{"id":3273,"date":"2020-09-02T12:26:43","date_gmt":"2020-09-02T12:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/patsytrench.com\/?p=3273"},"modified":"2020-09-11T09:32:47","modified_gmt":"2020-09-11T09:32:47","slug":"may-cottage-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patsytrench.com\/2020\/09\/02\/may-cottage-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"May Cottage revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The first few scenes in my book The Worst Country in the World<\/em> are set in a cottage in the village of Fiddleford, in Dorset, where my ancestress Mary Pitt was living, with her five children, when she made the momentous decision to emigrate to New South Wales in 1801.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

May Cottage is a Grade II listed building and it still exists. However when I tried to visit it back in 2008 the current owners would not allow me past the back gate. All I had to go on, apart from official records, was the testimony, and some photos and floor plans, from a previous owner, the lovely – and now late – Olive Hall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew May Cottage as a picture-postcard, two-storey thatched cottage with pink-washed walls. Two living rooms and a kitchen down, two bedrooms up. Not a lot of space for a family of six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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May Cottage in Olive Hall’s time<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Then a few weeks ago the current owner, Phil Leahy-Harland, contacted me through the Pitt family history website to say he was restoring the property to its original glory and I was welcome to visit any time. For the first time since I set out on my family history adventure I was able to actually set foot inside my ancestral home – which, incidentally, my family never owned – and patch together some kind of biography of May Cottage, thus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The house was originally built in 1684<\/strong> and was known as the \u2018Trout Alehouse\u2019. It was leased to Mary’s husband Robert Pitt in 1766, and it was licensed up until 1770, the year he married Mary and when, presumably, it changed its name to May Cottage. The cottage was owned by the local squire, Lord Pitt Rivers, and at the time of Mary’s emigration she and her five children were living there ‘rent-free’ – presumably because the family was on hard times; hence their emigration to make their home in a penal colony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Up until 1968 the house was unmodernised. The elderly couple who owned it did not use the upper floor; they turned the smaller of the two rooms downstairs into a bedroom and showered – with cold water – in the kitchen. Their toilet was an ‘elsan’ outside the back door. Olive and her husband added a bathroom on the upper level, and at some point the two downstairs rooms became one. An extension was added in 1992.<\/p>\n\n\n\n