The new entry road winds round behind Holmfield House into a yard that up to sixty years ago contained the stables, paddock, orchard and kitchen garden of the great house that stands to the front. Though for the last fifty years or so occupied by Grundy’s Engineering Works and before that Les Bates’ Haulage firm, originally Holmfield House and all the surrounding land was owned by the Dods family, probably the most influential and important family ever to walk the streets of Donington. The large field to the west of the house was known as the Home Field; all the grass of this huge field is now covered with housing, leaving only the great oak tree at the corner of Station Street and Malting Lane as a reminder of days gone by. Chestnut Avenue, Ash Court. Maple Way, Beech Grove and Salters Way all now divide what was once rich pasture land.

For some two hundred years the Dods family were land and property owners, coal and corn merchants. road stone merchants, animal feed and manure merchants, boat owners, farmers. maltsters, brewers, wine and spirit merchants, public-house owners, attorneys, insurance agents and general traders, employing near to one hundred men at the peak of their business empire. The family already had a thriving farming and grazing business when Holmfield House was built in 1792 - a typical large Georgian house, built of local red brick, three bays wide, three storeys high, with curious moustached lintels above the front windows. At the time it must have seemed a massive structure to the villagers, towering above every other building except the church. By the start of the 1800s Joseph Dods started to expand his business, building a wharf where the Bridge End Causeway crossed over the Forty-Foot Drain bringing in coal and taking away corn and produce. Old Joseph died in 1809 and in the Parish Register on his burial he was described as being “a man of great stature, peaceable and moral”.

Joseph junior then took over control but it was when his son, William, took over command in the middle of the century that the firm started to move forward at a tremendous pace. William expanded the wharf at Navigation Bridge to bring in more coal and general goods and take away the corn and produce from the village. He added stables, warehouses, a weighbridge, a blacksmith and a carpenter’s shop. In the village he built the malting buildings at the top of Malting Lane. (where Burdall’s Petrol Station now stands). He also built a brewery, just through the archway on the North side of Station Street, and so that he didn't have a problem selling his beer. he bought the licences of most of the public houses in the village. Two corn warehouses were built, one in Station Street, recently made into a private house, and the other, opposite the school in the High Street which was turned into the Donington Snooker Club around 1950. He bought an old thatched mud and stud cottage opposite Holmfield House and turned it into his office, and it was still known as Dods office when it closed in 1997. He was a prime mover in the late l870’s to get the Great Northern and the Great Eastern railways to build a line through Donington and when the line opened in March 1882, he was able to transfer his coal and corn haulage business from the Forty-Foot bank to the station yard.

William Dods had become the uncrowned king of Donington and, in his immaculate top hat and frock coat, he was as well known in the London Coal and Corn Markets as he was in the local markets of Donington, Boston and Spalding. With his white hair, beard and deep-set eyes he had the air of a man born to command; he was firmly convinced that he knew what was best for his business and what was best for Donington. William Dods didn’t suffer fools and many felt the weight of his tongue and influence if they dared oppose him, he was a hard man but he also had a soft heart. Long before the days of the welfare state he was ardent about the health and well-being of his workers. One day, a story goes, his son Joseph remarked that there were far too many old men on the payroll, to which his father replied “Yes son, I know — but I had them as fine strong young fellows. I've had the steel so l shall put up with the old iron”. The old man died aged 88 in 1917 and after one of the biggest funerals Donington has ever seen the business was left in charge of his sons, Harold and Joseph. Harold moved with his family into the big house while Joseph lived at St Heliers at the comer of the Market Place and Park Lane.

A passion running through the family was cricket. William’s son Harold had a long wooden building erected in the paddock behind Holmfield House for his son Harold, his friends and anyone else that could play cricket to practice their bowling and stroke play at the indoor nets. Young Harold was a brilliant all-rounder and in the 1930’s he became captain of the Lincolnshire County team.

The Dods dynasty ended on beautiful sunny morning in 1944. On Sunday the 18th of June 194-4, Lieutenant Harold Dods of the Scots Guards, along with l 18 other soldiers, was killed when a German VI flying bomb crashed on to the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks in London during morning service, Old Harold died, a broken man, aged 81, in October 1948. The house. land and the business were all then sold by the remaining members of the family. Curiously the wooden cricket hut was bought by the people of Bicker for £300, dismantled then re-erected in 1950 as the Bicker Village Hall, and served its purpose well until being replaced by a brand-new building in October 1986.

IAN EVANS December 2005