The re-imagined story …

My mother wasn’t an emotional type of woman, but when John and Hannah Bates moved away she was inconsolable. I don’t think I’d ever seen her cry before, so it came as quite a shock.

The Bates boys Bill and Tom had already gone and with the selfishness of youth all I could think was how lucky they were to escape. There was nothing in Snap anymore, but to be honest the village probably never had a thriving social life; not like Swindon where there were theatres and clubs and pubs.

But what there had been in Snap was a sense of community, and now even that had gone. I think that’s probably what upset mother as much as the departure of John and Hannah Bates. The families she had lived alongside had all left – the babies born at the same time she had hers, the children raised, the hardships shared, the good times celebrated, all in the past.

I hoped we might follow the Bates family but my parents were loathe to leave. We stuck it out a while longer, but things were never going to improve. There would be no new jobs, no one moving into the empty cottages; no one even came back to visit those of us still here.

I never made it to the bright lights of Swindon. My parents moved up the road to Aldbourne, and now I find, like mother, I don’t like change much either.

The facts …

The first recorded mention of Snap, or Snape as it was sometimes called, is in a medieval document dated 1268. In the 14^th century Snap was the smallest settlement in the parish of Aldbourne and one of the poorest in Wiltshire.

During the last decades of the 18^th century the village consisted of five cottages built on the southern side of the valley and by 1851 there were just 41 inhabitants. For more than one hundred years Snap village was he home of the Bates family.

Three generations of the Bates family made their home in Snap. They worshipped at the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel at Woodsend where John Bates was a trustee, and worked as agricultural labourers on the two farms that supported the village.

In 1861 John Waldron owned Snap Farm where he employed 8 men, 7 boys and a groom on his 411 acre holding. Thomas Bates was employed as a carter, living in one of the larger properties in the village which had an extension to accommodate the cart and stable the horses.  His son Joseph boarded at Snap Farm where he worked as under carter. Thomas’ father Joseph lived in the village and at the age of 76 he was still working as an agricultural labourer.

The difficult years 1871-1880 saw the onset of an agricultural depression. A series of cold, wet summers resulted in a succession of poor harvests and the residents of Snap began to move away.

At the time of the 1881 census there were just seven occupied cottages and a property described as a hut where the young shepherd William Marten lived.

John Bates lived at Snap Cottage with his wife Hannah and their three youngest children, William 14, Emily 10 and Thomas 7. For William, already working as an agricultural labourer, and his younger brother Thomas, there was no future for them in Snap.

William moved to Swindon where there were jobs aplenty in the railway factory. He married Ada Florence Gerrard at St Mark’s Church on September 30, 1893 and at the time of the 1901 census the couple and their three young children Dorothy 6; Hubert 4 and 8 month old Frances, were living at 13 Curtis Street. William’s brother Thomas was boarding with them and the brothers both worked as Machinemen in the GWR Works.

Back home in Snap a series of events would sound the death knell for the village. William’s parents had already left the cottage that had been their home for more than thirty years and moved to East Garston near Lambourn. Then in 1905 Henry Wilson, a butcher and sheep dealer from Ramsbury, bought both Snap and Leigh Farms. He quickly turned the land to grass and shipped in a more profitable crop – sheep.

Snap was all but deserted with just two remaining residents, James and Rachel Fisher. Following the death of her husband, Rachel was persuaded to move into Aldbourne, which she found too quiet, missing the birdsong and the barking of foxes in her cottage garden at Snap.

Following the outbreak of war in 1914 the village was used by the War Office for military training. The cottages fell into ruin, the stones robbed for new building in neighbouring Woodsend during the 1940s.

William Bates died on September 26, 1925 at his home in Curtis Street. His funeral at Radnor Street Cemetery took place on September 30th when he was buried in plot D907 where he was later joined by his son Hubert who died in 1932 and [Ada] Florence, his wife, who died in 1943.

Ruins of Snap farmhouse in the 1930s.

In 1991 the pupils of Toothill School, Swindon placed a stone in memory of the people of Snap. Photograph is published courtesy of Brian Robert Marshall.