The Blandford Express

  Pilot Jim Wallwork and his co-pilot Johnnie Ainsworth were the first Allied troops to land in Normandy as a part of the June 1944 D-Day Landings. They had flown their Horsa glider, named Lady Irene across the English Channel from Tarrant Rushton Airfield. Between 1943 and 1947, Tarrant Rushton was a Royal Air Force airfield and it played an important role in the war effort. It was used for glider operations and also for secretive Special Operations Executive (SOE) exercises such as weapon drops to the French Resistance. Wallwork and Ainsworth’s glider had taken off around 11.00pm on 5 th June 1944 towed by a Halifax aircraft known as a ‘tug’ . Behind them were 30 fighting men with blackened faces and just a little over an hour later, they landed in France. Their glider landed heavily hitting the ground at 95mph and ploughed through barbed wire before the cockpit collapsed. They were both catapulted through the windscreen of their glider. Although stunned, this made them the...

Thanks to an administrative blunder, Eleanor Dixon of Holton, near Wareham became the first woman in Dorset to vote in a Parliamentary election. When she voted in the 1910 East Dorset election, she was nearly 20 years ahead of the time. For it was not until 1928 that all women over the age of 21 were granted the right to vote - irrespective of property rights. Eleanor must have voted for the Conservative candidate, Colonel John Sanctuary Nicholson as the Liberal/Radical Agent raised an objection against her vote. After stating he had checked relevant legislation, the Presiding Officer allowed her vote. Eleanor Dixon was not the first woman to vote in a British Parliamentary election because of an administrative error. Lily Maxwell did so in 1867 in a Manchester by-election when her name was erroneously placed on the registered list of voters. Lily was a shopkeeper born in Scotland around 1800.

  Hall & Woodhouse have been brewing beers in the heart of Dorset for more than 200 years. Charles Hall began brewing in Ansty in 1777 and came to Blandford in 1883 when the business acquired Hector’s Brewery located on the banks of the River Stour. Established in the 1780s, it was named after John Hector who ran the business from 1827 to 1879. Sadly in August 1900, Hector’s Brewery was burned down. Such was the conflagration that villagers travelled into Blandford to view the spectacle. A local newspaper reported that the watching crowd was most orderly and all that went missing were just a few apples from Mr Woodhouse’s orchard. In October 1900, a new brewery completed its first brew. Hector’s Brewery was remembered many years later when a special ‘ Hector’s Ale’ was produced. While the ‘ Badger ’ has been the company’s hallmark for many years there was a dispute over its use with a Yorkshire mineral manufacturer. The dispute was resolved finally when Hall & Woodhouse ma...

  Diminutive Ethelbert Holborrow (53) from Bridport had a clear mission in life. He wanted to sail single-handedly across the Atlantic to Bermuda. Yet, he had never been to sea before. A gunsmith by trade, he was only able to get about with the help of crutches. Despite having no boat building experience, Ethelbert planned to do this in a small sailing vessel that he intended to build himself. For two years he worked on his boat on the beach at Burton Bradstock. His only construction tools were a butcher’s knife, a hammer and a chisel. Local opinion was strongly against the voyage describing it as ‘ fool hardy’ . Ethelbert Holborrow set sail from West Bay in July 1914 on his lonely voyage in his homebuilt vessel that he named the Burto n. On board the 14 feet long craft were 40 gallons of water and a hundredweight of biscuits. Five days later he had only travelled some sixty miles. The Burton was sighted by a fishing vessel drifting dangerously close to some rocks off Salcom...

Crown Hotel, Blandford is probably the oldest hotel in Dorset as a local historian found a reference to the ‘ Crowne’ dated as far back as 1465. Yet there are some who reckon it is also the county’s most haunted hostelry. A horse’s head severely shocked a seated gentleman. This occurred when this equine apparition burst through a wall in the unlikely location of the gentleman’s toilet in the Crown Hotel’s Sealy Suite. It had been built on the site of the hotel’s former coaching stables. In some terror, the unfortunate man fled the hotel. Mrs Gordon was an eccentric old lady who was a Crown Hotel resident for a number of years and   a member of the Gordon’s Gin family. Her familiar appearance was apparently witnessed by staff on several occasions after her death. Appropriately, bearing in mind her family pedigree, one of these appearances was at the hotel bar. A lady in black wearing a long crinoline dress, said to inhabit the first floor, seems to be the apparition that has ...

  George Pitt-Rivers was a major Dorset landowner and at one time was one of the richest men in England. Yet he was a controversial character and despite being related to Winston Churchill’s family was interned during the Second World War because of his Nazi sympathies. He was born in London in 1890 and during the First World War served as a Captain in the British Army. Pitt-Rivers was wounded in the First Battle of Ypres and had to return to Britain for surgery. After the war, he travelled to the South Pacific and he wrote about the clash of cultures he witnessed there. It was during the 1930s that he became increasingly involved in politics and attracted to the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In 1935, he stood as a candidate for the North Dorset parliamentary seat but finished second last and lost his deposit. He met Hitler in 1937 and attended the Nuremberg Rally at the invitation of the Nazi Government. One of his guests to Dorset in the 1930s was an enigmatic Irish...

Dorset Starfish are not a rare marine invertebrate found off the Dorset  coast. In fact, Starfish saved hundreds of lives in Bournemoth & Poole during World War II by preventing an estimated one thousand tons of German bombs being dropped there. Starfish were decoy sites designed to deceive German night bombers away from strategically important towns and airfields. There were several Starfish decoys in Dorset. One was set up on the western side of Brownsea Harbour. It contained a mixture of different types of fire designed to simulate a burning town. Created with the help of a technician from Elstree Film Studios, it was operated by Royal Air Force personnel from a bunker about 200 metres from the set up pyrotechnics. Once the first wave of bombers had passed drums of oil and creosote-soaked hay bales were lit to simulate the effects of incendiary bombs. This sought to attract the focus of the drops from the next bomber wave. Poole & Bournemouth were a target for a large ...