Heytesbury, a Wiltshire village en route to Salisbury or Bath but rarely a destination, has a population of some seven hundred variously happy souls. Considerably up from Domesday estimates at sixty but a tad down from over a thousand at the beginning of the 19th Century.
Strangely, at that time, Heytesbury was a Borough (Est. 1449) with an official population of just eighty one and returned two MPs to Westminster entirely at the direction of the Lords Heytesbury.
One of the infamous Rotten Boroughs abolished
by the Great Reform Act of 1832. This may explain the area known as
Little London in the village. But then again, it may not.
Those landing here from Perth, Western
Australia may be expecting to read about bloodstock, vast private
art collections and over-strength wine. The reason for everything
being Heytesbury shaped in Perth is the legacy of the spectacularly
wealthy, but dead,
Robert Holmes à
Court.
In the
early 1980s he descended upon Heytesbury House with a very large
cheque which he proceeded to wave about in an Australian manner
whilst instructing George Sassoon to sell up. He had come to reclaim
his birthright based upon having the same surname as ye olde Lords
Heytesbury. On the same basis that Barbara Windsor might justifiably buy
Buckingham Palace.
George
declined the offer which, in hindsight, may have been a bit foolish
when shortly after Lloyds of London came a calling. Looking for
large cheques.
If you are a wealthy Dubliner you almost certainly live on Heytesbury Street, Dublin 8. The reason for this street name being the Lords Heytesbury, yet again, this time providing the Viceroy of Ireland (1844-1846).
Being boggies on the poor list in Cork my
ancestors may well have been slightly bewildered as to my occupancy
of the Viceroy’s English stately pile a tad over a century later.
The long cut short is that my mother met George
Sassoon at Cambridge University, had a fling, then met again twenty
years later. Being twenty at the time I was a bit touch and go on
the father front and ended up spending twenty five years as a sort
of Sassoon.
My late step-father, George Thornycroft Sassoon
(1936-2006), being the only child of Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE,
MC (1886-1967).
This website will reveal much about Heytesbury over the past twenty five years and hitherto, the genius of George and all that I have discovered about his father.
Anyone with fond visions of cosy thatched
cottages with ancient chimneys curling wisps of wood smoke and chaps
with caps heartily greeting fellow sundowners over frothing ale will
be mildly disappointed.
There is no well endowed wench behind the bar
nor huddle of bubbling conversation with oldest friends. The spindly
spinsters patching patchwork quilts and the apple-red faced farmers
have long since passed away along with the young families and local
ties and tied cottages.
This is New England and Little London has long
since enveloped the village.
But there is still news