Barbara Woodhouse and Headington
Mrs Barbara Woodhouse (1910–1988) was born Barbara Kathleen Vera Blackburn. Her early years were spent in Dublin, where her father was headmaster at St Columba’s College; but after his sudden death in 1919 her mother moved with her to Headington, buying Sandfield Cottage on the London Road.
Sandfield Cottage was in fact much more than a cottage: it was a big house with large grounds (see map below). Barbara trained her first ponies in its grounds, and was sent to Headington School, where she recalled that every mistress hated her "because I always went to school smelling of horse".
Barbara went to agricultural college in Shropshire in 1926, and then came back to Headington and opened a riding school and boarding kennels at Sandfield Cottage. The advertisement below, from Kelly’s Directory of 1933, shows Barbara, then aged 23, described as Principal of "The Headington Riding School and Boarding Kennels".
Barbara moved to Wiltshire in 1940 when she married Michael Woodhouse, who was a doctor, and she managed several farms and brought up three children.
Meanwhile her mother, Mrs L. Blackburn, remained at Sandfield Cottage (numbered first 5 and eventually 43 London Road) and continued to run the Sandfield Dog Boarding Kennels until about 1960. Sandfield Cottage was demolished in 1965, and its grounds redeveloped.
Barbara Woodhouse only became famous at the age of 70, when she started to present the programme "Training Dogs the Woodhouse way" in 1980.
Above: Sandfield Cottage in 1939. Its grounds stretched from the present Dial House at 25 London Road in the west to the Manor Buildings on Osler Road in the east, and from the Manor Hospital in the north to London Road in the south. Its grounds are now occupied by the 39 houses of Horwood Close, the service entrance to the Manor Hospital, the Headington telephone exchange, and the petrol station with its shop.
There is a
much fuller entry on Barbara Woodhouse in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The ODNB online is available free to many public library users, including those in Oxfordshire:
enter L followed by your card number in the "Library Card Login" box
See also Barbara Woodhouse, Just Barbara (M. Joseph, 1981)
(autobiography including reminiscences of her time at Sandfield Cottage)
