We were all sorry when Adrian Simmonds had to close his shop. It was like an Aladdin's cave inside and he aimed to have 6 new things each week. There is a letter to the Bampton Beam here from Toby Hopkins and one from Adrian himself.

This is one of the earliest photograph of the Bampton Morris Men taken in 1897, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year.
The dancers are
George Wells/Taylor
Thomas William Tanner
Joseph Rouse
Robert Dixey
George Dixey
James Dewe
Charles Henry Tanner, ragman
Henry Radband, sword carrier
William Nathan Wells, fool, known as Jingy
Richard Decimus Butler, musician

n November 2015 eight products, including Patrick Strainge's Bampton Royal sausages were nominated for the Q Guild Smithfield Awards. Only 200 butchers in England can hold a Q guild aware at any one time so it really is a feather in the cap of our local butchers shop.
The Bampton Royal sausages were also a firm favourite with many members of the cast of Downton Abbey which was partly filmed in Bampton.

L to R. Lucy Slatter, Terry Argles, Terry Crowley, all living in Church Street. May, 1997. Lucy Slatter died 2008.

Doug Read OBE (he gained the OBE for services to ploughing) was a huge fan of classic cars and owned several over the years. These are four of them and show

1. Trojan Tourer 1924 model owned by Doug Read. Douglas Read driving, passengers David Hunt, Bill Bullock and Geoff Hunt
2. Photograph of a Riley Monaco in 1933
3. Photograph of MG Model J.2. 1932 in 1948.
4. Photograph of MG Model T.A. 1937 driven by his wife Sally (nee Raymond) in 1953 (Sally was buried in Nov 2020)

Freda Bradley lent this to the Archive to copy and we believe she is talking about her Grampy owning Sundown Cottage at one time.
In the 1960s it was purchased by Bernard Rose along with Sandfords where he and wife Molly lived and he demolished the old cottage.

The staircase to the top floor of the Grammar School was removed in the 1960s when people stood a greater chance of getting to the ground floor by falling through the rotten floor than coming back down the stairs. The Bampton Community Archive members have worked incredibly hard to raise funds on the back of the tourism boost from visitors flocking to Bampton to see the this building which was used as the Cottage Hospital in ITV's Downton Abbey. The grant from WODC means the work to bring the whole building into good heart can begin.

A house and field called Long Paddock in Weald Street for sale, offers in excess of £750,000 wanted

Originally called the Bampton Charity Shop, it had a name change and a legal status changed to enable it to donate monies to other charities in Bampton. Apparently a charity cannot give money to another charity and Trevor Milne-Day gave his time to deal with the legal matter of the change. In this article Fenella Gray talks about the history of the shop from its inception in 2004.

These three photographs are of one of the visiting sides to Bampton in 1985 dancing in the Market Square outside the Village Hall in two pictures and at the West end of the Square in the third picture.