Locking
The village of Locking in Somerset became part of the Woodforde story when the Revd Alexander Woodforde was appointed rector at St Augustine's in 1894.
Alexander John Woodforde was born in Ansford on 3 August 1839. He gained a BA degree in Divinity from Hatfield House, University of Durham, and served as vicar of Shepton Montague, near Castle Cary, and as vicar of St Augustine's Locking, near Weston-super-Mare from 1894 until his death in 1909. A number of his watercolours of this church and the rectory (now demolished) have survived.
He was previously curate at the Parish Church of St John in Weston-super-Mare, at which time he lived at Chittagong Villa in Shrubbery Walks on Weston-super-Mare's Worlebury Hill.
The son of Ansford solicitor George Augustus Woodforde and Harriett Mary Leir, eldest daughter of Revd William Leir, Rector of Ditcheat, Somerset, the Revd Alexander John Woodforde inherited the Ansford estate because his elder brothers, Charles Neville and Robert Reginald Augustus, died unmarried and without issue.
He
married, on 11 January 1870, Elizabeth Laishley, the only child of George Laishley of
Clarence Lodge, Shirley. Elizabeth was born in Southampton on 5 February 1835, and died at Lausanne on 5 February 1885.
On 27 September 1886 the Revd Woodforde secondly married Agnes Marie Collett, the daughter of the Revd William Collett. They had one child, Dorothy Cecil, who was born 20 December 1888 and died 8 January 1889.
According
to Dorothy Heighes Woodforde, a granddaughter of the Revd
Alexander, many family papers were lost in 1909 when the family left
Locking
after his death.
"He was a great collector of family stories and traditions
(inventing not a few himself), and all existing letters, diaries and
note books were very carefully kept by him.
Immediately after his death all these letters, and many of the diaries, were accidentally sold as waste paper. My father, arriving a day or two later, found a few of these letters of these letters in the stables where they had been dropped by the man who carted the rest away, but very little has ever been recovered."
Amongst
the lost papers, according to Dorothy, was 'a great deal of
material of a much earlier period which had never been
examined', probably from the 14th or 15th centuries.
The old
Elizabethan Ansford House, which had been in the ownership of the
Woodforde family for almost two centuries, accidentally burned down in
April 1893. Street directories for the period list the Revd Alexander
Woodforde and his brother
Randolph as the chief landowners in Ansford.
The children of Revd Alexander Woodforde and Elizabeth Laishley
Alexander George Leslie - Born 19 September 1873, died Auckland, New Zealand,1953.
Robert Edmond Heighes - GP, born 23 December 1874 who married Mary Thorne.
Reginald Fielding Marriott - Electrical Engineer, born 30 November 1880.
Georgina Maud - Born 2 November 1870.
Harriet Ethel Berkeley - Born 8 April 1872 who married, on 31 October 1905,the Revd George Frederick Jackson MA, English Chaplain at Hyeres, France.
Margaret Cecily Neville - Born 31 July 1876.
Katherine Delicia -Born 26 April 1878. Died 13 September 1904 (suicide).
In the churchyard are buried Katherine Delicia Woodforde (1904), Revd Alexander John Woodforde (1910), Agnes Mary Woodforde (1920), Margaret Cecily Nevil Woodforde (1947)
Reginald Fielding Marriott Woodforde (1962), Winifred Elizabeth Woodforde, second wife of Reginald (1983), and Robert Alexander Woodforde, younger son of Reginald (ashes, 2018).
In the above photograph, taken at Locking Rectory in Somerset in about 1900, the family members are:
The Revd Alexander John Woodforde and (seated) Agnes Woodforde nee Collett, his second wife.
His children:
Standing (left to right), Harriett Ethel Berkeley Woodforde, Reginald Fielding Marriott Woodforde and Robert Edmond Heighes Woodforde. Seated, (left to right) are Margaret Cecily Neville Woodforde and Katherine Delicia Woodforde.
The eldest son (Alexander George Leslie Woodforde) and eldest daughter (Georgina Maud) had already left the family home.