Drawing courtesy of Bernard Braun
Donkey Lane Community Orchard – The Inhabitants of Guntrip’s Lane – 1851
1. John & Sarah Guntrip
In 1851 all three cottages in the Donkey Lane “Orchard”, containing the six households, were occupied. The lane, branching off as it does from the present “High Street”, not yet severed off from the village by the railway line, and stretching uphill over the fields to the Upper Icknield Way, had seen a change of name since 1841 when it was enumerated, or certainly the lower part which led from Hill Farm and past the cottages, as Holland Lane. Now in 1851 it is described as “Guntrip’s Lane”. One family living in the lane bears the surname of Guntrip and it would appear that the Lane took its new name from this fact.
Ten years earlier, in 1841,
John and Sarah Guntrip, along with Sarah’s widowed mother, Mary Gomme were living there. Mary had passed away in 1842 leaving John and Sarah as the only occupants of the cottage. John Guntrip, of Thame, had married a Sarah Gomm/Gumm on the 7th December 1818 when John would have been about 37 years of age and Sarah about 36 - indicating that they had married quite late in life. No details of any children have been found so perhaps the marriage was childless. We do not know when they moved into the cottage in Holland’s Lane but this cottage formed their matrimonial home during the latter stages of their life together.
John, although now aged 73, had not retired and was still working as a “dealer in wood” who, we assume, would therefore have been purchasing timber from the local woods either by bidding at auction or buying certain areas of trees in the wood, arranging felling and taking the huge tree trunks back to the village. He probably stored the trees in the garden of his cottage or in a yard somewhere in the village and in some cases may have left them several months or years to “season” before being ready for use and sale. He may have cut the trunks down to smaller sizes. The wood and timber would then have been available for sale to local businesses who converted the timber into other smaller, saleable items - the chair maker, the chair turners, if the turners did not have a pitch within the woods themselves, the wheelwright, the cabinet maker, the carpenter and any other artisan who used wood to produce a finished article.
