A BIG VLIELAND CONNECTION

Ospringe: a small village in Kent with a big Vlieland connection Ospringe – originally known as ‘Ospringes’ because of the ‘water lane’ of springs that ran through it, was a hamlet named in The Domesday Book that, although both rural and remote, had surprisingly many connections to our Vlieland story. The next door-parish was Syndale, the estate farmed by William Millen and where Alice Edith Millen and her younger sister Bertha, grew up. Alice Edith, as we know, married Charles James Vlieland of Stalisfield, two miles away; Bertha married Herbert Samuel Shove of Queen’s Court, the mansion originally owned by Margaret, the wife of King Edward I, and the ‘big house’ in Ospringe. Until his early death at 35, in 1889, Herbert Samuel and William Millen were in partnership to work farms in nearby Plumford and Luddenham. In 1877, though still in his early 20s, Herbert helped to support the Vlieland children when Jerome Nicholas Vlieland died and his children and second wife Ann literally ‘lost their living’, as the vicarage passed to the new incumbent and they were turned out on the street. Bertha was born in 1865, married to the 31-year old Herbert in June 1885, and widowed four years later, a month after her mother Phoebe Millen’s own death. Alice Edith’ third daughter Phoebe was born at Queen’s Court in January 1888, and christened at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in the village. Why Phoebe was not born in Exeter, like her elder sisters Frances and Dorothy, is not clear, but maybe Alice came to help with Bertha’s young family – Herbert William b. July 1886 and Gerald Frank b. November 1887 – when Bertha was only 21 and 22. Her third son, Ralph Samuel, was born in May 1889, only a month before Herbert Samuel’s death. Herbert William Shove, Bertha’s eldest son, was the best man at the wedding of Frances Vlieland in Exeter in April 1906; we know from the blog that he was a decorated naval officer and later prominent in the ‘Flee to the Fields’ movement in 1918–39 that lobbied the government to create a land reform to give every smallholder farmer his own plot of land, not tied to a landowner as a ‘tenant slave’. Bertha and Herbert Samuel are both buried in the beautiful 13th-century church in Water Lane; in Victorian times a ‘hop garden’ lined the path to the church. Hop flowers (known as ‘cones’) are crucial for brewing beer. The hop plants climb 19- foot high chestnut-wood poles on strings of twine, trained on the frame by ‘monkeys’, men walking on stilts, as has been done since the 15th century. The harvest is picked by hand, and the hops added to the boiling process to add bitterness, flavour and stability to the brew. We know all about William Millen as a sheep farmer, but the family now farming at Syndale have records going back to his time as a hop-grower as well, so we may have a whole new story to tell. Thanks to BARBARA,