On This Day in Wembury — 19 September 1935
An advertisement in the Western Morning News announced that John Wakeham, auctioneer, had received instructions from the executors of the late Mr. J. N. Atwill to sell by auction the contents of Spriddlestone Barton, Brixton, just a short distance from Wembury.
The auction, scheduled for Saturday 21 September 1935, offered a full array of farm implements, household furniture, poultry, and effects. Farm items included wagons, carts, a self-binder, ploughs, harrows, a hay lift, root drill, sheep troughs, dipping apparatus, and cider pipes. Around forty young hens were also listed for sale. Inside the farmhouse, buyers could bid for oak tables and stools, iron bedsteads, wardrobes, carpets, linens, and a wide assortment of domestic furnishings.
Notably, two cottages with possession were also put up for sale, showing that the auction extended beyond the moveable contents of the farm.
Source: Western Morning News, 19 September 1935.
Reflection: Spriddlestone Barton’s dispersal fits into a long line of Wembury area estate and farm breakups recorded in the archive. From the grand sales of Wembury House and its landscaped gardens to the more modest but still significant clearances of farms and cottages, each notice charts the shifting shape of local landholding. By the 1930s, such auctions were as much a social event as a transaction — neighbours gathered not only to buy tools or furniture but also to mark the passing of one farming chapter and the start of another.