An Easter wedding breakfast

On 13 April 1903, Robert Marsh and Mary Axe were married at Hardington Parish Church. After the ceremony, the Rector, Rev Cleife, hosted a wedding breakfast for the couple and their friends at the rectory where Mary had worked for five years.[1] The rector had reason to be grateful to Mary. The previous year, she […]

Joan Elizabeth Hann

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 […]

Isaac Harding, farm labourer

From about 1900 to 1918, Isaac Harding lived at Hardington, where he worked for William Taylor at Marsh Farm.
Isaac was born at Seavington St Mary in 1851 and lived in or close to that parish for the first fifty years of his life.
On 24 December 1873, at Kingstone parish church, he married Hephzibah Seward, with whom he had seven children.

Death on a Cornish Beach

In the summer of 1959, Geoffrey Coleman Smith of Whitethorn, Hill End, Hardington Mandeville, went on holiday to Cornwall with his wife, Margaret. He was the Accounts Director at the Yeovil gloving firm of Clothier, Giles & Co, and their factory had probably shut down for a two-week break. Geoffrey liked visiting Cornwall for its landscape and beaches and because of family associations.