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« on: Monday 27 October 08 12:20 GMT (UK) »
Not sure if this really helps, but I found this account from Wiltshire recently. It's rather lovely anyway! My great-grandmother Ann Blake was his cook in 1861
The Rev. W.H.E. McKnight described his first impression of his Lydiard Millicent congregation sitting in a draughty church in May 1852:
“At that time the villagers had not stepped out into the higher civilization of broadcloth. They still came to church in their snow white smock-frocks which were here and there varied with a blue one, with its pattern in white thread conspicuous on the breast. On that morning there were a good many smock-frocks present and, as the wind swept in gusts over us, one by one, for his self-protection, drew out his red pocket handkerchief and threw it over his head. Then I had a not unpleasant variety of colour before me; the white and the blue and the red were too strong to be swamped by the black coats of the two or three farmers, whilst the women’s dresses gave various shadings of colour from brown to black. It was a most picturesque group of a generation then rapidly passing away and soon to be seen no more. For Swindon was beginning to grow and, with the incoming of the artisan, the smock-frock departed and my poor neighbour, Mrs Ody, who earned her living by adorning them with her handiwork, complained to me in 1860 that, where she had once made a score, she did not now make one.”
Diana
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