This framed drawing was passed on to us by the previous owner, Joe Ball, when we moved-in in June 1994, so that is getting on for 26 years ago as I type this on 17.4.2020 amid the Coronavirus pandemic.
The main thing to say about the house is that we have loved it from the moment we moved in, on about June 2nd 1994, when it was 106 years old. This is our new 'Somersday', the newly-coined name deriving from my Grandpa William Archer's "Somerville House" at 130 Banbury Road Oxford, which has always been a sylvan inspiration to me, in combination with William Shakespeare's sonnet: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". Love of nature and love for a person. My father, Fred Archer, lived at Somerville House for about 10 years (approx 1926-1936) until he married my mother in 1936 (October 31st). It was a glorious North Oxford gentleman's residence, with about 2 acres of garden, maintained by a full-time gardener in the 1940s.
Somersday is unostentatious, so it seems to me. Five windows and a front door (at the back of the house), and looking like a doll's house! And the archway is not semi-circular but ellipsoidal. Wonderful! And the wall on the 'non-visible' side (the north-east side) is of brick rather than Rutland stone, presumably to save cost.
What do I love about Somersday? Everything: its Victorian vintage, its encaustic tiles in the hall, its logo with John Thomas Clarke's initials and the 1888 building date over the formal entrance door at the back of the house, the Rutand stone building material, the wonderful garden and trees and wild part....so many aspects, it is impossible to mention them all here. On a superb Spring day like today (19.4.2020) to live here is heavenly. I will post some photographs to try to convey some idea of the joys of this house.
The first thing we did here on moving in, was to have David Clayton, a local builder, check-over and do maintenance work on the outhouses and soon after to put down the concrete base for the wooden garage, with its weathervane. David told us some of his stories about his young days as a local lad, in which he and friends would creep into the garden here from the bottom, in the days when it was owned by the 'Miss Masters', who were three spinster ladies who lived here for many years. (7.5.20).
(Cont'd 2.6.20): We are in the middle of the so-called "Covid-19" virus health-crisis. Nothing like this has arisen before in the lifetime of this house. And perhaps nothing strictly comparable since the (bubonic) plague epidemic of 1603 immediately after James I came to the throne after Queen Elizabeth I died in the Spring of that year. James issued printed orders to the public about their conduct, including shutting down places of entertainment and public gathering, just as has happened recently. What seems so unusual about this situation is that the medical authorities have no cure or medication or vaccine for this disease. All that can be done is to let the disease take its course and to isolate the victim (not by imprisoning in his/her own house as In James I's reign), but in hospital, and to assist breathing with oxygen and/or a respirator). Up to today, the government-admitted death toll is just over 39,000 in the UK, compared with (a few days ago) only 22 (yes, 22, not 22,000) in New Zealand, where they instituted a lock-down much earlier in the progress of the epidemic.
Other major events in the lifetime of this house (since 1888):
1. Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897 - at the apogee of the British Empire;
2. The Boer Wars 1897-1902;
3. The Great War (1914- 1918);
4. The 2nd World War (1939-1945);
5. UK's membership of the Iron-and-Steel Community/Common Market/European Economic Community: 1973 - 2020 for 47 golden years in which we were a member of a family of nations working together for peace and prosperity. Now we have left, under the leadership of cheap and shallow men and organisations like Farage, Johnson, Murdoch/Fox News/The Daily Mail, and UKIP, and applauded by Trump. What madness. Nations have periods of madness, when the worst aspects of tribalism take over. Those instincts were at a low ebb in the immeidately post-war years of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, but have re-surfacec with a vengeance now, just as they did in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s.
We arrived here in 1994 and the main changes we made were:
a) on arrival (1994): removal of partition wall in kitchen, so that the house side-door opens directly into the kitchen which was thereby enlarged; (to be continued)