here are many people of all ages who have wonderful memories of Stocklinch and its times. If you, or someone you know, would like to share village memories with others through this site do please let us know..

We are so pleased that our very first interview is with Charlie Newis - the most senior person in our village, who has lived in Stocklinch all his life.

Celebrating his ninetieth birthday this year, Charlie Newis was born in Stocklinch and has lived here all his life. His reminiscences afford a glimpse into an English country life that has perhaps vanished forever …

" I was born in Stocklinch in 1913. My parents moved here from Seavington in 1911 when my father got a job as a carter with Samuel Faulkner, who ran the big farm here. It was all farms here then; there were nine of them, including some smallholdings. They were all owned either by the Allen family, who lived at Stocklinch Manor, or by the Ilchester Trust.

We lived at first at Gerrards, on the corner of Tunway and what is now Owl Street. I was the youngest of three brothers. My eldest brother went to the village school at what is now the village hall, but when that closed he transferred to a school in Ilminster. He had to walk there and back every day, but that didn't do him any harm! My other brother and myself were luckier and went to school from the beginning at Whitelackington, which is a lot closer.

There were about forty pupils at the school at any one time and about fifteen came from Stocklinch. The teachers were always women, there was a succession of them while I was there. In the holidays I used to help out on the farms, picking potatoes and cutting grass and that kind of thing.

I learnt how to milk a cow by hand and I remember in particular practising on one old cow called Ruby; I sat on a stool beside her but I was so small - I must have been about ten at the time - that I could only reach the teats on one side of her. So I moved the stool around the other side of her and finished the job there. Old Faulkner the farmer said I was a lucky young devil; cows were only used to being milked from one side and I was lucky not to get a kick in the ear for my trouble!

Mrs.Allen up at the Manor House was very fond of tennis parties and had a tennis lawn in front of the house. As a kid I used to go up there and act as a ball-boy to earn a bit of pocketmoney. Mrs. Allen also gave some smashing parties at the Manor at Christmas.

When I was about eight we moved to Crockers in Stoney lane and I lived there with my parents for the next nineteen years. When I left school I went to work at first on a poultry farm out at Winsmore, cleaning out the coops. That lasted twelve months but I wanted a change and for a while I messed about doing odd jobs on farms. Then one day Mr.Vile, who ran a building business over at Puckington, offered me a job as an apprentice stonemason. He knew me from our village choir, and I think my singing was the only reason I got the job! I travelled all over working for him, and when war broke out I had to go over to an aerodrome near Wellington to build gun emplacements.

I was called up in 1942 and drafted into the Somerset Light Infantry. We didn't do very much and I soon got fed up. Fortunately my brother was in the Seventh Survey Regiment for the Royal Artillery, and he pulled a few strings to get me transferred to them. They were a mobile reconnaissance outfit, scouting to set the targeting for the artillery. We were based initially at the Duke of York training school at Dover Castle in Kent and one night we were bombed out by the Germans. They did a lot of damage but I can't remember that anyone was hurt. We moved about - twelve months at Hawkhurst in Kent and then Maidstone and finally to Southampton, in preparation for the Normandy Invasion.

We arrived on the beaches on D6 (six days after D-day). We were on a pretty large ship but it just rammed into the sand and then we had to drop over the side and into the sea and wade ashore with our equipment. Over the next few months we pushed up through France, Belgium and Holland. I was there for the big attack at Nijmegen and saw all the gliders landing; the allies lost a lot of men there, especially the Americans.

One day we were told to draw lots from a hat to get a bit of leave back in England; I was lucky enough to be one of the first out of the hat. But it turned out to be a mixed blessing. There was so much snow and ice on the roads and the sea crossing was terrifying, with monstrous waves, so that the journey home was as hairy as anything I faced in the war itself!

I went back to Holland and then on to Germany. I was in Hamburg when peace was declared; the devastation there was terrible. I came back to England and since I was in the building trade was demobbed within two months.

I returned to Somerset but my old employer Mr.Vile had died during the war and most of his business had been taken over by a Mr.Fry at Kingsbury. I joined that firm as a stonemason, and I stayed with them until I retired in 1983 at the age of seventy. I actually retired at sixty-five, but they asked me to stay on, so for the last five years I worked three days a week. It became a big firm while I was there, employing about seventy-two people, and I worked all over the southwest, including working on over two hundred churches. But wherever we were - and we had a contract on a church in Salisbury that took over two years to complete - I never lodged. We always came back every night to Kingsbury and Mr.Fry paid for travelling time.

I married Rene Knight when I was twenty-seven and we lived with her parents at Elwell House for the next two years. Then a chance came up of moving into the Old Post Office, but the condition was that my wife had to do the washing for the Manor House! But we were only too glad to have the chance - property was hard to come by in those days. We had three daughters all of whom are now married - Janet, who lives at Marston Magna and who is retiring this year from the Midland Bank at Yeovil, Margaret who lives at Stoke Under Ham and who is also retired and Eileen who lives in Australia. I have four grandchildren and one great-grandchild - so far!

We had some great times in Stocklinch. We had to make our own entertainment then. There was a men's club in the Village Hall, with a billiard table and card games and we used to have whist drives and dances there too. As well as the choir, which I belonged to for eighteen years, there was a village youth band in the fifties and sixties, which used to play at all the village events. Before the war there were also village charabanc rides organised by the Sunday School and we used to go out for the day to places like Bournemouth and Lyme Regis.

When I was a young man I was pretty athletic. I used to go cycle racing and I played a lot of football, mostly as a left-winger for Barrington and Shepton. I used to get in trouble with Rene for that since I was always playing football instead of doing jobs at home! I never got into any real trouble as a young man except once. On a Sunday four or five of us used to go out into the lanes and play pitch and toss, and we used to bet a few pence on the outcome, which was then illegal. One day over at Puckington a policeman saw us doing it and called out to us. We turned tail and ran, but he knew who we were. He sent a message back through my brother that if we went over to see him and apologised he would leave it at that. So we went to see him and he turned tail himself and booked us! We each got a summons and had to pay a seven shilling fine.

Christmas was always a lot of fun. People came from all over on Christmas Eve. We had one group that always came over from Shepton Beauchamp, moving from house to house wassailing and being greeted with cider served up in big milking buckets. Every house in the village made its own cider then - there were orchards all around. My brother and I had big double-screw cheese press up at Crockers which we used to make ours and we reckoned to produce four or five barrels a year. At one time there was a cooper working in what is now Fred Faulkner's barn.

The village has changed a lot now. Opposite my house there used to be a big pond in the field. It was surrounded by willow trees and in the mornings I used to lie in bed listening to the frogs croaking. The farmers would bring the horses, ploughs and carts off the fields after ploughing and wash the mud off them in that pond. But it was filled in after a while as was the other big pond where Springfield House now stands next to Fred Faulkner's farm. That was surrounded by farm buildings - all gone now - and there was an orchard by the road where we used to pinch apples on the way home from school. Nobody minded - we weren't short of apples around here.

During my lifetime I've counted that twenty-seven houses have been built in the village. In fact I helped build one of them myself, Alan Speed's cottage up in Stoney Lane. I've lived here all my life and on my own since Rene passed away in 1991. I was always involved in the village and I served on the Village County Council for forty years from 1947 to 1987. They kindly presented me with an engraved silver tankard when I retired from it, which I'm very proud of.

I keep busy with my garden, which I love, and at the weekend I'll have a tiny flutter on the horses. Yes the village has changed and there are a lot of new people but it's still a lovely place to live. Time goes on and you've got to keep up with the times."

Charlie Newis was interview by Stephen Catchpole, March 2003

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