Childhood

Joan was born near Wincanton on 20 January 1936. Her father, Albert Edward Snaydon, worked on a local farm, and her mother, Dorothy, was the daughter of a farm worker.

Joan had two older siblings, Dennis and Eileen, and a younger brother, Keith, who followed in 1940.

When Joan was eighteen months old, she won first prize in a baby show competition at Ditcheat Flower Show.

Ancestors

On her father’s side, Joan was descended from prosperous Dorset yeomen who enjoyed status and influence. In 1840, the will of her great-great-grandfather, William Snaydon, was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, the highest probate court in the land. In the 1870s and 1880s, William’s son, also called William, farmed over 200 acres at Corscombe.

Joan’s grandfather, another William Snaydon, was a dairyman whose work took him to live all over Dorset, Wiltshire, and Somerset. In the 1930s, he and his wife, Daisy, retired to East Chinnock.

Their son, Percy Snaydon, Joan’s uncle, became a door-to-door Kleeneze salesman in the Yeovil area after the war. He often visited us at Hill End, and after a half an hour’s catch-up on family and village news, my Nanny Hann would invariably buy something from him.

Move to Haselbury

In the 1940s, Joan’s family moved to Puddle Town, Haselbury, to be close to her father’s parents.

When Joan was fifteen, the Bristol Evening Post celebrated her birthday because she was a member of their Pillar Box Club.

Courtship and marriage

In the early 1950s, Joan met John Hann of Hill End, Hardington, and they became close. Their courtship was interrupted between 1953 and 1955, when John spent his National Service in Germany with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, learning to drive tanks. However, they wrote to each other constantly.

When John left the Army, three days after his twenty-first birthday, he returned home and joined his father, George, working at Pen Hill Farm, Pendomer. George, a sergeant with the Somerset Light infantry in the First World War, had worked there since he sold Landground Farm, Hardington, in 1942.

John and Joan were married at Haselbury parish church on 31 January 1959 and moved into a new bungalow at Pen Hill.

Life in Dorset

John worked at Pen Hill Farm for John and Vera Smith until about 1968 or 1969, when he and his family moved to Compton Abbas, where John worked at Manor Farm.  

John retired in 1999, and he and Joan enjoyed twenty-five years of happy retirement together.

Joan passed away on 1 September 2024 after a short illness.

They have four daughters: Denise, Teresa, Debra and Sharon.