This article was part of The Wedding Belles exhibition held in the Village Hall in 2007
On September 25th 1915 Lt. Colonel Walter Cecil Wright of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers married Mrs. Jane Edith Marion Johnstone. Colonel Wright lived and owned Rock Cottage at the top of Highfield Lane. This, in itself, was unusual as all the surrounding property was part of the Cosford Estate. The Colonel was a good friend of a gentleman artist who lived in Helen Allingham’s old house in Sandhills, Walford Graham Robertson, who affectionately called his friend “Dolly”. The Colonel’s bride was a widow with two children (Ralph and Lettice). Graham Robertson attended with another local child, Rachel, and described the wedding and marriage in some of his many letters to his friend Kerrison Preston:
7.8.1915 [sic.]
“Lettice’s mother has been passing through a time of great sorrow and anxiety, but she is now a widow and is going to marry Dolly, at which I am delighted. They thoroughly deserve great happiness and I trust they will find it if there is any such thing left in these days. I am to be Dolly’s second-best man, and Lettice will appear with her grandfather in the character of the bride’s mother”
20.8.1915 [sic.]
“Lettice and I have appeared in our respective roles and the performance is over. It was really very sweet and pretty – just what a wedding should be – absolutely. Rachel and I arrived first at the little old Thursley Church, near Rock Cottage. Then came Colonel Dolly with his best man, Major Campbell, another stray major and Lettice, absorbed in her new shoes and the difficulty of keeping on her first hat. Also big Ralphie, her brother, who had managed to get there unexpectedly. Then the bride came in with her father and though we tried to turn her out again, and make her enter properly at her proper cue, she sat down calmly, remarking that she was always punctual if the padre wasn’t, and she was not going to hang about for him or for anybody else.
Then when the clergyman did put in an appearance, we lost the best man and Dolly clung miserably to me, wailing at the top of a naturally powerful voice, ‘What am I to do? Where am I to stand? I’ve never been married before.’
However, Major Campbell reappeared and sorted them and got them comfortable, and they got through very well, the children deeply impressed by the mystic ceremonial. Then we went up the narrow lanes to Rock Cottage, where we had chicken and wedding cake and blackberry gin. During the meal I noticed, through the window behind the bridegroom, strange and unaccustomed presences bouncing about the garden and staring in from the sacred, newly-turfed terrace. ‘What is it?’ he inquired, noting my rapt gaze. ‘P-pigs, Dolly,’ I murmured, loath to disturb the peace of the assembly and feeling sure that the colonel, lately become rather peppery and particular from overwork, would burst from the room like Betsy Trotwood. However- ‘Pigs?’ said he, dreamily. ‘Oh, yes, of course. They are the Baker pigs from over the way. They were specially invited and arrived bright and early this morning. She says they’re lucky. They were all in the dining-room when I started for church.’ I thought that, as a first concession on marrying an Irishwoman, it was charmingly tactful and appropriate. When the happy trio left (Lettice accompanied them), the bride’s father said to her in joke, ‘Well, Edith, you had better come back with me to Ireland now and rest a bit,’ but Lettice, departing with the bridegroom, called patronisingly over her shoulder, ‘No Mummy, you may come with us. We should like it.’”
“The Times”, September 28th 1915
The Wrights then enjoyed a simple country life here in Thursley as further letters describe.
20.8.18
“Yesterday was my weekly ‘Rock Cottage’ day, and the walk home in the evening along that wonderful valley was quite exquisite. They have induced a village lady to come in and ‘oblige’, so Dolly and I cook no more. I’m rather sorry, though the interest was almost too painful; we distrust each other’s methods so deeply. However, after my triumph in the regrettable incident of the bouquet garni, which Dolly had so far forgotten himself as to allude to as ‘your damn flowers’ and which proved the making of the boiled salmon, I was able to take high ground.
Mrs. Wright has developed extraordinary talents as a bee mistress, very luckily, as no bee master is now within summons. She goes calmly to work with bees in her hair and bees covering her face and hands, veilless and gloveless, and all is well. She took over twenty pounds of honey the other day.”
W. Graham Robertson painted Lettice many times and described her head of blond hair as “a dandelion clock”. The little girl Lettice Mary, was born in 1908 whilst her elder brother, Ralph U. Johnstone, was much older having been born in 1894.
15.8.19
“The Wrights of Rock Cottage have been wrenched from me, and they all vanished last week”.
The Wrights remained at Rock Cottage until 1919 when it was bought by Mrs. Lettice Fisher, so that her husband H.A.L. Fisher who was then Minister of Education in the post-war Coalition Government could have a place in the country that was still within reasonable reach of London. Colonel Wright died on September 8th 1939.
Rock Cottage remained the home of Mary Bennett, nee Fisher, until her death in 2005.