37 Acre End Street, surrounding land and barns were redeveloped as Blankstones Farm.
Michael Morley tells the fascinating story of his family’s early days here; of village life around them; and of his own circuitous route to the Country Gallery - more in Eynsham Record 28, 2011
‘After my father was demobbed from the RAF in 1945 he was determined to resume the career which his ancestors had pursued in farming. But finding a smallholding was not easy. He repped for the agricultural feed firm, Farmers’ Marketing Supplies, in Berks, Bucks. and Oxon driving his own pre-war Singer Bantam, reg. APN 15. He eventually discovered his blessed plot in a lively Oxfordshire village and he moved his family into Eynsham - mother, me and my twin sisters, Veronica and Angela in 1953. All the best people were doing it – Her Majesty also moved into her new residence in that year.
‘My father bred pigs here (Landrace and Large White for those in the village who still retain some farming memory of the old days), and kept a few thousand laying hens whose fruit was sent mainly to the packing station to have a little lion stamped on them so that the nation could ‘go to work on an egg’. Approximately one quarter of the farm produce was sold at the door of Blankstones Farm. The Post Office, in its pedantic and nationalised way, later mundanely and simply designated our farm, my father’s pride and joy, to be ‘37, Acre End Street’ which did not particularly please him. One of my sisters’ boyfriends carved BLANKSTONES FARM into a piece of oak and my father screwed it up high on the wall above the entrance. He never did display any ‘37’!’