Lord Nuffield (William Morris) and Headington
William Morris, Lord Nuffield (1877–1963) is always regarded as a Cowley lad; but in fact his parents were married in Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, and he spent his childhood in Headington, as his father was bailiff at Wood Farm from c.1881 to c.1891.
The Morris family is shown in the 1891 census as living at "Brasenose Lane", and they probably lived in Brasenose Farmhouse (above), which is now across the bypass from Curry’s but was then part of Wood Farm. Morris may have lived here from the age of 4 to 14.
In the second half of the nineteenth century Brasenose Farm had only 20 acres of land and was farmed by the Pethers in conjunction with the much larger Wood Farm to the east of the Slade.
Richard Pether and his brother Henry originally held Bartlemas Farm, but by 1851 Richard had the lease of Wood Farm, which was owned by Magdalen College. He thus came to live within the boundary of the newly-established parish of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. At the time of the 1861 census he employed twelve men and eleven boys to look after the 207 acres of Wood Farm; ten years later, his land had increased to 295 acres; and twenty years later to 370 acres, worked by 17 men, three women, and six boys. This growth is probably explained by the fact that Richard, much to the disgust of the people of Quarry, had been encroaching on the Open Magdalens.
On 7 November 1876, at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Richard Pether’s daughter Emily Ann married Frederick Morris, a footloose and feckless clothier’s assistant from Witney. The newly-weds moved to Worcester, where Frederick had been living before his marriage, and on 10 October 1877 Emily gave birth to their first child, whom they named William Richard after his two grandfathers: he of course was the future Lord Nuffield, and in 1881 appears in the Worcester census.
But Frederick Morris failed to make a living there, and soon after the census was taken, the family came crawling back to Emily’s father at Wood Farm for support. Richard – who at 64 had been a widower for ten years – made Frederick his farm bailiff. Soon after the 1891 census was taken, the family moved to James Street in East Oxford; William took a job in a bicycle shop; and the rest is history.
With no surviving son to take over the business, Richard Pether moved away from Wood Farm in 1895, when he was 80, and went to live at Unity House in Larkins Lane, Old Headington with his two unmarried daughters, Annie and Elizabeth (Bessy). When he died in 1902 (the year his grandson managed to produce his first motorcycle), he was buried with his wife and four young sons in the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry. The Pether family continued to own Unity House, and Mrs Emily Ann Yockney, Lord Nuffield’s sister, lived there with her family until 1912.
William Morris's father Frederick died in 1916, and his mother Emily Ann Morris in 1934.
The Pether family grave is situated immediately in front of the C. S. Lewis signpost at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. Here lie Lord Nuffield’s grandfather, Richard Pether (who died in 1902, aged 87) and his grandmother Ann Ursula (who died in 1871, aged 51). Also buried in the grave are three of their children: their son Richard (who died in 1867, aged 11, at Mr Hurst’s School in Littlemore); and their two youngest daughters, who never married but cared for their father Richard in his old age and outlived him. Next to this grave are three child-sized graves whose inscriptions are now illegible: they must belong to Richard and Ann Pether’s other three boys, who all died in the 1850s before their first birthday: Walter, an earlier Richard, and Henry. Their eldest daughter, Ann Ursula Pether (baptised on 3 Jan 1846) was buried at Cowley St. James on 16 April 1846.Nuffield’s later connection with Headington relates to the enormous gifts he gave towards medical research and hospitals, and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre bears his name.
This cartoon, entitled THE HORN OF PLENTY: "SAY WHEN!", was published in Punch on 2 December 1936. Underneath is written "With Mr. Punch’s congratulations to Lord Nuffield, who has increased his enormous gift to Oxford University for Medical Research by another £750,000."
- Pether family tree: drawn up by Irene Lowe of Australia, who is descended from Richard Pether’s older brother William (one of the first emigrants to Western Australia in 1838) and his wife Irene
- Morris family tree: brief details from The Complete Peerage
Note that there is a
much fuller entry on Lord Nuffield
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography