Strange Events in 1793: 'The Bridge' Parish Centre

Ten years ago, when Datchet Parish Council decided to renovate this old building and lease it to the three churches as a community centre, a strange problem became evident; there was no proof that the Council, or anyone else, owned it and no title deeds anywhere to be found. The same situation had been faced a hundred years previously, in 1894, when the newly constituted Civil Parish Council began to consider the properties and responsibilities it had inherited from the Ecclesiastical Parish. (From Elizabethan times, church parishes had been units of local government, each being responsible, among many other things, for the care of its own poor.)

The new Councillors recorded in their minutes that Mr Wilkinson's shop, known as the 'Almshouse Trust', was a parish property and should be transferred to their ownership under the new Local Government Act. Then they discovered there was no trust deed or endowment, but that the Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor owned it simply by custom. The problem of the Almshouse Trust became a regular topic at Council meetings as the oldest villagers sought for memories and provided lurid stories about the building's origins. Mr Hunt (of Manor Cottage) told the Council his parents had informed him that:

'… in consequence of a document being falsely signed, one of the signatories had died with his pen in his hand and another had been thrown from his horse and killed by breaking of his back, while a third also met with a fatal accident. The superstition of the period (1793) caused the people to ascribe their fates to the illegal action. One of the men was his own great-uncle Mr David Ogilvy who was buried in the church yard.'

Mr Hunt also claimed that £100 was lying in the Bank of England in the name of Ogilvy, and one of his daughters had always said it was 'not their money but something to do with the almshouses'.

The council was deeply confused. They knew that there was a Union Workhouse in Slough (now Upton Hospital), and a disused parish workhouse at the end of Old Workhouse Road (Holmlea Road), so why had there apparently been another one in the centre of the village?

It was thought that there were no records of an old almshouse, but no one looked at the minutes of the Barker Bridge House Trust, which had been responsible for repairing the almshouse building (the one we call the Bridge) throughout the 1700s. Most almshouses were endowed as a charity by a named founder, but in Datchet it seems that an ordinary cottage was used by the parish authorities from at least 1548 when it is first listed in a village survey. There was no provision for its upkeep, which seems to have fallen upon the Bridge Trust although it is not clear when or why. By the mid 1700s the Trust had rebuilt the dwelling, as cheaply as possible, and it continued to provide shelter for the most destitute until a larger building was provided away from the village centre.

It is fascinating that the date 1793 should have been passed down in the Hunt family's story, since two relevant events did actually occur then. Among the very few parish documents which have survived is an agreement, dated 1793, between the Overseers of the Poor and Stephen Riddington, for him to manage the workhouse and its inmates for his profit, as was the custom. Moreover, all mention of the almshouses in the Bridge Trust minutes ceases before 1800 while the Parish Overseers minutes (which survive from that year) refer to the workhouse frequently, so presumably the new one was built in 1793.

Also, in that crucial year, the Barker Bridge House Trust was in severe difficulties. In January of 1793 an emergency parish meeting was held at the Royal Stag to deal with problems which match Mr Hunt's tale in 1895. There were only two surviving trustees, Thomas Dell and David Ogilvy; Mr William Sturgess was still alive, but 'incapable by reason of a paralytick stroke which deprived him of speech', while Samuel Montague, Daniel Marsh and Adrian Marsh had all died. At the meeting, four new trustees were nominated: Colonel Needham (of Datchet House), James Haydock (of Datchet Lodge), John Fleetwood Marsh (possibly of Goodwin House) and Robert Style (of Riding Court Farm).

Then in December 1794, when another meeting was held in Datchet House, things were much worse. David Ogilvy, Robert Style and Thomas Dell had all died (though we don't know in what circumstances), William Sturgess was still speechless, John Fleetwood Marsh had gone to America and Colonel Needham was about to depart for Ireland on military duty. The two survivors who were still in possession of all their faculties, James Haydock and Colonel Needham, were unable to obtain any Trust papers which had been held by the treasurer, Thomas Dell, since he had refused to hand them over while alive and his daughter had destroyed them immediately after his death.

So it is possible that the Hunt and Ogilvy family story of falsely signed documents and stashed-away money may have some basis in truth, and the parish registers show that David Ogilvy certainly did die in 1793. It is unlikely that any more will ever be discovered about what really did happen unless new evidence for the period turns up. Once the old almshouse was redundant, it seems to have been let to John Rollins the ecclesiastical parish clerk (how appropriate that Joe Comerford's office is now in the back room!), with profits due to the Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor. By 1822 it was rented out as a grocery shop with living rooms above and from the 1830s was run by the Pond family, whose descendants have recently visited their family's old home. It has been in the hands of relatively few tenants since then:

Pond's Grocery 1830s to about 1880
Wilkinson's Grocery 1880s to about 1900 (also the Post Office in 1890s)
Hepher's Stores about 1900 to about 1940 (grocery)
Howat's Newsagents late 1940s to 1970s
Finlay's Newsagents 1980s to early 1990s

When the last tenant left abruptly and Datchet Parish Council was faced with the lack of any legal paperwork, the matter was resolved once and for all by the Charity Commission which accepted the council's ownership and regularised the situation for the future. Profits from letting the building are now used towards the local taxes, which are the modern equivalent of the parish poor rate; thus the building is still partly fulfilling its original purpose.