Leach and sons at Trinity Church

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Thomas Leach moved to Abingdon with his young family and opened a shop in Bath Street in 1900. He was a printer and sold books and stationery.

The Leach family went to Trinity Church and had a big influence. Thomas was a lay preacher and preached at Trinity and many free churches in Abingdon and surrounding villages. He also worked for the temperance cause and preached a famous sermon on temperance at Trinity in November 1909, where he calculated if the £22,500 spent on drink in Abingdon in 1908 were saved for three years, two hundred families could be taken from the unsanitary courts of Ock Street and moved rent free to good houses.

Norman, the youngest of his sons, died at sea in 1918, a wireless operator on the S.S. Arka, sunk by a German Submarine. William was badly injured in the trenches and died fairly young.

Two other brothers were well known in Abingdon and at Trinity Church. Frederick managed the printing works, while Victor managed the Bath Street shop. The printing expanded and moved from the back of the Bath Street shop to Ock Street in 1937.

The firm was well known for its clerical printing and had a dog-collared cleric as a logo for its clerical business. Leach’s offering envelopes were well known among all denominations, and how many church people heard of the town Abingdon-on-Thames.

Frederick was remembered at Trinity as being kind and generous. He produced and distributed Trinity News free of charge. He gave generously to surrounding churches and to the elderly and sick children.

Victor was a choirmaster at Trinity and a founding member of the Abingdon Music Society. In 1959 he laid the foundation stone of All Saints Methodist Church. He was also involved in the renovation and modernisation of Trinity Church, moving the organ and later reordering the church, replacing pews with seats.

References:
1. History of Trinity (Wesleyan) Methodist Church by D.B.Tranter.
2) Information by Jonathon Leach at https://www.abingdonfirstworldwar.uk/leach.
3) A Oxford Mail article when the Leach printing business moved from Ock Street https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2091421.new-chapter-print-firm-illustrious-past/.

Thank you to St Helens and St Katherine’s for the ecclesiastical publisher’s advert. The other advert came from The Abingdon Free Press on the British Newspaper Archive in 1906.

Old Abbey House – new roof

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There has been a lot of activity at Old Abbey House, with tradespeople coming and going. The roof looks nearly complete, but it is difficult to tell how work is progressing inside and when the hotel will be open.

P.S. The planning application for widening the gate was the hotel at Cosenors House. I saw ‘hotel’ and did not double-check. Apologies

Abingdon Telephone Subscribers in 1928

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This telephone directory would have been around 1928 when the telephone exchange was in East St Helen Street.

  1. A. G Leach
  2. Barclays Bank Limited
  3. Alderman A.E Preston
  4. Morland & Son
  5. Abingdon Borough Surveyor
  6. …

Somebody phoning from outside Abingdon would have their number connected by using the place and number such as ‘Abingdon 2’. This allowed calls to be placed initially through the local switchboard operator to the number and later by local or national dialling codes.

Some signs still show the original Abingdon national dialling code of 0235, which became 01235 on 16th April 1995 – known as PhONEday.

P.S. Thank you to Glenn for a picture of his bike bell from Braggs with the number Abingdon 34.

Last public call box and Last Manual Telephone Exchange

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Unless anybody knows better, the last public call box disappeared from Abingdon between November 2020 and September 2021 and was in Ock Street.

On the subject of the last telephones, the last manual telephone exchange, operated by human switchboard operators, was in Abingdon and closed in 1975. (Thank you to gbcovercollector.co.uk for the postmark). The Strowger Appreciation Site has pictures of the exchange.

According to Hooke’s Abingdon Almanack and Directory, the manual telephone exchange moved in with the post office in about 1932. The General Post Office and Telephone Exchange was at 25 High Street from 1932 until 1975, now Wetherspoons.

The Telephone Exchange is now on Stratton Way, but the exchange only takes up the lower floors. The upper floors are housing.

Just to add that the Telephone Exchange was on East St  Helen  Street in the 1920s.