund Parsons was, for many years, joint proprietor of Parsons & Hart, a Department Store which took up considerable space (Waterloo House) on the west side of Andover High Street. The business had been started by his grandfather, William Parsons, in 1842.  William Parsons met with an untimely end in November 1858, when he was…

Pannell was born in Plymouth. His father was a ‘cycle agent and maker’, which may have stimulated his son’s interest in engineering. Pannell began his career in this sphere in 1920 with a firm in Slough and two year’s later joined the Great Western Railway’s Civil Engineering Department, gaining experience of the operation of docks…

William was the fifth of six children of merchant Henry Page and his wife Georgina. Born in Paddington, his education at private schools was cut short by the death of his father in 1875. Subsequently articled to an engineer, between c.1881 and 1884 he was employed in this capacity by the Government of Queensland in…

Alfred Oscroft was a place-names authority and polymath. Born in Nottingham, he was awarded a scholarship to the recently founded Nottingham University College, but, instead, trained as a teacher at Saltley College. After a short spell as a teacher, he joined the Royal Engineers in 1891 where he rose to Company Sergeant Major (WOII). He…

The daughter of George Washington Sandell, head of a local shipping firm of Sandell & Son, Elsie was born in Southampton and spent much of her life in the town. At the time of the compilation of the 1939 Register, however, she was residing at a guest house in Axminster, Devon, with her father and…

Born in Dunston, near Gateshead, Rutherford was the son of a railway worker. He was educated in the Newcastle area and attended the University of Durham, from where he graduated with an MA in history. Postgraduate study was undertaken at the University of Michigan, with the subject of his PhD thesis being South Africa’s federal government in the late nineteenth century.

The son of a clergyman, Charles was born in Fulham. It is not known where he undertook his primary and secondary education (to use modern terminology), but he secured a place at Cambridge to study mathematics, garduating with a first class degree in 1905. From 1906 to 1911 he was a fellow of Pembroke College…

He belonged to the Benedictine monastery of St Swithun’s, Winchester, living in what is regarded as the earliest period of historical writing, though ‘the beginnings of the true antiquarian scholarship at Winchester’ has been set in the late 17th century (John Crook, 2003). Scholars are certain that his works include two manuscripts generally called Historia…

J Horace Round was one of the pre-eminent historians of his time, a genealogist so expert in the convolutions of the British peerage that he was appointed Honorary Historical Advisor to the Crown.  Another specialism was Domesday Book, and his translation and discussion of the Essex entries was widely regarded as a tour de force of…

Rolt was an engineer at heart but his complex character, as well as being instrumental in establishing the canal and railway preservation movements, also found joy in ‘the beauties of the English countryside’.  He was aware of the rapid changes taking place in post-war Britain and the dangers inherent in the economic concept of unlimited…