Patcombe Farm - Melbourne Street
Patcombe Farm - Melbourne Street


Patcombe Farm held land within the village and the field called Patcombe Hill. The farmhouse was partly thatched and partly tiled, with a porch and front garden behind black railings. The Whittaker family had lived there for several generations and, at some point, they added a very high room to the rear of the house to accommodate a pipe organ.

In 1935 the farm changed hands from Mr W. Smith to Mr S. Butt. In 1939 a Bath Transport omnibus hit the front porch and it was “knocked entirely away from the front of the house”. This, along with farming and family struggles, led Mr Butt to conclude: “I have had nothing but trouble since coming to Bratton. I have tried hard, but everything seems to have gone against me”.

Bill and Peggy Gale took over the tenancy in 1943. They found a building in a shocking state. Door handles came off in visitors’ hands. The wooden floor had rotted so badly that Mr Butt's dog crept through a hole and slept between the joists. Elsewhere eight layers of linoleum and newspaper had been laid on the uneven flag stones to battle the damp. Eerily, if you shut one door, two or three others flew open, and one night all the wallpaper came off the walls.

The photograph, taken by Bill Gale in 1944, shows his first employee, Reg Newbury, shovelling bricks which had fallen out of the wall when an American tank drove up Melbourne Street, during training for D-day on the Plain.

There was a well inside the back door, with a big hand pump to lift the water into the roof tank. Being a self-taught engineer, Bill rigged up an electric motor and a float switch in the tank so it filled automatically.

Having dedicated several years to creating a cosy home for their young family, Bill and Peggy were shocked when, following the war, the MoD decided that it was in too poor a state to recondition and should be demolished and a new house built in its place. The new farmhouse would stand there today if Bill Gale hadn't boldly insisted on staying put and pressing to have it rebuilt across the yard, away from the road, in a little orchard.

With the new house completed in 1953, the old farmhouse came down. The front porch was sold to Ludlow Farm near Warminster, and all the rest, bar the timber, was dropped down the well.




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Bratton History Association.

The Bratton History Association aims to provide all those curious about local history with an opportunity to meet, exchange ideas, and discover more about the history of Bratton and Wiltshire. Activities include monthly meetings, talks by professional historians, visits to places of interest to historians, and our own local history project.

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