Donkey Lane Dwellers - Recollections of Local Residents

According to a history of Chinnor compiled by members of the WI in the late 1940s Keanes (sic) Lane was named after the Keane family who for 300 years occupied Hill Farm beside the lane. There were cottages with mud walls on the lane close to the railway crossing. These were inhabited by men who carted flints, for road making down from the hills using donkeys. The carters' donkeys grazed in the grassy lane and so Keane's Lane became Donkey Lane. They also carried wood for chairmaking. 'Donkey Jimmy' is remembered as the last and proud owner of four donkeys.

Recollections of the late Mabel Howlett

 
“Chinnor has always been my home and I have never wanted to live anywhere else. In 1952 I married my second husband who worked for the Eggleston’s at Hill Farm and we went to live in a cottage in Keens Lane dating back to the 1600s. The cottages were on the left when walking up the lane [before the railway crossing and is now a field]. We always knew Keens Lane as Donkey Lane. There were two cottages, the other was occupied by Syd Heybourne, his wife Doris and daughters Jean and Joan. Syd looked after the pigs and farm gardens and tennis courts.

 
Rent for the cottage was one shilling a week and the rates ninepence [together roughly 10p in today’s money]. There were no drains of any kind, just an earth lavatory at the top of the garden and a tin bath kept hanging on the shed wall and fetched in for bath nights. We washed our dishes and prepared vegetables etc at the kitchen table and drew water from the well in buckets. Someone asked me how many buckets I drew on a wash day (Monday). I wasn't sure so the next week I counted them and it was thirty.

People tried to keep the houses nice on the inside, but decorating a room was a major operation. First, we had to borrow the book of wallpaper patterns from Mr. Johnson’s shop in the High Street (today a private house: ‘Dillamores’), then once the whole family had agreed on a paper, it had to be ordered. By the time it had arrived we had whitewashed the ceiling with chalk and water with a blue bag added to make it white. The painting had been done (usually dark brown) with paint from Mr Arnold. Mabel then goes into great detail about the hanging of the wallpaper with paste made from flour and hot water that needed endless stirring to remove the lumps. Quite an undertaking. (Ed)

One day when I went to draw water from the well, I heard a cat meowing. My neighbour then drew a bucket but she couldn’t hear it. Mr Keen, who was a cowman at the farm, came up the lane so I called him over but he couldn’t hear the cat either. He said he would sit by the well while I drew a bucket. I always gave the handle a pull and then let it go by itself. Everyone heard the cat then. Syd came up from the farm and attached a basket to the rope. He let it down carefully and the kitten clung on to it. The kitten was nearly at the top when it fell off again and landed back in the same crevice. Eventually someone had to make a trip to Potters in Thame to borrow a long rope ladder which they attached to a wooden ladder. Syd then went down and brought the kitten up. Joan, Syd’s daughter put a hot water bottle in her doll’s pram, tucked the kitten up in it and within half an hour it was running around none the worse for its adventures.

Mr Eggleton did all he could to get the cottages modernised but in the end he built two new cottages for us on the opposite side of the lane. Piped water had come to the village so there was a smart bathroom and a copper for boiling water and washing. After we had moved into the new cottages my husband was asked to tie a rope to the chimney of the old cottages and pull them down with the tractor, which he sadly did.” READ MORE...