These interesting items have been extracted from Journey Westward, subtitled A Record of a Tour in the Welsh Marches and beyond. The book was written c. 1940, but the characters, some of whom were thriving in the reign of Queen Victoria, may well be remembered by many local people.
I gathered many odd items of Kington’s history as I sat in the bar at the ‘Oxford Arms.’ It was a few days before a municipal election and one or two of the candidates were on show to the populace, who were, it must be confessed, not opposed to accepting their generous invitation to drink. It was explained to me that it is customary here for each candidate to adopt a hotel or public-house for himself, but the ‘Oxford Arms’ was an orphan upon this occasion. The proprietor, Major Lock, had only recently acquired the house on his retirement from India and was consequently not so well known as he was destined to become. As it happened, the men of Kington were amused to observe that they now had two Locks in the town of whom the original was very little over five feet in height, while the newcomer topped six feet comfortably.
It was when the bar was tolerably full that the Major said of me : “This gentleman wants to know something about Kington.” The point was that I had engaged him in conversation myself on local matters with which he was not familiar. The response was gratifying in its volume, and from a number of facts which were laid before me I gleaned that the King’s chauffeur was a nephew of the local butcher and that Mr. A. W. Gamage started his business career in a shop in Kington.
Then somebody said: “You go and see Fred Jones at the Railway Tavern. He’s broadcasted.”
I had already heard of Mr. Jones as a man who brewed his own beer in what was termed ‘one of the oldest breweries in Wales’, a claim difficult to substantiate, particularly as the brewery is in England.
I think that Fred Jones is a man who lives entirely upon reminiscences of the Kington he used to know. The town to-day does not interest him greatly, for his mind runs back to the time when the Old Tavern was open for seventeen hours consecutively and was thronged with farmers in for the market. He brought out his albums of old photos. “Here’s one of them building the railway in 1870,” he said, and disclosed an amusing print of navvies in bowler hats laying the track. Other pictures demonstrated the changes which even a small town like Kington can see in one man’s lifetime. From where a garage now stands by the bridge on the Leominster road an old house was moved in its entirety and set up elsewhere. On this spot was an old inn; on that, a stables. The old industries of Kington which enabled it to supply almost the whole needs of a rural community for a wide area – candlemaking, a foundry, a tannery, and so on – had all ceased to function. And among these photos was one of Mr. Jones in his own garden standing beside a peculiar object that was just showing above the ground. “That?” he said, “Why, that’s one of the tramcars of the old railroad.”
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