The Willy Wicket, Wick Wick, South Gloucestershire

Until the late 1980s this pub and restaurant on the northeast fringe of the Bristol conurbation was the farm house of Wick Wick farm. The pub's website has it that ''County assize records show the farm as 'Wekwicha' in 1221. 'Wic' is old English for 'dairy farm' and 'Wike' was derived from an old surname.'' In fact you only need to consult the OED to see that a wick can be a dairy farm. There's a reference here to a John de Wykkewyk being in the vicinity in 1327 – so it could have been his farm. The one-time hamlet of Wick Wick and its associations with the Kemys family have a history going back at least to the 16th century. The Visitation of Gloucestershire of 1583-1623 refers to a ''Kemys of Wickwick'' and, in 1628, John Smythe in his ''The history of the family of the lords of Berkeley from the earliest times'' referred to ''Carta cum Rogero Kemis de Wick-wick''.

The house itself is probably about 300 years old and was at one time called Wickwick Manor House. In 1899, the then Curate of Downend, Arthur Emylyn Jones, in his Our Parish: Mangotsfield including Downend wrote:-
''Wickwick is a part of the original chief Manor of Frampton Cottrell, as Rodway is of Mangotsfield. The chief estate of Frampton Cottrell was detached by Henry VIII and given to Sir Jno. Seymour, the father of Edward, Duke of Somerset. It became Sir Henry Seymour's, and then his son's, Sir John, of Bitton. Wickwick was originally a part of this Manor, but in the time of Elizabeth (1558) it passed by purchase to Mr. Roger Kemys; by his daughter it went to the Brownes; by Browne's daughter Mary it went to Clayton Milborne, who died in 1712. The Kemyses are buried in the Milborne aisle in Frampton Cottrell Church. A Wm. Player purchased the Manor of Frampton Cottrell in 1700. Mr. Thos. Player was in possession in 1736; afterwards Chas. Bragge had it by descent from the Players (1750); in 1788 Robert Tucker bought it of Ed. Hoskins.''

During the 19th century the Cave family possessed much of the land in and around what is now Downend and this probably included Wick Wick Farm. At the time of the 1841 census the tenant farmer was the 50-year-old William Ansty. Ten years later the Wick Wick was being farmed by the 31-year-old William Matthews and his wife Acquilla, née Gibbs. In 1860 a son, also William, was born to them. When the census was taken in 1871 there were three more members of the family – but a few months later William died and Acquilla took over the farm. In 1873 she won a prize for the quality of her ewes. She continued running the farm until, aged 75, she died in 1896 and the 36-year old William junior took over. In 1908 he was awarded first prize in Class II of the Royal Agricultural Society of England.

Later in the new century the tenancy passed to George Roberts. One of his employees was a William Charles Wathen who had been born in St Pauls, Bristol, in 1867. He joined George on the farm early in the 1920s. William Wathen's granddaugher, Constance Jones (no relation of of Emylyn), recorded her memories of that time in Chapter 14 of ''All Our Yesterdays: memories of Downend, Mangotsfield and Staple Hill'' published by the Downend Local History Society in 1994 and later in ''The Leap to the Folley'' ¹ published in 2001. She relates that she lived in a house called Wickleize a little further along the Badminton Road from the farmhouse itself. In 1929 George Roberts retired and the Gingell family took the tenancy. Constance took a poor view of the Gingells.

The last people to run the farm were the Williams family. Christopher Williams moved in as a tenant in 1938 and purchased the farm in 1942, I believe, for £2000. Constance relates that ''the Williams were good farmers and put new life into the place''. When Christopher died in 1952 his son Mervyn took over. He was still there in the late 1980s when the property was compulsorily purchased for the extension of the Bristol ring road. Mervyn died aged 88 in 2006.

In the Autumn of 1961 plans were published for the construction of the London to South Wales motorway. The planned road was to pass just south of Wick Wick Farmhouse and close to houses in Church Lane and Blackhorse Lane which lie either side of Badminton Road, the main road from Bristol to Yate and Chipping Sodbury. Local opposition was slow to react but, at the last minute, a campaign emerged to protest against the planned route. Mervyn Williams was an important member of the protesting group. The local MP at the time, Fred Corfield, was on their side and spoke up for their cause in Parliament. On 30 November, 10 days before the deadline for objections to be submitted, Warmley Rural District Council sent a letter to the Ministry of Transport officially lodging the objections. As a result the motorway route was shifted a 100 yards or so north so that it no longer cut the farmhouse off from the village of Downend. Mervyn's boast that he was responsible for moving the M4, though exaggerated, has some truth in it.

In the mid 1980s plans were made to complete the missing link of the northeast Bristol ring road ² between the Bromley Heath Roundabout and the Warmley Roundabout. The road was constructed in two stages. The first stage did not effect the farm as it ran between Shortwood with Warmley but, near the end of the decade, the second stage was completed. This ran from Bromley heath to Shortwood. It cut straight through the farm which was compulsorily purchased. For a few years, to quote Constance Jones ''The old grey-stone house of Wick Wick Farm stood boarded up and desolate, awaiting its fate on the edge of a modern residential development stretching back to the Westerleigh Road.'' That fate came in the early years of the new millennium³ when it was converted into the Willy Wicket. The conversion was certainly as sympathetic as could be expected and, within the pub, there are some photos of the building as it was in its days as a farmhouse.
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¹ The Leap (or Lep) and the Folly (or Folley) are brooks running through north Downend. Both cross Badminton Road and are about half a mile apart at that point. The Folly is the more northerly and runs through the former Wick Wick Farm. Both brooks have pubs named after them. The Folly is on Westerleigh Road half a mile east of Wick Wick Farm. In this Google Street View the brook runs between the pub and the road on the left of the view. That road was opened in about 2005 and is called Folly Brook Road. The Leap is a smaller pub. It can be seen in this Google Streetview of Badminton Road looking north towards Wick Wick and the Willy Wicket. The little white road-sign on the left of the view is out of focus even when you zoom in – but you can just about discern that it bears the name of 'Wick Wick'.

² 'Ring road is a misnomer. The Bristol ring road does not at present – and probably never will – go anything like all the way round the City.

³ My best estimate for the opening date of the Willy Wicket is 2003.

Robert Cutts, bob@winton.me.uk
July 2010

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Taken in: United Kingdom / England / Bristol (show map)

Taken on: July 21, 2010

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