https://www.tiktok.com/@brian..smith

Obituary: By Ian Abbott Donnelly

Brian's journey through eight decades of life coincided with immense shifts in how we live and connect. 

From his early years as a child travelling on his own by tram and growing up in London using the London Underground to travel to and from school, he navigated the evolving landscape of transport and technology, embracing everything from the history of stage coaching (about which he wrote whole a book), through his love of trains to the emerging technology of the internet and self-driving cars.

I first got to know Brian through a conversation, which started in the queue at the village's fish and chip van. His sparkle for anything new that could make the world better, wiser and more connected was the theme of a conversation that lasted for over 30 years. 

As we got to know each other better through village events and through the friendship of Hilary and Janette.  ‘The boys’ were often dragged along to some garden or historic house, or to a film or theatre outing - Tolethorpe theatre was an annual occurrence - and most memorably, the Science festivals held in Grantham and Cambridge.  Food was always involved - be it bacon butties, brunch, wine and cheese, afternoon teas, dinners, fish and chips …as long as there was at least a cheese scone, the conversation flowed.

By a strange coincidence, in the same week that Brian passed away, and our conversation finally came to an end, so too, the Fish and Chip Van ceased trading.

His interest in sharing the value of education meant he was an early adopter of the internet, making good use of this through his profession as a teacher and then on to connecting to a huge number of people during his retirement, especially the next generation, through the best aspects of social media. His tag line was:

“I am 79, I have seen a lot of change. What would you like to know?”

This ability to constantly inquire, to learn and to make use of the emerging future was only possible because of the team created by his marriage to Hilary. Their partnership enabled them both to thrive and make the most of the world around them. 

Together, with each house move, they didn't just create homes; they created role-model lifestyles.  They valued each other’s interests and independence, though perhaps here, Hilary’s ’tolerance’ has to be commended; Brian would often be found to have wandered off and be in conversation with someone when he was needed elsewhere. They were gracious hosts and good friends.

Brian was someone who understood that life is not measured by time, rather it is a connected series of moments to be lived and cherished.

He never missed an opportunity to document his view of the interesting parts of life through platforms like Discord, YouTube and TikTok, where he had an amazing following. Perhaps he was an unlikely ‘Influencer’, but the 17 pages of heartfelt messages from the community that Brian had created simply by being Brian, tell their own story.

I’ll quote just a few…

When I watch Brian’s videos, they made me feel quite calm and relaxed, which helps me deal with the day-to-day.

Brian was like a spiritual father to me. I found comfort and solace in his presence and his videos 

What an amazing dude. Nobody his age is as open and willing to have an open dialogue with this younger generation. 

I didn’t actually speak to Brian much, but when I got the pleasure to do so, he was the kindest soul ever.

This man was an educator throughout his life. His wisdom, humour and warmth made us not only learn, but feel like we had a TikTok grandad. 

Brian was an amazing human, Brian shared his experiences, his wealth of knowledge and a well-lived life. One thing Brian taught me is never to shy away from an opportunity. 

What really struck me was the fact that despite being generations older than us, he didn't feel any different to us. 

I have never been so devastated over the passing of someone I’ve never met.

Brian loved to inform and enlighten, and I am almost certain he wouldn't want this to be a moment of heartbreak but rather another point of enlightenment.  Just because you think you and those around you are fine, it doesn't mean that's the case. Brian was a wise man, and he would have known, that it's better to view loss, as an opportunity to get closer to those you care for.

The legacy Brian left through the content he created will remain and will continue to influence the next generation:

• to be kind and caring,

• to participate in the world (not just observe it), 

• and most of all, to always be curious. 

I will finish with a quote from a song lyric that seems appropriate for this occasion:

The song title is  'Keep Me in Your Heart for a While'  by Warren Zevon

There is one specific line that says: 

'There is a train leaving nightly, called:    'When all is said and done'.

Content from Brians Website

The End of Antibiotics

King Richard I, ‘The Lionheart’, died in April 1199 when he received a crossbow bolt wound to his left shoulder whilst walking the castle walls without his chainmail.

It wasn't a bad wound and these days we'd clean it and dress it and put him on a course of antibiotics. He'd have been as right as rain in no time.

But Richard died in his mother’s arms ten days later. The warrior king, seen here in the famous statue outside the Houses of Parliament in London, was brought down by microscopic organisms that we barely give a second thought to.

Richard's wound allowed bacteria through the skin's protective layer, and once inside they multiplied until infection raged through his body, causing fever and gangrene and ultimately killing him.

His fate was not unusual. Before the discovery of penicillin, any wound could lead to infection, fever and death. Not all wounds did, of course, but the possibility was always there. Even a minor scratch could lead to death if you were unlucky.

I was born just after the war so I’ve spent my entire life in a world in which infections can be treated swiftly with antibiotics. Unless you’re older than me, you too have never known a world without antibiotics. Cuts and grazes are very rarely a problem and even major wounds and surgery are generally not life-threatening. We’ve become blasé to the risks.

But the time has come to wake up - and it’s becoming urgent.

We are now approaching a post-antibiotic world and this should frighten us all into immediate action. The fact that it isn’t bothering us too much is testament to the way we humans have an almost infinite capacity to ignore the blindingly obvious until it's almost too late. I say "almost" because we also have the ability to find creative solutions to impossible-seeming problems - but we only do it when we reach the brink.

The brink is nearer than you think and if we want to avoid plunging our children back into a world where small cuts can kill them we need to start acting now.

The UK government has already announced a research programme to find alternatives to antibiotics but this is not enough. It is actually a warning shot at the beginning of a battle for survival. Will you pay heed to it or are you still sleep-walking into a post-antibiotic world?

The film below - a TED Talk given by Maryn McKenna - explains everything you need to know. Watch it and you will understand. Don’t put it off - our children’s futures are at stake. 

Computing

Computing is a subject taught in all UK schools.  All children, from the age of four, must learn about algorithms, programming and using computer technologies. Why is this and what do you need to know about it?

The main reason, of course, is to ensure that Britain can compete with other countries in designing and making products based on computer technologies.

It’s also important that we should all be able to understand and control products which include computers technologies, rather than being assive recipients.

Products which include computer technologies, increasingly means pretty well everything we purchase and own.

 
If you’re under 40, you won’t remember a world without computers and the all of the digital technologies we take for granted nowadays. You’re probably not aware of just how profound a change there has been during your lifetime.

Does it really matter? Well, this rapid change has had profound impact on our way of life and nowhere is this less important than in education, where young people are learning how to be happy, healthy and productive members of society.

So read on. This website will tell you all you need to know . . .

There are three sections:-

• The Coming of Computers:
  How the world changed from analogue to digital and how computers came to be everywhere and in everything.

• Computers in Schools:
  How computers came into schools and where they fitted in the new National Curriculum of 1989.

• The New Subject, Computing:
  How the study of computers changed from ICT to Computing and why.

There’s much more of course so click below to continue or choose fom rht menu in the sidebar on the right.

Part 1: The Coming of Computers

For the 200 years before you were born, everything was mechanical. Cogwheels, pulleys and pistons; knobs, switches and ropes; this was the world before digital.  

Charlie Chaplin operating a machine in the film “Modern Times” (1936)

And for the thousands of years before that, nothing existed that couldn’t be made by a carpenter, blacksmith or stone mason.

If you couldn’t make it, it didn't exist - blacksmith working red hot iron

Men’o’ war at sea

Even the fighting ships of the world’s navies were built by hand - with a little help from horses to pull carts and drive winches.

But then came digital technology . . .

Computers in Education

Before the early 1980s computers didn’t exist in a form which could be used by you and me. They were enormous, complex, machines which were used for financial and manufacturing “number crunching”.

Typical computer of the 1960s

By 2000, every school in the UK had several computers, many in dedicated rooms called computer suites, and “Information Technology” (IT) was a core element in the National Curriculum of England and Wales. 

The computers all had the “Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer” (WIMP) interface and a range of robotic and data measuring equipment had also been provided under government schemes, though these were less well used (more about that in this section). These computers were truly multimedia machines capable of working with words, images, sounds and even film.

Typical computers in the late 1990s (PC, Acorn, Apple)

Two decades later, computers have become ubiquitous, with touchscreens and mobile devices spreading so fast that the concept of “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) has entered educational parlance.

But computers are not about the hardware. It’s what you do with them that matters and in schools, they have a dual role:

• You must learn how to use them (computing as a subject),

• They help you learn other subjects (computers across the curriculum.

By 2014, this dual role had become muddied. Computing as a subject (or ICT as it was known by then) had often become little more than learning how to use Microsoft Office.

The full story of what happened between 1980 and 2014 is covered in this section. I’d recommend reading it because much is still relevant today.

https://computerhistory.org/ 

Can you foresee the future?
The future is coming. It is beckoning to us. But what it will be like? Can you guess what life will be like in five years’ time - or ten?

Thomas Watson, president of IBM in 1943, couldn’t when he said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Nor could Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1977 he said, "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

So our chances are slim.
Did you foresee the widespread ownership of smartphones and tablets when mobile phones looked like this back in 1987? (They cost $3,500, by the way.)
No, nor did I.

And could you have conceived back then, that children and teenagers would be routinely posting videos on Facebook and YouTube - a few of them making a fortune in the process? 

That's the problem with trying to foresee the future. It’s pretty well impossible despite the fact that we all think we have a fair idea of what things might be like in a few years’ time.

We think we know what’s coming . . .
We imagine bigger televisions and smarter cars, faster trains and futuristic fashions. But are we right?

It’s actually pretty impossible to imagine what the world will be like in just five years' time, never mind ten or twenty. We just can’t imagine what we’ll all be using and doing.

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Why is it so difficult to see what the future holds
- and what can we do about it?

There are several reason why we can’t foresee what’s to come, the two main ones being familiarity and unexpected consequences.

This website will help you begin to see what’s coming and that may well give you a competeitive advantage.

You’ll learn about:

• Why we can’t see into the future

• How we never know what to do with any new technology

• How the consequences always take us by surprise

• How things as timeless and essential as jobs may not be as timeless and essential as we thought

• How we think we know what wealth is . . . but we don’t

• How we try to educate our young people for the future but get it all wrong

A Bridge Made of Iron

Whenever a new technology comes along, it is used for familiar tasks. It’s not surprising really. Here’s an example from the 1700s:-

Building Bridges
How do you cross a river? Well you can ford it if it's shallow but otherwise your only option is to build a bridge and this has been done for thousands of years with very little change. There are two way to do it: arches and spans.

Arches are built using stones or bricks, each of which is very short. 

But you can also span a river using wood, which is a long material. 

By joining lengths of wood together you can span a river - and the way you join two pieces of wood together is by making a joint.

The best known joint, and the most beautiful, is the dovetail joint.

Dovetail joint

The Arrival of Cast Iron
It all changed in the mid 1700s when the Industrial Revolution began to take its first faltering steps and iron was produced in large quantities for the first time. Prior to this iron ore had to be heated over a fire and you only got small lumps. Good for forging axes and plough shares but not enough to cross a river.

Suddenly, it was possible to pour iron into moulds and make it into long lengths.

For the first time in history it was possible to build a bridge using iron and it happened in Shropshire, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. The town is still called Ironbridge and the bridge is still there as you can see in this picture.

The iron bridge at Ironbridge in Shropshire

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But the early builders faced a problem - how do you join long lengths of iron together? Until that time iron had been worked by beating it on an anvil. No-one had ever had to join long lengths of iron together on this scale. So how did they do it?

The answer is that they did what users of all new technologies do. They used familiar methods. They cast dovetail joints and pegged them with iron pegs! It sounds crazy now but for them it was the most logical thing in the world. 

They were at the white heat of technological innovation and they were doing new things with a new material. But they did what we all do with a new technology - they used it for a familiar task. Admittedly, it did it did rather better than the old technology (wood), but there was nothing really new happening. They used iron in place of wood and they joined the pieces together the only way they knew how.

This happens with every new technology. We have to go through the process of getting familiar with it by doing familiar things. Then, in due course someone comes along with exciting new ideas and the technology takes off.

Hot riveting and welding

New Ideas
It wasn’t until hot rivets and welding were invented that the new technology came into its own. And when it did, the effects were amazing - iron ships that floated and steam engines that could do the work of a hundred horses!
The consequences were enormous and started a revolution: The Industrial Revolution

Iron sinks - yet a boat made of it can float

When I first wrote this page, back in the 1990s, I  believed that almost everything we had done with computers up until then had been little more than using new technology to do traditional tasks. We'd been using dovetail joints.

For example, word processing has advantages over pen and ink - you can erase easily and the results look professional - but it’s not a new activity. Even desktop publishing, very popular in 2000, was nothing new. It brought the power of the printshop to your desktop - but wasn’t a new idea.

What are the New Ideas We Are Waiting For?
I asked what the first “electronic rivet” might be? What would the first example of “electronic welding” be? I thought that perhaps the Internet was the first really new idea (it was still very new in the 1990s). We accessed it using dial-up and it was a very slow process. Any page that had pictures on it took a long time to load - but it did have new elements. You could access a wealth of information, 24 hours a day, from the comfort of your own home.

Was it just an electronic library or was it a really new idea?

Now, twenty years later, we can see real change. Thanks to broadband, those static web pages have been replaced by vibrant, media-rich, user-generated content, online shopping, virtual reality . . . . and identity theft (not all good then?)

But we haven’t finished yet.

Superfast Broadband
Superfast broadband is the next step, currently neing trumpetted by governments. It will have profound consequences - it’s just not possible for our brains to make that conceptual leap. Current indications are Big Data and Artificial Intelligence which are leading to driverless cars and will probably eventually replace the professions in the same way that robots have replaced factory jobs.

Medicine will probably change from being a reactive process where you visit your GP when you have symptoms and damage has already begun in your body, to a pro-actice one in which wearable technology is monitoring you 24 hours a day and the health system calls you in long before you know anything is amiss.

Before you leave this page you might like to see a film I made in the 1990s, in which I tried to capture that idea of using new technologies to do familiar things:

When the builders of the first iron bridge started exploiting their new wonder material, iron, they had no idea what the consequeces would be.

When we look forward and imagine life in a world where superfast broadband is completely ubiquitous - available everywhere by technology that’s embedded into everything, we think we can see the consequences. But we can’t.

Let’s look at one more example from the past. This is the story of Type Setting.

A Better Way to Set Type

Movable type
Gutenberg printed his first bible in 1492, and Caxton brought printing to England shortly after. The secret behind the new process was movable type. Small pieces of wood had a reverse letter carved into the end of them and by placing them together you could build up words. Ink and a press meant that you could then turn out hundreds of copies far more quickly than scribes could hand-write them - and the type could be reused again and again. 

The printing process remained essentially unchanged for centuries. Metal replaced wood for smaller type sizes and presses became more sophisticated but otherwise it has been said that Caxton could have walked into a 20th Century letterpress factory and picked up the basics in a day.

The explosive increase in books fuelled a wider readership and by the late 1700s pamphlets were also common and news sheets began to be printed. As the 1800s progressed printing firms employed hundreds of typesetters, or ‘compositors’ as they were known. Yet despite their number, by 1884 not a single daily newspaper in the world had more than eight pages! Typesetting was a slow process.

Google advertisement:

The Lintoype Machine
Then, in 1884, a new machine was invented which caused panic among the compositors. German-born Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the linotype machine which speeded up the process - and caused uproar! Compositors across the world feared that they would lose their jobs and they were very angry.

Here is a Linotype machine (left). It looks amazing and it is. Click on the image if you’d like to see it full size in Wikipedia (opens in a new window).

To use a Linotype machine, one person sits at a keyboard - which you can see near the bottom of the machine - and types a whole line of text in seconds. 

As the operator typed, this amazing machine assembled brass matrices into a row. When the line was ful, the operated pulled a lever and molten metal flowed into them and produced a complete “line-o’-type”.
The result was called a ‘slug’ and you can see one below.

At last it was possible to set type efficiently and quickly. Whole pages could be composed in the time it used to take to set a small paragraph.

It revolutionised typesetting and, true enough, it did put the old typesetters out of work . . . but that wasn’t althogether bad. After all, who would really prefer to set type by hand when they could retrain and become a Linotype operator?

Their anxiety was not with the technology but with fears for their future, their incomes and their families.

Consequences
But it’s the consequences that are the lesson for us all. The linotype machine did not do away with jobs (other than manual compositing). What it did was reduce the cost of typesetting. 

This doesn’t sound particularly ground breaking, but it was. The immediate effect was an explosion in the the number of newspapers being produced - and their size. This is something that people probably foresaw. What they didn’t see coming was the creation of an entire new industry - the magazine industry and the thousands of ew and unheard-of jobs that came with it.

What the Linotype machine did was reduce the cost of typesetting. That was its contribution to history. And by lowering the cost of typesetting a whole new industry and millions of jobs were created.

Just think about it. In a world where print was expensive, the idea of a specialist paper that catered for a minority interest was completely unthinkable. It made no business sense.

But once typesetting was cheap, newspapers, pamphlets, and magazines began to be produced in their millions.

What’s more, many new jobs were created - foreseeable ones like reporters, journalists and columnists for example - but also completely new types of job, like illustrators, designers, publishers and distributors. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created once the new technology had rolled out and the dust had settled. All this could not have been imagined by the publishers of early newspapers.

The compositors could not have foreseen their future any more than we can see ours. They saw the technology as a threat to jobs; in reality it created them.

Specialist interest magazines are familiar to us today

Unexpected Consequences
I call this an unexpected consequence and I think it’s crucial to our understanding of how computer technologies are changing our world. The next page will look at this idea in more depth:-

Next: Unexpected Consequences

Aside: There was another unexpected consequence of the linotype machine - the birth of the misprint. Click here to read this amusing story.

Misprints

Etaoin Shrdlu and the world of misprints
There’s a wonderful aside from the invention of the linotype machine - the misprint.

What happens when you make a typing error when using a Linotype machine? The answer is that it’s easier to fill the rest of the line with rubbish and start the line again than to try and correct the error. And the best way to fill a line was run your finger down a couple of rows of keys.

If you look at this photograph of a Linotype keyboard you’ll see that the first two vertical rows of keys in both capitals and lowercase spell out the nonsense words "etaoin" and “shrdlu”.

The Linotype machine keyboard

All you had to do was remember to remove the faulty slug from the finished job - and as you can imagine, this was often forgotten so the misprint was dutifully printed, complete with etaoin shrdlu’s to the end of the line.

People in the early part of the 20th century became very familiar with seeing rows of etaoin shrdlu’s in their printed matter. Here’s an example - an advertisement for Doan’s Pills (about half way down).

Read more about “Etaoin Shrdlu” misprints in Wikipedia. (opens in new window)

In fact the words Etaoin and Shrdlu became so familiar to early 20th century readers that they were used in several works of fiction.

A short story by Anthony Armstrong was entitled "Etaoin and Shrdlu”, and ends:-
"And Sir Etaoin and Shrdlu married and lived so happily ever after that whenever you come across Etaoin's name even today it's generally followed by Shrdlu's".

Today’s readers would wonder what he was talking about but it was clearly very familiar in 1945 when the story was written.

In 1965 a book of misprints was published called "Funny Ha Ha and Funny Peculiar”, by Denys Parsons.

It was simply a collection of misprints, grammatical errors and plain bad English but had the background theme that they had all been the work of an inept character called Gobfrey Shrdlu or his wife, Lousie.

Here are a few examples. They’re not particularly funny in themselves but a book containing page after page of them leaves you helpless with mirth:-

• Something New Which No Motorist Should Be Without. We offer you the SELF-GRIP WENCH.

• It was not disclosed where the honeymoon would be spent. For travelling Mrs Johnson wore the lovely 5-tier wedding cake.

• Mr --- was elected and accepted the office of People's Churchwarden. We could not get a better man!

• A very enjoyable affair was the Children's Hallowe'en Party. Added to the beauty of it all was the fact that few of the children could be recognized as they all wore masks.

• For a moment he stood there looking into her eyes. Between them was a bowl of hyacinths.

Next: Dramatic changes

Dramatic Changes

This brings us full circle to where this section started: change from Agriculture to Industry to Information.

This is the cottage I lived in until 2012. It was built in 1732 and although its appearance has changed very little, it has witnessed 285 years of mankind’s progress. It was built by William Fell, a local stonemason, ready for his marriage in 1733 to a girl from the next village called Mary Fletcher. You can read more about them in the “Cottage” section of this website.

William and Mary will have looked out of their windows at large fields divided into strips of land that their families had farmed for generations. They saw nothing to suggest that it would ever change. Yet the seeds were already sown. Farmer George was on the throne and inventors like Thomas Newcomen were experimenting with steam power. (Read more)

It was WiIliam's daughter-in-law, another Mary, by then a widow, who saw the first drama begin in 1794 when commissioners from London arrived to begin the process of enclosing the land amidst immense upheaval. Mary had to make a claim for land equivalent to her strips less the cost of fencing and hedging. We don't even know if she could read but she was plunged into a world of lawyers and meetings at the Blue Boar in Bainton. When the dust had settled, Mary Fell owned the paddock opposite. Her name is on the Enclosures Awards Map of 1799 and the earliest document in the cottage deeds refers to the cottage as "formerly owned by the widow Mary Fell”. The poet, John Clare, lived in the adjacent village of Helpston and this is what he wrote when hawthorn hedges changed the landscape:

"Enclosure, thou'rt curse upon the land,
And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence planned."
- John Clare

The Industrial Revolution
But Mary had seen nothing compared to what was to come. She died in 1801 before the Midland Railway built its line just a mile away, visible from her bedroom window. within the next 100 years the entire economy of Britain changed from Agricultural to Industrial and the way ordinary people lived their lives also changed forever.

The Information Revolution
Now it is happening again. The Industrial economy into which we were born is no more; it has already changed into an information economy. Our years at school trained us to get secure jobs with a pension but these jobs are no more. Uncertainty, zero-hour contracts and the need to constantly re-train are the qualities we now see in the press on a daily basis. And as for a pensions, we are asked if retirement should be compulsory and encouraged to start building our own pension independently of any one employer. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which took about 150 years to run its full course, this change is happening within a generation.

How do we educate children for an information society?
We have to look at the lessons of the past. During the period of change there was immense hardship. Change brought unexpected consequences. For example, when agricultural jobs were lost the old Parish Relief system broke down because there were too many poor people. It was years before a proper state benefit system was introduced. And as people moved out of the villages and into towns overcrowding led to slums and epidemics. Again it was years before public health gained a proper footing. And there were other consequences. In 1788 John Byng wrote that he couldn't conceive of any reason to teach the poor to read. In 1870 the Education Act introduced exactly that.

Computers in schools
Which brings us back to today. William Fell could not, in his wildest imagination, have conceived the things we now take for granted - universal education, package holidays, the publishing industry, television, motor cars, flight, space travel - it's impossible to stop listing things that William could not have foreseen in a million years. And these things are no longer new - they are absolutely normal for everyday people.

Believe it or not, we are now standing in William Fell's shoes. We cannot, in our wildest dreams, imagine what the future holds. Information technologies are going to cause change just as profound as those witnessed by the cottage in the picture above - and it's going to happen a lot faster.

We must educate our children to enter a world of profound change and the way to do that is not to ‘deliver’ a content-rich curriculum that the Victorians could easily recognise. 

Dramatic Changes

This brings us full circle to where this section started: change from Agriculture to Industry to Information.

This is the cottage I lived in until 2012. It was built in 1732 and although its appearance has changed very little, it has witnessed 285 years of mankind’s progress. It was built by William Fell, a local stonemason, ready for his marriage in 1733 to a girl from the next village called Mary Fletcher. You can read more about them in the “Cottage” section of this website.

William and Mary will have looked out of their windows at large fields divided into strips of land that their families had farmed for generations. They saw nothing to suggest that it would ever change. Yet the seeds were already sown. Farmer George was on the throne and inventors like Thomas Newcomen were experimenting with steam power. (Read more)

It was WiIliam's daughter-in-law, another Mary, by then a widow, who saw the first drama begin in 1794 when commissioners from London arrived to begin the process of enclosing the land amidst immense upheaval. Mary had to make a claim for land equivalent to her strips less the cost of fencing and hedging. We don't even know if she could read but she was plunged into a world of lawyers and meetings at the Blue Boar in Bainton. When the dust had settled, Mary Fell owned the paddock opposite. Her name is on the Enclosures Awards Map of 1799 and the earliest document in the cottage deeds refers to the cottage as "formerly owned by the widow Mary Fell”. The poet, John Clare, lived in the adjacent village of Helpston and this is what he wrote when hawthorn hedges changed the landscape:

"Enclosure, thou'rt curse upon the land,
And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence planned."
- John Clare

The Industrial Revolution
But Mary had seen nothing compared to what was to come. She died in 1801 before the Midland Railway built its line just a mile away, visible from her bedroom window. within the next 100 years the entire economy of Britain changed from Agricultural to Industrial and the way ordinary people lived their lives also changed forever.

The Information Revolution
Now it is happening again. The Industrial economy into which we were born is no more; it has already changed into an information economy. Our years at school trained us to get secure jobs with a pension but these jobs are no more. Uncertainty, zero-hour contracts and the need to constantly re-train are the qualities we now see in the press on a daily basis. And as for a pensions, we are asked if retirement should be compulsory and encouraged to start building our own pension independently of any one employer. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which took about 150 years to run its full course, this change is happening within a generation.

How do we educate children for an information society?
We have to look at the lessons of the past. During the period of change there was immense hardship. Change brought unexpected consequences. For example, when agricultural jobs were lost the old Parish Relief system broke down because there were too many poor people. It was years before a proper state benefit system was introduced. And as people moved out of the villages and into towns overcrowding led to slums and epidemics. Again it was years before public health gained a proper footing. And there were other consequences. In 1788 John Byng wrote that he couldn't conceive of any reason to teach the poor to read. In 1870 the Education Act introduced exactly that.

Computers in schools
Which brings us back to today. William Fell could not, in his wildest imagination, have conceived the things we now take for granted - universal education, package holidays, the publishing industry, television, motor cars, flight, space travel - it's impossible to stop listing things that William could not have foreseen in a million years. And these things are no longer new - they are absolutely normal for everyday people.

Believe it or not, we are now standing in William Fell's shoes. We cannot, in our wildest dreams, imagine what the future holds. Information technologies are going to cause change just as profound as those witnessed by the cottage in the picture above - and it's going to happen a lot faster.

We must educate our children to enter a world of profound change and the way to do that is not to ‘deliver’ a content-rich curriculum that the Victorians could easily recognise. 

The story of a cottage

For almost thirty years, home was a stone and slate cottage in the East Midlands, where Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and Lincolnshire all meet. It is called Berry Cottage but we have no idea which former resident gave it that name. The cottage was built in 1732 by William Fell, a stonemason, in preparation for his marriage in 1733 to Mary Fletcher who lived in the next village, Bainton.

Many generations of people have owned the cottage before us and although we thought of it as ours it was impossible to escape an awareness of the fact that we were only holding it in trust until we passed it on to its next guardians - which we now have done. It's a great responsibility which is not lost on us. If we had spoiled it, a piece of English history would have been lost forever.

Owning an old cottage is a fascinating experience. Apart from the fact that there isn't a straight wall in the place, there is the sobering knowledge that it was built before such familiar names as Beethoven, Mozart, Napoleon and Nelson were even born, and William Fell was closer in time to the Plague than we are to World War One.

Find out how it’s built and who lived in it in this section.

1700s: first generation

The first generation
On the15th April 1733, William Fell married Mary Fletcher. We don't know whether the service was held in Bainton or Ufford, nor do we know who attended his wedding. But we do know he was a mason by trade and it would seem likely that he'd been busy throughout the previous year building a house for himself and his new wife to live in. Here you can see the datestone he carved and placed high on the gable end. Above it, the chimney rises from the huge inglenook fireplace.

We don't know how old William was but he was probably in his mid twenties when he married Mary. This would mean that he was born in about 1708, just 42 years after the great fire of London and just one generation away from the dreadful plague that attacked London. I wonder if that plague reached these parts and if it ever cropped up in conversations in Ashton at that time?

It is impossible to know exactly what happened over the following years because William and Mary are long gone, as are their children and their children's children. They didn't leave us diaries or letters and we don't even know if they could read and write, though it seems likely that they could. However, like all of us they left a trail of their lives in official documents and from it we've been able to work out fairly accurately who lived in the cottage throughout its history. The trail may be 283 years old (in 2015) but it includes the datestone, the enclosures awards map of 1799, old deeds, parish records, gravestones in Ufford churchyard and a will.

So we know with a fair amount of certainty that William and Mary Fell had a daughter, Elizabeth, who was baptised on 8th October 1734. Tragically, she seems to have died only two days later so the cottage must have known great sadness in its first year of occupation. Then on 3rd February 1735, a son William was baptised. He lived for 59 years and inherited the cottage when his father died. He was buried on 14th February 1780.

We think that WIlliam and Mary also had another child - a daughter, Mary, who was baptised on 31st May 1739 - but that she too, died in infancy just six months later and was buried on 6 September 1739. If all this is true then it seems the cottage wasn't full of laughing children during those early years, just young William growing up with his father and mother. This is a guess based on the records we found which also contain other members of the Fell family. So we like to think that the house was a happy place with a growing family.

We know of no other events over the next twenty years. The family probably lived as contentedly as anyone else in Ashton. William was probably building other local houses or working on buildings in Stamford. And we know they owned strips of land scattered across the four great fields of the parish because when they were enclosed in 1799 the paddock opposite Berry Cottage was awarded to Mary Fell (see Enclosure for more).

Then, in January 1761, young William's mother, Mary, died. She was buried on 28 January. It must have been a tragedy for both of the men, especially since young William was due to marry a local girl called Mary Nottingham just a couple of months later. She lived in Bainton and despite the loss of his mother, she and William were married on 14th April 1761.

Next: the second generation of the Fell family

1700s: second generation

The Second Generation
William Fell’s son, the young William Fell, married Mary Nottingham from Bainton on 14th April 1761. He was 26 years old. She moved into the cottage and they lived with William's father, his mother having died just two months before their wedding. 

Berry Cottage was built by William Fell. William was a stone mason but his family also farmed in Ashton. We know this because in 1799 the Enclosures Awards Map awarded the paddock opposite the cottage to Mary Fell. Find out who she is on these pages.

We are not genealogists so details in this story may be incorrect. But we're pretty certain that the main facts are accurate. Old William certainly did build the cottage and young William did inherit it from his father. But the children they had is open to interpretation. If you are an experienced genealogist and can refine my guesswork please get in touch. A good place to start is the Bishop's transcripts of the Ufford Parish registers.

Here is what I think happened next:

• On 21st April 1762 William and Mary baptised a daughter, Elizabeth. Was she named after William's parents' first born child who had lived for only two days? That we shall never know.

• On 5th December 1763 another daughter, Mary, was baptised.

• On 19th May 1771, a daughter, Sarah, was baptised. There had been a gap of eight years and William was 34 when she was born.

• On 7th March 1773, another daughter, Barbara, was baptised but sadly, she seems to have lived for only fifteen months and was buried on 3rd June 1774.

These girls were almost certainly born to William and Mary in the cottage but there are other children in the records who may have belonged here although there were several Fell families in the parish at the time so it's impossible to be sure.

• Jane was baptised on 1st October 1775. She seems to have died when she was seven and was buried on 7th August 1782.

• Another Barbara was baptised in September 1781 and llived until 1805 when she was buried aged 24. William would have been 44 when she was born.

• There may even have been a son, William, but he is listed as being born to "William and Mary of Ufford".

In 1780 old William, who had built the cottage, died. He was buried on 14th February alongside other members of the Fell family. We haven't been able to locate his grave but these are the gravestones of other Fells and it is certain that William's is there too. Perhaps 221 years of weather have made his engraving illegible? At that time Bainton Church, although closer, was a chapel of Ufford Church and so all major events took place in Ufford. The people of Ashton must have walked there regularly but we are not certain which way they went.

When the older William died their daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, were 18 and 17 years old respectively. It's possible, of course, that they may have left home by then and perhaps gone into service, but young Sarah was only nine when her grandad died and she will undoubtedly have still been living at home.

Young William was now the owner of the cottage which he lived in with his wife, Mary, and their daughter, Sarah. It's possible that he built the extension which is now our kitchen. Or perhaps he and his father had built it together? It was clearly built after the main cottage because it uses smaller and more ragged stones and this suggests that it was built by a less skilled mason than William the Elder.

In 1790 Sarah, now 19 years old, married Ben Johnson. We don't know if they lived in the cottage with her parents, William and Mary Fell, but it seems likely that they did. William was now 55 years old and Mary will have been of a similar age. They will almost certainly have all farmed the family strips together.

But in 1794 at the age of 59, William died and his widow, Mary Fell, inherited the cottage. She had to continue to manage the strips and it is to be hoped that Sarah and Ben did live at home to help her. Their help would be needed for another reason too, for trouble was just around the corner.

In 1796, just two years after William had died, their world turned upside down when commissioners were appointed under an Act of Parliament to enclose the land. Poor Mary, without her William to help her, had to make a claim for land based on the strips she owned. And she had to bear the cost of enclosing any block of land she was awarded by planting a hawthorn hedge all round it. The story of what happened next is contained in the records of the enclosure but three years later Mary was awarded the paddock opposite the cottage and curiously, one other paddock some was away in what was the old High Field. The hedge she planted is still there. You can see it in the photograph. The hedge is in the foreground, recently trimmed and the sheep are in the paddock which was awarded to Mary Fell. The hedge is 269 years old now and has Elder, Ash and Willow growing in it. We watch it trimmed by tractor each year and only in our imaginations can we envisage how it was planted as young Hawthorn striplings, perhaps by Mary herself, or perhaps by Son-in-law Ben?

Enclosure

In 1796 local land owners met together and discussed modern farming methods. It was becoming increasingly impossible, they said, to farm efficiently when each person owned strips of land in different places all over the three open fields. In common with people all over Britain, they wanted to amalgamate their land into fields and enclose them with hedges. The process was called Enclosure.

It would be a major undertaking and would need an Act of Parliament to do it. And whilst it was of great advantage to the larger land owners, small cottagers who only owned a few strips would find themselves with not enough land to make a decent field - and by the time the cost of hedging and ditching had been taken into account, they'd have no land at all, so how would they live? We don't know how the arguments raged but we do know that meetings were held in the Blue Boar public house in Bainton and we can only imagine the conversations which took place there. The result was that, like every other parish, they went ahead petitioned Parliament to allow them to enclose the great fields of Ufford with Bainton and Ashton Parish.

As you can imagine, the process was a huge transformation and we can only guess at the feelings that Mary Fell had as she looked out of the very window where I now sit and contemplated the future. If only her dear William had still been alive to help her through this, she may well have thought! In the event, the history books describe the enclosure of Ufford and Bainton with Ashton as very easy and peaceful compared with many enclosures at the time. And when the dust had settled, Mary Fell had been awarded plot 92. You can see it in the map below which is a detail from the Enclosures Awards map of 1799. (See the full map here or by clicking on the picture below).

The 1800s

As 1799 drew to a close the Enclosure of Ufford with Bainton and Ashton was over. The landscape and the people were changed forever. For youngsters like Mary and William's daughter, and son-in-law, Sarah and Ben Johnson, the challenge of a new century and a new way of farming was probably exciting. For the older generation like Mary Fell, it was probably all too much. Two years later she died.

At this point our knowledge of who owned and lived in the cottage is weakest. However, on 17th November 1837 a local gentleman, William Wyles of Southorpe, made a will which left, "all to his wife, Ann, for life, thence to his daughter, Elizabeth, wife of William Grossmith, thence to her children to be tenants in common" (not joint tenants). This may seem irrelevant at first but his possessions included land and property in Ashton and in Deeping St James - including the Cottage! How did he come to own it? The answer is we don't know. In 1808 a nearby pair of cottages were owned by Benjamin Wiles who, the Ufford Bishop's Transcripts imply, was William Wyles's brother. Perhaps Ben and Elizabeth (nee Fell) sold it to William Wyles to raise money and thereafter paid him rent? It does seem that Johnsons continued to live in the cottage for many years.

Pamela Broster, who lived at Gamekeepers Cottage in Ashton, did a lot of work on the history of the village. She worked out who most probably lived in Berry Cottage based on the census returns. It seems most probably that in 1841 it was "Hannah Johnson (widow) and son George". In 1851 it was "George Johnson aged 34 born Ashton". And it 1861 it was "John Johnson, unmarried, aged 59 born Ashton". These Johnsons are probably the descendants of Benjamin and Sarah (nee Fell) but we can't be sure.

So in 1837 William Wyles owns the cottage and has willed it to his wife, Ann. However, he survived her so when he died on 10th October 1854 everything went to his daughter Elizabeth until she died on 20th January 1864 when it went to her son and daughter, Lucy and John Grossmith.

The Grossmith family were significant Ashton residents in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The farm next to Berry Cottage was known as Grossmiths Farm until the house and land were separated in 1995, and there is a cottage called Grossmiths Cottage a little further along the road.

Lucy and John's inheritance included Berry Cottage and also some lands in Deeping St James. We know this because they decided to partition their inheritance, John taking the Deeping St James land while Lucy kept the land in Ashton. We don’t know if the paddock awarded to Mary Fell still belonged to the cottage at this point. Perhaps it had been sold by Ben and Sarah in the early part of the century? The picture shows the original deed of partition and, below it, the title on the reverse side, showing their names.

Perhaps John Johnson died at about this time, or perhaps he was evicted? Either way, by 1868 Lucy Grossmith had married John Grooby and changed her surname. We know this because in 1868 John Grooby borrowed £50 on a mortgage against the house from Mr Francis Brown, a gentleman from Peterborough (it was in the days before building societies!). What the money was for we have no idea but the mortgage document shows that he borrowed the money "in right of his wife" and refers to the cottage as "formerly in the occupation of Mary Fell and now of Sarah Grooby".

In the 1871 census, John and Lucy Grooby lived in the cottage and Lucy stayed there until 1923.

The 1900s

As the twentieth century dawned Lucy Grooby lived in Berry Cottage. Queen Victoria was on the throne and Britain was at the height of its success. We don’t know what happened to John Grooby. Presumably he had died by the turn of the century.

The cottage probably didn't have a name at that time - names are quite a modern feature and even as late as the 1990s two homes in Ashton still had no names. They were listed on the Post Office website as "Dunford, Ashton" (now Primrose Cottage) and "Wilkinson, Ashton" (now First House).

So we don't know who named the cottage Berry Cottage but it will have been one of the owners in the 20th Century and we know who they all are.

• In 1923, Lucy Grooby sold the cottage to Herbert George Sculfer

• In 1926, Grace Susannah Grossmith bought it.

• In 1940, Rose Alice Gibson inherited it from Grace Grossmith.

• In 1949, Mrs Emily Hales bought the cottage and lived in it with her husband, George Hales, and his daughter by a previous marriage, Jean.

• In 1958, Mrs Norah Gertrude Jones bought it.

• In 1965, Norman and Virginia Britton bought the cottage.

• Then, in 1967, Ian Norman Collins bought it and did a major renovation. He added a swimming pool and had wild parties which were still remembered by local residents when we moved in in 1987.

• In 1971, Thomas and Carlota Brewer, Americans based in the UK at the time, bought Berry Cottage. Carlota is still in touch and now lives back home in America.

• In 1973, Miss Michelle Frankel bought the cottage but does not seem to have lived it at all. She let it to students who seem not to have looked after it. By the time she sold it, the swimming pool was empty and the pump, etc., didn't work.

• In 1976, Edith Annie Smith, joint owner of Grossmiths Farm next door, bought the cottage and lived in it until her death in November 1985. She had the downstairs floors dug out and concreted and filled in the swimming pool with the dug out soil plus paint cans etc. We know this because we painstakingly dug them all out!

• In 1986, Brian and Hilary Smith (that’s us) bought the Berry Cottage from the deceased's estate. John Smith, who farmed Grossmiths Farm next door was executor for Edith Annie Smith (Aunt Edie).