It’s always pleasure to walk out from the village of Sapperton. Among many lovely villages in the Cotswolds, for me it is particularly special, as I have long worked with the Arts & Crafts movement, and Sapperton became home to a trio of architects and their craftspeople in the early 20th century.
If you walk into St Kenelm’s churchyard, you’ll see a number of chest tombs with small metal plaques on them. Some are dated as far back as the early 18th century, but if you look closer, there’s a group of three, one on one side of the path, two on the other, with a more modern looking gravestone beside the single one. Now read the dates: 1919 for the one alone, and 1926 – 100 years ago this year – on the two together. These self-effacing monuments are the graves of Ernest Gimson (d 1919) and his friends the brothers Ernest and Sidney Barnsley, who both died in 1926, Ernest aged 62 in January, and Sidney, aged 61, in September.
The trio and their families moved into Sapperton in about 1902-3. Prior to that they had been living at, and restoring, Pinbury Park just up the road. What were they doing here in the Cotswolds? The Barnsleys were from Birmingham originally, and Gimson from Leicester. They had met as architectural students in London the 1880s, and decided, early in the 1890s, that they needed to be closer to nature and the vernacular architecture they loved ‘than they felt was possible over the drawing board in a city office’. Their friend Alfred Powell, who would follow them to the Cotswolds, settling in Tunley, says Gimson and Sidney Barnsley ‘scoured the countryside from Yorkshire to the South Downs’ looking for a home, but eventually they rented property at Ewen, near Cirencester. One fateful day Sidney walked across the park and discovered Pinbury mouldering in the woods.
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At first all three concentrated on crafts, not architecture, although Ernest Barnsley graduated from Pinbury to restoring another Bathurst property, Daneway House. They built their own homes in Sapperton, and Sidney Barnsley had a workshop to his ‘lone self’ in the grounds of his house, Beechanger. He said that he had the most ‘wonderful view across the hanging wood’ that the house is named for and our walk cuts through. He was making, ‘good solid oak furniture with occasional pieces of a delicate kind.’ This relaxed life was a far cry from both London and the gruelling travels Sidney had made in Greece and Turkey to record Byzantine architecture in the 1880s.
Their furniture became a subtle mix of the Byzantine and the Cotswold, with close attention paid to the work of wheelwrights – for chamfering; wagon sides – reimagined as the backs of sideboards and settee and even hayrakes, which became stretchers on tables. Native oaks and walnuts mixed with exotic macassar ebony and inlay made of mother-of-pearl, silver – and occasionally sheep bones picked up while walking in the countryside! For the two Ernests in business together in the first years of the 20th century, there would have been frequent walks between Pinbury, Sapperton and Daneway, where they had their furniture workshops. What a walk to work! On our walk along the canal we chanced upon a weasel playing among tree roots. Mammals like these are a rare sighting these days, but for Gimson and the Barnsleys they would’ve been much more common – alongside water rats and otters. That said, these days, these too can be along much of the Thames and Severn Canal and Stroudwater, even in central Stroud! It was the red squirrel that Gimson particularly associated with the area, and sadly you won’t see one of those anymore, but their work shows mice and frogs… and their own chickens!
At the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust Daneway Banks and Siccaridge Woods we can get a glimpse of what the countryside was like 100 years ago as the trust brings back the large blue butterfly, and dormice roam in the wood by the Frome, and lily of the valley and herb-paris, both relatively uncommon flowers, bloom there.
Orchids can be found in the area too! Norman Jewson, Gimson’s assistant, was instructed to go out and study a flower a day by Gimson, and describes finding periwinkles and bloody cranesbill and pink wood sorrel in the woods and lanes.
Sadly, the two Ernests found they couldn’t work together, and Barnsley had returned to architecture by 1905. From 1909, when he was commissioned to build Rodmarton Manor, just five miles away from Sapperton, he cycled. He cycled into Cirencester too, for the luxury viands he liked so well, with cheeses and meats and boxes hanging off every part of the bike on the way home – and him riding very slowly reading a book perched on the handlebars! Rodmarton, built over 20 years, is Ernest Barnsley’s masterwork. You also can see his architecture in Sapperton Village Hall as well as several houses on Minchinhampton Common, and in Tarlton.
Sidney continued making furniture alone until his back began to trouble him. He trained his son, Edward, who went on to be one of the 20th century’s most famous furniture designers, working near to his old school, Bedales, in Froxfield, Hampshire. The Edward Barnsley Workshop still goes strong today.
Into the 1920s, Sidney was in demand for the sensitive restoration and extension of old properties. He created studios for fellow Arts & Crafts designers, stained glass designer Henry Payne in Amberley and Charles March Gere in Painswick. Gere recommended Barnsley to the Gyde charities in Painswick, and he also built a series of almhouses and the public baths and lavatories in the village – the latter is now private housing. Perhaps his finest house is Cotswold Farm in Duntisbourne Abbots.
He was almost too busy for his own good, picking up first Gimson’s, then his brother’s projects. Oakridge carver and puppeteer William Simmonds recorded in his diary that he died just as he ‘was on his way from his own house to Daneway in a car with some friends.’ This may have been to see printer Emery Walker, who was renting Daneway House at the time. Simmonds goes on, saying it was ‘a great blow to everyone.’
Everyone turned out for as they had done in January for his brother’s funeral: from the Rodmarton Biddulphs, to Emery Walker, to many villagers, the Rothensteins and the Simmondses from Oakridge, to Alfred Powell, their old friend from their London architecture days who had joined them in the Golden Valley from 1901. He was the last man standing, living on until 1960!
The work of Gimson and the Barnsleys is often forgotten today, with Arts & Crafts architects such CFA Voysey and Charles Rennie Mackintosh revered for their more outré designs. However, the work of Gimson and the Barnsleys is quietly radical, respecting, understanding and developing the traditions they saw around them in their architecture and furniture. Their work in building conservation and restoration is still respected today. When you visit places like Ernest Barnsley’s Rodmarton Manor (open Wednesdays and Saturdays in the season), you might perhaps agree with CR Ashbee’s comment in his diary after visiting the work in progress in 1914: ‘The Arts & Crafts Movement at its best here – and so are the vanishing traditions of the Cotswolds.’.
COMPASS POINTS
Distance: Three miles.
Duration: Two hours.
Parking: By the church in Sapperton
Toilets and refreshments: Daneway Inn, Daneway and The Bell, Sapperton
Further reading: The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Cotswolds by Mary Greensted
Route: gb.mapometer.com/walking/route_5644016.html
Kirsty Hartsiotis is based in Stroud and available for hire as a storyteller and speaker.
She is an Accredited Arts Society lecturer. Her books include Wiltshire Folk Tales and (with Anthony Nanson) Gloucestershire Ghost Tales and Gloucestershire Folk Tales for Children. She is also the curator of decorative art at a Gloucestershire museum.
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