SAM STEVENS IN DISCUSSION WITH S.P.B.MAIS 1956

(Sam Stevens were one of the Cumnor residents visited by Mais when he was working on his book 'Our Village Today' (Weiner Laurie) in 1956.)  

I had the good fortune to be taken round the village by the genial, energetic and very forceful Sam Stevens, headmaster of the new handsome Primary School of a hundred and eighty four children, who is an enthusiastic and expert wood-carver and lay reader in the church. His principal leisure time occupation (if you can call it leisure time) is his Boys' Brigade of which he is very, and very rightly, proud. He showed me a photograph of his company, as smart, smiling and fit as if they were winners of the Ashes.

'The object,' said Sam Stevens, 'is interdenominational Christianity and discipline.'

He took me over his headquarters in the Vicarage stables over the door of which I read the inscription 'B.B. 1767.'*

'Appropriate,' he said, 'but untrue. The Boys' Brigade was only founded in 1883 by Sir William Smith.'

I saw a billiard table in the main stable. a well equipped library in the harness room, and in the loft above, a carpenter's bench, metal shop and lathes with examples in wood-carving and copper-beating of the boys' achievement. It was a most heartening sight. Sam Stevens has solved the problem of the teenage boys of Cumnor.

He took me over the magnificent Norman church of St Michael which is abnormally light and spacious and contains a wonderful circular oak staircase under the tower that was built in 1685. There is also a carved Jacobean pulpit and below it a very unusual clerk's pew or reading-desk of the same period and a chained Bible.

There is good plain panelling and a fine oak altar in the side chapel. The most exciting monument is that to Sir Anthony Forster, who died in 1572,, and his wife. This has a Purbeek marble canopy and consists of two brasses and coloured coats of arms.

Forster, owner of Cumnor Hall, has always been held responsible for the murder of Amy Robsart in September, 1560, when she was precipitated downstairs during the absence of her whole household staff at Abingdon**. As her husband was in love with Queen Elizabeth, who apparently knew nothing of his ten years' old marriage, murder seems the obvious verdict. Murder at any rate is the general verdict of the village.

Amy haunted the Hall for a long time until her spirit was exorcised in the very black and forbidding village pond. There is a curious stone statue of Queen Elizabeth in the church that was brought here in 1888 from Wytham Abbey. There are also copies of letters written by Amy to her agent (none to her husband) on the wall and a print which makes her out to he singularly beautiful.

In the churchyard Sam Stevens showed me the only remaining relic of the once famous Hall which was pulled down in 1840***. It is a piece of the stone fireplace of the Great Hall. In the field beyond you can still see grassy mounds showing where the buildings stood. The graveyard threatens to extend in that direction.

* The stable block was built by the Rev. Benjamin Buckler.
** Academic sources discount any such involvement by Forster.
*** It was pulled down c.1810