COATES COINCIDENCES

We purchased a semi-detached cottage in Coates near Cirencester on 4th July 2014. We liked the property because it had good sized rooms and big windows letting in loads of light - and because we could see how it could be improved and extended; but most of all because it had an airiness in and around it. Unlike so many other properties we had visited, this one was surrounded by a sense of open space - not hemmed in like so many British houses. It was also very quiet - but the village was clearly lived in (unlike others we had visited - Cotswold hamlets with pretty or rustic stone house but the places looked 'dead' - most properties owned as country cottages and obviously rarely visited by their probable London owners). 

When we looked at a property map of Coates, we saw that a house just up the road from 'ours' was named 'Sarona' and another house we thought was called 'Penney's House' - and thought what a coincidence given our investment company in Australia was called 'Sarhona Pty Ltd' - an amalgam of our daughters names (Sarah and Rhona) and because of our granddaughter, Pennie. We also noticed that the 'big house' of the village (well, set off in its own grounds just on the southern edge of the village) was called 'Bledisloe' - the same name as the famous cup fought out each year by the Australian and New Zealand rugby union teams. So many connections - it just had to be 'meant' we thought.

But we only knew half of it!

The 'big wig' of the area and the major landowner around Coates is Earl Bathurst - and yes, one of his predecessors was the Colonial Secretary and the first inland city in Australia was named in his honour - so another Ozzie connection. Bledisloe House was built (or rebuilt from a house in Derbyshire) by a member of the Bathurst family who as Lord Bledisloe was the Governor- General of New Zealand who donated the eponymous cup referred to above. 

The property was acquired in 1950 by the Royal Agricultural College (now University) at Cirencester and renamed as Bledisloe Lodge, it served as the residential hall of the Royal Agricultural College (until the 1960s). 

In the parish church yard is the grave of  Derrick Francis Douglas Christopherson, a former warden of Bledisloe Lodge.  Christopherson was born in the year Emmanuel UQ was founded (1911) and he died prematurely in 1959 at the age of only 48 years. Each time I take a walk that passes through the churchyard, I stop and pay my respects. 

The village clock which hangs off the wall of the former National School building (established in 1848) and featured in a BBC 2 TV program, The Restorers, in 2017.  Jan and I both appear in the episode on Coates. The clock was first installed in 1911 (that year again!) to celebrate the coronation of King George V. 

Then we discovered only after a year or so that teh curreent Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Dame Fiona Reynolds (elected as Master in 2012) is a neighbour in Glebe House, only 300 yards down the road from us where she lives (when not in Cambridge) with her husband, Bob x, with whom we have had some dealings. As another Dame - Dame Edna Everage would say, ‘Spooky!’