Bicester - Famous Bicestrians

As I was reading about Bicester for our second -cester walk, I decided to do some research into famous people who were born in Bicester.  Britain has contributed a lot to the world in terms of the sports, sciences, politics and the arts and one can only presume that each small town in the UK will have it's own celebrities, sons and daughters who left their town or village behind and went on to greater things.  Amidst the usual plethora of sports' stars and entrepreneurs, I've chosen three famous Bicestrians, who interested me, for one reason or another.

The Muse

Being a 19th-century artist's model doesn't really guarantee you any fame these days and, compared to the overpaid supermodels of the 20th century, Maud Franklin ended her career in relative obscurity having been, for a time, the mistress and muse of the famous American painter James McNeill Whistler.  Whistler was somewhat of an eccentric character, travelling to Russia and Chile, studying art in Paris, living with Maud in Venice but ending his years in England.  By all accounts he didn't treat Maud particularly well.  She had two children by him, but he never married her, eventually ditching her for a young woman called Beatrix Godwin, the widow of his friend and architect, Edward Godwin. 

It is said that Maud was so loved by Whistler because she was the only woman who could put up with the demanding sittings his portraiture required.  After her relationship with Whistler ended, she moved to Paris and, later Cannes, where she died sometime around 1942.

The Doctor

Another interesting Bicestrian was the 19th century doctor and obstetrician, Albert Freeman Africanus King.  King owes his unusual name to his father's obsession with Africa.  The family moved from rural Oxfordshire to the USA when King was ten years old and King followed his father into the medical profession, graduating from the Columbia Medical College and the University of Pennsylvania.

King is famous for two things - being one of the physicians on hand, at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and being one of the first doctors to suggest a connection between mosquitoes and malaria.  People thought he was joking at first, when he suggested that there might be a connection between the presence of mosquitoes and incidences of the disease and it was not until 1898 that the British Indian doctor, Ronald Ross, proved that this was indeed the case. 

The Modern Major-General

George Rose was an actor, remembered primarily for his comedic roles and his interpretation of, what must be, one of the hardest songs in the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, I am the very model of a modern Major-General.  Although he acted in quite a few movies, Rose was better known as a stage actor, both at the Old Vic in London and later in Broadway, where he first graced the boards in 1946. 

More controversial than his life, was Rose's death in 1988, in mysterious circumstances in the Dominican Republic.  Rose bought a house in the Dominican resort town Sosua in 1984, where he'd seemed very happy, with his coterie of animals and 17,000 jazz records.  Being gay and childless, Rose had taken in a 14-year old boy in 1984, who he later adopted and had intended as his heir.  What was first reported to have been a terrible car accident in May 1988, turned out to be something more sinister and Rose is believe to have been brutally beaten and killed by his adopted son and his son's real father. 

The boy claimed to have been Rose's lover and, by all accounts, was worried that Rose was going to disown him because they hadn't been getting on very well.  Rose's friends insist that his relationship with the young man was purely a father-son bond.  The case, which remains unsolved, certainly exposed the press's homophobia in their attitude towards Rose, as well as the Domincan Republic's desire to make as little fuss about Rose's death as possible, not wanting to discourage the lucrative stream of British tourists visiting the island.  It's very much a story of its time and I can't help thinking that if this had happened ten or twenty years later, Rose's killers would have got the punishment that they truly deserved.

Whether ending their days in Cannes, Pennsylvania or the Dominican Republic, these famous Bicestrians certainly led interesting lives, leaving the town of their birth far behind, in their pursuit of fame and glory, whether on the canvas, in the medical world or on stage. 

I'm going to leave you with a Youtube video, showing George Rose as the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance. 



Credits

The images of Albert Freeman and Whistler's Arrangement in White in Black are in the public domain and (therefore) copyright free. 

The photo of Sosua, Dominican Republic was taken by flickruser Eaulive, a lighting designer from Montreal, Canada, who currently lives in DR.  Thanks Eaulive for sharing this image with us, using the Creative Commons License.  If you'd like to see more of Eaulive's photos, check out his photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/eaulive/

The photo of the sign in Bicester was taken by me. 

A lot of the information I've used came from Wikipedia.  I've also referenced an article on the death of George Rose, which was written by investigative journalist Alix Kirsta and first appeared in the Sunday Times on the 25th of May 1997.  You can see the full article at http://www.alixkirsta.com/articles/georgerose/index.htm

Bicester - the walk

When I first starting writing this blog, I thought I would do all of the research before visiting whichever -chester myself and BAM (Best Aussie Mate) had agreed upon, then finish with a final blog about the walk itself.  We're only on our second -chester and I realise that it's better to do things the other way round - ie. start with the walk and pick up ideas for further research along the way.

Although I've been living in England for almost two years (and BAM has been here a lot longer), I feel there is still so much to learn and our walk in Oxfordshire yesterday has proven to me that you can plump yourself down in any random place in England and there will be a whole lot of history, landscape and village-life to observe and absorb!

Bicester

I didn't really know what to expect with Bicester.  Enquiries from work colleagues and English friends drew blank looks or, at best, vague references to a massive shopping mall.  In my mind, Bicester was slowly becoming Stevenage or Milton Keynes!  Arriving anywhere at night is definitely disorientating and, walking along Launton Road in Bicester, through the eerily abandoned office buildings of an industrial estate and past a factory with the ominous grinding of machinery, we were beginning to wonder what God-forsaken place we'd ended up in. 

We sought refuge in the King's Arms and steeled ourselves for rural Oxfordshire on a Friday night, with cheap red wine (BAM) and a yummy Oxfordshire ale called Hobgoblin (me).  It also gave us a chance to catch up on all of our news since we last met and we talked about my Irish lessons in Hammersmith and the difficulties of Cantonese with its seven tones and rapid delivery.  The B&B we stayed in, Ava House, was really lovely and we would definitely recommend it, if this blog inspires you to venture down Bicester-way.

After a fab breakfast and a chance to stock up at the local Co-op, we wandered through the town centre.  It's funny how different things look in the daylight!  Bicester is really a charming little market town, bustling with shoppers on a Saturday morning, there was a nice feel about the place and we were impressed by some of the quaint buildings along Church Street in, what seemed like, the older part of town.  I'd also like to say a big Thank-you to the lovely woman in Vision Express who mended my glasses after the frames had (somehow!) got bent the evening before.  There was a prominent Methodist Church in Bicester and we noticed others during our walk, so it's something I'm going to look into and (perhaps) blog about later.

Bicester to Wendlebury (3.2 miles)

When we were originally talked about this trip, we'd planned to go in a completely different direction via Middleton Stoney, past Upper Heyford Airfield to Somerton then along the Oxford Canal Walk to Lower Heyford where we would catch our train back to London.  Totally on a whim, we changed our minds.  Whilst looking over the map in the King's Arms on Friday night, we decided instead to follow a cycle path south via Wendlebury, getting to Lower Heyford via the Oxfordshire Way and the south-north route on the Oxford Canal walk.  We also thought it would be apt to walk past Alchester, the site of a Roman 'vexillation camp'.  Vexillation doesn't mean, as I thought, that everyone there is angry all the time, but refers to a camp which can be set up quickly, part of a movable front line protecting the south-north movement of the Roman armies.

Leaving Bicester via King's End and the Oxford Road (A41), we passed the famous shopping mall, Bicester Village which, although we didn't have time to visit, looks very modern and a pleasant place to while away an hour or so.  Our main concerns were avoiding occasional cars coming round the sharp bends and deciding whether or not Germaine Greer had gone too far in her attempts to gain notoriety (BAM is a fellow-Melbournian and knows more about the subject than I do). 

Wendlebury didn't fail to impress and we particularly liked the 'Broken House' which added atmosphere to the village. 

Wendlebury to Oddington Grange (2.9 miles)

Wendlebury seems absolutely idyllic until you realise how close it is to the M40!  The M40 is something I'd really like to come back to in a future blog, as I think it has an interesting story to tell, being Britain's latest major motorway, it cut a controversial swath through a rural Oxfordshire unprepared for its speed and purpose.  I couldn't help being impressed by the speed of cars on the motorway, as we stood on a bridge just south of Junction 9 - it seemed so at odds with the peaceful countryside around it.

By the time we crossed the motorway, BAM had had enough of roads, so we decided to go off-piste on one of those 'rights of way' that appear as a series of red dots on Ordnance Survey maps.  The route took us through a landscape that has been utterly changed with the end of summer, the land being ripped up and the path being, at best, a conjecture.  What had started as a rainy morning in Bicester, suddenly transformed into a gloriously sunny afternoon and I couldn't help falling into a reverie about walking and how it's not all about mountains and the land but, especially in flatter landscapes like Oxfordshire, it's also about the sky and the clouds.  I've long been impressed by the landscapes of the Dutch painters, where the land appears as a sliver along the bottom and the sky dominates the painting, in all its glory.  I tried to create my own version of this in the photograph accompanying this paragraph.

As we were negotiating our way through tilled fields and along the edge of Weston Wood, we saw several pens with quails running around inside.  We also saw lots of pheasants, near Weston Park farm and, in case the farmer is reading this, BAM was very impressed with how orderly and well-kept the farm was.

Oddington Grange to Weston-on-the-Green (2 miles)

At Oddington Grange we met the Oxfordshire Way, a waymarked trail that runs for 68 miles from Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire to Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire.  We used the trail to cross the A34 and followed it over the fields to Weston-on-the-Green.  Weston is an idyllic Oxfordshire village, with little thatched cottages, a very solid looking 13th-century church called St Mary's and a busy Village Hall, which was hosting a horticultural show.  We had a rest on a bench outside St Mary's and were talking to some of the volunteers who worked in the church.  Village life in England fascinates me - with its Women's Institutes, marrow contests and home-made jams - it's a million miles from the world I grew up in, that's for sure!

Weston-on-the-Green to Kirtlington (2.4 miles)

We left Weston-on-the-Green following the Oxfordshire Way through a field full of sheep and with a view of parachutists towards the north of the village.  I've since learned that RAF Weston-on-the-Green is used as a parachute training site.  I get the sense that there is a tangible Army presence in the county and, I suspect, many local families have sons and daughters who are in the RAF or other military units.

It didn't take long to be in the middle of nowhere again and, at this point, we did get a bit lost, being distracted by a lovely hedgerow that took us a quarter of a mile in the wrong direction, when we should have been concentrating on going straight ahead.  When we finally got back on track again, crossing a line of trees, we came to the stunning grounds of Kirtlington Park, an 18th-century Palladian country house, the park itself having been designed by Britain's most famous landscape gardener, 'Capability Brown'. 

Kirtlington was yet another idyllic Oxfordshire village - lots of sighs and gasps from BAM this time, as she admired the layout of the village and its pretty little buildings - you certainly get an inkling of how the other half lives!  It helped that the village was basked in a glorious late-afternoon sunshine, adding a magical hue to the stone houses, apple bowers and thatched cottages. 

Kirtlington to Pigeon Lock (1 mile)

We followed the Oxfordshire Way along Mill Lane, passing a disused Quarry and on the east bank of the Oxford Canal to Pigeon Lock.  BAM is very interested in Canal boats and knows all about locks and narrow-boats - she filled me in on the standard measurement of narrow boats in Paddington dock (63 metres) and we talked to boat owners, as we met them along the tow path, BAM quizzed them about the length of their boats, as she admired their paintwork and remarked on the names their owners had given them.

Pigeon Lock to Lower Heyford (5 miles)

For the last part of our walk we turned onto the Oxford Canal walk, a long-distance path that is 82 miles from Oxford to Coventry.  As a keen walker, I've spent quite a bit of time on towpaths and it's always very pleasant walking, away from the roads and fields, life seems to slow down immensely, as the canal boats drift past, then stop at the locks, where there is usually a bench, so you can rest and have a chat with the boat owners. 

We did about 15.5 miles altogether on our Bicester-Lower Heyford walk, so (after 7 1/2 hours) I think we were both genuinely relieved to get to Lower Heyford, in the end, for a pint and a meal in the beer garden of the Bell Inn. 

Image credits

All photos were taken by me during the walk on Saturday the 12th of September 2010