Bothway family
Within a year of the great 1869 farm auction, the remaining tenant of Burton’s Farm, Maria Burton, had died. New tenant farmer, Henry Bothway, took her place, arriving with his wife, Mary, and five children in 1870.
The full story of the Farm is provided here.
The new landowner, after 1869, was Sir Henry Tyrwhitt. He died in 1894 and was succeeded by his wife Harriet, Lady Berners.
The 1871 Census advises that the tenant, Henry Bothway, employed seven men and two boys. By 1881, this had increased to ten men and two boys.
Henry Bothway farmed until his death in 1902 and was succeeded by his son, Herbert – at the comparatively young age of 18.
Lady Berners died in 1917, and her successor, Raymond Robert Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 13th Baron Berners died a year after her. Farm ownership was inherited by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners – and nephew of the 13th Baron, who immediately decided to sell.
The young Herbert Bothway was able to raise a mortgage and buy the farm – no longer were the Bothway family the farm tenants.
In June 1911, Robert Dennis Day was carrying out house repairs for Mrs H Bothway – but we don’t know whether it was the senior or junior Mrs H Bothway!
The tasks comprised:
Repairing ..? veneer, repairing a ..? stand & varnishing, putting up wardrobe hooks, repairing a cane seated chair, putting letter-plate and bell on hall door, shortening towel horse, new frame for looking glass and converting ..? a chair. All for the sum of £1 13s 10d.
Sometime after the death of Henry Bothway, his widow, Mary, had moved to a newly constructed house: “The Homestead”, on Church Road. The land had been bought for £40 from Lady Berners in 1910 by two married women (sisters?) who each lived in different parts of England. By 1919, one sold their share to the other – for £200, by which time, The Homestead had been constructed – with Mary Bothway as its tenant.
Fanny Bothway, a daughter of Henry and Mary, married Marshall Howard in 1901. Marshall was a master builder and he was responsible for building The Homestead after Henry Bothway’s death. All the bricks were fired at Marshall’s brick kiln in Cawston, North Norfolk. The bricks were transported by train between Cawston and Ashwellthorpe stations.
Is there a connection between R D Day’s above June 1911 repairs (plus adding a letterbox & front doorbell) and Mary Bothway moving from the farm / into the newly completed house?
At about the same time that Herbert Bothway was buying Poplar / Home Farm, his elder brother, William Edwin Bothway (husband of Elizabeth, nee Quantrell) had made his own successful bid for a 183-acre farm. This was The Grange/Canal House Farm, just to the south of Toprow (and mostly in Ashwellthorpe). In the same 1918 auction, William acquired several Toprow cottages.
Up until then, William and his wife had been tenanting the same farm. Its northernmost fields were in Wreningham (abutting the southern boundary of Hill House Farm) although the majority of the land fell in Ashwellthorpe with some margins crossing into the parishes of Hapton and Fundenhall.
In 1915, Dorothy Bothway (daughter of William and Elizabeth) married Horace Folwell the son of a pork butcher from Leicester, creating a Wreningham connection with Leicester’s Folwell family. Dorothy went on to become the founder of the Wreningham & District Women’s Institute branch. She eventually became the branch’s lifetime president – and, through the passage of time, morphed into local Womens Institute ‘royalty’!
In due course, Dorothy and Horace took over the farm and it remained with them until the mid-1960s.
In World War 2, Major Richard Bothway was in the Norfolk Regiment, serving in S E Asia. He can be seen in this East Anglian Film Archive film report sending a message home – from Burma to Wreningham (about two and a half minutes into the film).
Herbert remained in charge at Poplar Farm until his death and – skipping a generation – he was succeeded by Robert Bothway during the late nineteen sixties. (Robert’s father – a further Henry – was already operating a farm at Fundenhall and had preferred to remain there.) In arriving at Poplar Farm, Robert had the interesting experience of taking on a farming establishment still mostly powered by horses; he had to make rapid changes to mechanise!