Nathaniel ‘Nat’ Seal (1793-1887) was a well-known Dorchester character, countryman and drover. He had a hat made out of hedgehog skins which it is said he wore to stop people patting him on the head. He was a self-appointed overseer of Dorchester Market. When the authorities tried to sack him, he threw a fully-laden beehive at the official market custodian. Before the railway age, the most important long distance travellers were drovers. This saw thousands of sheep, cattle and pigs being moved along roads to markets and abattoirs. Some of these journeys could be more than 100 miles. As a drover, Nat Seal had a particular talent of finding ways to avoid paying bridge and turnpike tolls. All types of meat would literally walk to market. Sometimes the lines of animals would be two miles long and householders would board themselves in until they had passed. Drovers used dogs to control their charges and these dogs would sometimes be sent home alone after a drove. At Poundbury Fair in...
Charles Gray was a Bournemouth born actor who has the distinction of appearing in two James Bond films playing different characters. He was arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Diamonds Are For Ever and British intelligence officer Dikko Henderson in You Only Live Twice. Born in August 1928, the son of a surveyor, he went to the same Bournemouth school as Benny Hill. The comedian was evacuated to Bournemouth during the war. Raised in Queen’s Park, Gray left his estate agent job to become an actor. He received voice training from the Royal Shakespeare Company and it was his voice which became his most valuable tool. Gray used this to play eccentric toffs and suave villains with oily malice to great effect. By the mid-1950s, Charles Gray was taking leading roles. He dubbed for actor Jack Hawkins when Hawkins was unable to speak his lines due to throat cancer. Gray’s distinctive voice was regularly heard on television commercials. In the decade from 1968, he ...