Times are Changing

Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday cropped up in a village zoom quiz recently. He’s been one of my favourite wordsmiths since student days. A group of four of us travelled to Leicester in 1965 to see him live at the de Montfort Hall. How times change, but we move on.

Friday night quizzes were once a regular feature at the King’s Head before the pub closed. Now in the current restrictions we quiz via zoom instead. This has meant that non-villagers and ex-villagers are able to join in, bringing a whole other dimension to the experience. Things change, as they must if we don’t want the village to stagnate or die.

Folks move on or move in. Lately, we have lost one of our oldest villagers. Pam Jones, nee Poolman, who was born in the village, went to the village school and married in the village church. A lovely lady, a big loss. Probably the last Poolman in the village descended from John Poolman who married Betty Eyles at Chitterne All Saints Church on 20 May 1757, that’s 264 years that descendants of the Poolman family have lived in the village. Pam is also the last remaining connection to the Brown family, William Brown headmaster at the school from 1867 to 1906 and his son Bill Brown the Big 5 detective at Scotland Yard, who came back to Chitterne in retirement, and incidentally was the reason Pam’s parents moved from 48 Bidden Lane to Abdon Close. Bill bought up the row of cottages numbered 48 to 53, knocked most of them down, kept 53 where he’d lived as a child and turned it into his new home. Pam’s grandmother was Annie Brown, Bill’s sister.

We hear another big change is happening at Chitterne House, sold recently by the family who have owned it since 1947.

As Bob reminded us: Times they are a-changing. I don’t have any pictures of Pam, so here’s one of Bob.