Porter's House, next door to the Roebuck on Pebble Hill, was the village Post Office for a long time until the 1980’s. The house, known by several names since then, was built sometime between 1816 and 1831 by the Reverend George Porter. It was originally constructed on the site of much older cottages as the Parsonage House for Toot Baldon Parish.
Reverend Porter was a celebrated Calvinistic preacher whose sermons were so popular that people—including the future Prime Minister William Gladstone (then an undergraduate)—came from far and wide to hear him.
After Porter, the next rector of Toot Baldon was Archibald Tait, a Fellow at Balliol (who later became Headmaster of Rugby School and Archbishop of Canterbury). He only came to Baldon at the weekends. He used to drive over from Oxford on Saturday with his friend Mr Johnson, bursar of Queen’s, or another friend, Thomas Golightly of Brasenose. People remembered them carrying a bag with surplices and hoods. They would sleep at Porter’s House on Saturday night.
The house ceased being the parsonage around 1860 when a "much grander Vicarage", now Court Leys, was built next to St Lawrence Church.
By the time of the 1881 Census, the name "Porter's House" was no longer used, and the house was called Pebble Hill Cottage.
James Arnold (a carpenter) and his wife Julia lived there with their two sons, James and Albert. James was the church warden and lived in the property, then owned by The Queen's College. He was an undertaker as well as a carpenter. He made coffins in the house, evidenced by a thick layer of sawdust found on the cobbled floor. The hearse was kept in the coach-house.
In 1891, James Arnold was described as a Builder and Beer Retailer, suggesting he was the licensee of the adjacent Roebuck pub. The house was called 40 Pebble Hill. The household included James and Julia Arnold, their son Albert (Carpenter and Wheelwright), a servant named Blanche, and a lodger (Agnes Tarbet, a nurse)
Arnold Cottage in 1891 L-R Agnes Tarbet (nurse and lodger), Julia Arnold, James Arnold (Julia's husband), Albert Arnold, their son, holding their pet dog
James Arnold was politically active, serving as chairman of a Conservative Association meeting in 1909 and being elected to the Abingdon Rural District Council in 1914. In1904 he was also awarded a bar to his badge for special service to the Dorchester Habitation of the Primrose League, a national organisation devoted to promoting Conservative principles.
In 1914 the house, then called Baldon Cottage, was valued by the Inland Revenue. It was a brick and slated house containing four bedrooms and a box room, two reception rooms, a kitchen, and a scullery. It also included a stable, an old coach house (in poor condition), an old painter's shop, a cart shed, a garden, and a small strip of pasture.
The conservatory ran east from the current kitchen door and featured a vine that sometimes yielded white grapes. The outside toilet was located against the wall beyond the conservatory, screened by a yew hedge, and had two adult seats and a lower seat for children.
The house gained the name Arnold Cottage sometime after 1914, before being purchased by the Mawer family.
Roy Mawer bought the property from The Queen's College in 1936 for £365. His wife, Florence Mawer, ran the village Post Office in the house from the mid-1950s until the 1980s.
The counter initially operated from a lobby inside the back door (north side) before moving to the hall (west side).
On 1 October 1962, Florence Mawer was the victim of a robbery. The thieves were caught after a roadblock was set up, and both Florence and her son, Geoff Mawer, received a five guinea reward. During the Cold War, the house also had the village telephone and an early warning system (a box that went "beep beep beep") to alert against Russian attack.
Initially, the house relied on pumped-up well water (using an electric pump and a tank in the roof) rather than mains water. Mains water and sewage did not arrive until after 1964.
The Mawers sold the house in 2003, when it briefly became ’Pebble Cottage’, before reverting to the original name in 2005.
Grateful thanks to the Mawer and the Lyall families for their help.