The Life & Times of a Hampshire Blacksmith

The story of the Preston Candover Smithy, 1900-80

Philip Sheail

Walter Murphy was only a few months old when he was brought to live in the Hampshire village of Preston Candover in 1901. He was apprenticed to his uncle at the smithy in 1915 and was to go on working there for the next 70 years.

They were to be years of momentous change. When he started at the smithy, the work was geared to the needs of a horse-drawn society. In the years that followed, a good many of his fellow blacksmiths went under in the changeover to motorised transport and mechanised farming. But Walter survived into the 1980s – by keeping abreast of the times and by steering the business away from horseshoeing into agricultural engineering.

In The Life & Times of a Hampshire Blacksmith Philip Sheail gives us an engaging memoir of a rural craftsman. In addition, he has investigated the surviving records of the business from 1910-70, and has used them to provide an exceptionally detailed study of how the work of a country smithy changed in response to the social, economic and technological upheavals of the 20th century.

The book also places the village blacksmith fully within the context of the wider community. It includes biographical sketches of the smithy's major customers, from the local gentry and clergy to the farmers, shopkeepers and craftsmen. It also shows how village life changed with the coming of motor transport and describes the ups and downs of the local farming scene.

The Life & Times of a Hampshire Blacksmith is published in softback,
81 pages, 155 b&w photographs

Molewood Hawthorn Publishing
ISBN 978-0-9555684-0-4
July 2007

£10.00

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