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The History of Thursley Society (HoTS), the forerunner of Thursley History Society, used the opening of the renovated barn at Wheelers Farm as a focal point for their exhibition in July 1996. Other examples of HoTS's activities are shown below.

Only photographs of this Grade II listed building (28th October 1986)

Ann Wakeley wrote in December 1996, "We have lived in Little Green ever since we were married in 1967. It started off as a "dolls house" and has subsequently had four extensions, to grow with the family. Oliver is 27 and works in the research department of BT in Ipswich. Fenella is 25 and is a primary school teacher in Huntingdon. Melissa is 18 and in her last year as Downe House taking three A levels. Adam is 18, in his last year at Radley and he is also taking three A levels.

This parade was arranged to celebrate Thursley winning the Best Kept Village Competition Ben Wonham as William Cobbett Other floats celebrate the Farmers; Association (Tom Ranson); the British Legion; the Unknown Sailor; Emergency Ward 10

Introducing Mary Bennett and her parents, H A L Fisher and Lettice Fisher, from these three articles written by Jackie Rickenberg for the Parish Magazine Mary Bennett outside Rock Cottage Her childhood calendar Rock Cottage and some neighbours Thursley in the Twenties

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.

From Thursley Parish Magazine June 2019 ”Placed in chains, and there close by The London Road to be hung on high... A sight more loathsome none could see.” But did you know that the links used on the gallows to hang the murderous sailors were forged at Forge Cottage, dating back 700 years, here in Thursley? The Forge, was run by Uncle Tom Khan, his father and grandfather and, it is thought, was worked until the last decade of the 1800s.  The Hammer and other historically interesting items were acquired by Haslemere Museum. The forge, as it would have been at the time of the murder, is depicted in drawings done by Mr Khan. Popsy Holford, who lived at Forge Cottage for over 50 years, has allowed us to reproduce them here.

From Thursley Parish Magazine July 2019 Did you know….? Some houses in our area were called ‘hall houses’ because originally the fire was placed in the middle of the large central room and smoke escaped through a hole in the roof. An example is Bowlhead Green Farmhouse. Now, of course, an upper floor has been put in and so the roof beams cannot be seen. This drawing of Bayleaf at the Weald and Downland Museum illustrates how a ‘hall house’ was constructed. The museum has kindly given permission for this picture to be included. More on the museum website

Photographs courtesy Valérie Ferris

Following an appeal for help from Arkadii Kostenko, a number of villagers were able to house Ukrainian refugees beginning in April 2022, with some staying to the current day. In January 2023, they said thank you by hosting a lunch party in the Village Hall.

This article written by Jackie Rickenberg was published in the Parish Magazine in August 2022 This is the final story of the Fisher family. Herbert and Lettice have been featured over the last couple of months and now it’s the turn of their daughter Mary. Mary Letitia Somerville Fisher (1913-2005) was an only child, born in London to Herbert and Lettice, but brought up in Oxford where her father was Warden of New College. She was best known as an academic, historian and for her tenure as Principle of St Hilda’s College between 1965 and 1980. Mary had lived (part-time) in our village ever since she was a small child and moved here permanently when she retired. She lived in her parents’ house, Rock Cottage at the top of Highfield Lane. And we were so very fortuitous to have had her, as being an historian, not only did Mary research her own family history, but she documented so much of life as it was in Thursley throughout her time here. The History Society’s archives would be a lot less interesting and poorer, were it not for Mary’s records of the times, the occupants and village life throughout her lifetime. It is amazing that those recollections will be with us for generations to come and will inform and enhance the lives of many families and villagers alike. After Mary obtained her degree from Somerville College, Oxford, she was living at home, researching Roman history and picking up a little undergraduate teaching from friends in other colleges. When war broke out, she felt that she should be doing something more immediately useful to the war effort and so, with the help of one of her mother’s friends, Hilda Matheson, who had been a spy in the First World War, she landed a position in an organisation run by Hilda, (known to the Intelligent Services!) that sent broadcasting material to various countries, with the ostensible purpose of replacing it with covert recordings which were to be smuggled into or dropped over Germany. Very mysterious and curious! In Mary’s own words, the story continues: “I was living in London, on Chelsea Embankment, after Hilda’s premature death. Her company was taken over by the BBC and we moved first to Bedford College in Regent’s Park and then to an ex-convent in Maida Vale. We worked very hard and did a lot of recording, including a good deal of actuality recording, for special recorded programmes. We corresponded with overseas radio stations but, I think rightly, very few people took us very seriously and I doubt we did anything very useful. By this point, my mother had retired from Oxford to Thursley, and I would return at weekends, taking the train to Milford station, where she would sometimes collect me in her small car with her even smaller petrol ration! But I think more often, I took the bus from Guildford and walked up from the Red Lion. To return, I would walk across Upper Highfield Farm to the A3 and take the bus to Godalming station. I was based in London, commissioning and supervising the recording of programmes. The French, were the main point of contact, and we had a liaison officer called Mademoiselle Moulun, whose home was in the Argentine but who had worked as a finishing school teacher in Paris. We would mainly send out pressed 78rpm recordings in brown paper parcels and because they would go by sea mail to consuls to pass on to the local radio stations, they were not very prompt. We would send out light programmes of dance music. The purpose of these recordings was to show the rest of the world that we were still in the field, that things were still happening, that life was going on and above all that the French were still in the field. We were showing that the French had not been forgotten and that was the one undoubtedly useful thing we did because we did convince the Free French that we were batting on their side. By Christmas of 1944 it was clear that the war was coming to an end and so my job became far less interesting and there was really very little point in going on with it. So, I let it be known that I was in the market as I didn’t want to stay with the BBC, but rather do something different. Then there was one of those accidents that happen and change your life. My mother had yet another friend, who had a farm in Hampshire and she used to throw great parties, one of which I was invited to. At the party I found myself talking to a man from the Colonial Office (the Foreign, India, Home and Colonial Offices have now become the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) and during our conversation I said that I was at the BBC but was trying to get out of it. The next day he telephoned to say that he thought there was a vacancy coming up in the Colonial Office and would I be interested? I thought it would be worth trying anything and I got the job! Originally, he thought the vacancy was on the Palestine desk but the job I was posted to was in the Mediterranean department, which was responsible for Malta, Gibraltar and Cyprus. As the war ended our job was to try to cope with the political ferment that it had produced in the colonies, both by economic and social development and by devising new constitutional arrangements, most of which proved shorter lived than we expected”. In 1955, Mary Fisher married senior civil servant John Bennett and from 1965 until 1980, she was Principal of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. They commissioned Jean Cooke to paint this portrait of her: Mary retired from Oxford, as her mother had done before her, to Rock Cottage and from there she filled her days, until her death in 2005, writing her memoirs and her recollections of a bygone Thursley. We shall be regularly featuring Mary’s amusing and incisive musings in months to come.

Photographs courtesy Valérie Ferris