Some More History

The picture was given us by Tom.

Tom’s Field is a little more than 4.5 acres and was used for stone quarrying, having heads for three underground workings. When underground working became less attractive the land became used as a smallholding for cattle, chicken and pigs.

The whole of Tom’s Field Road once belonged to the Bower family but was gradually sold off as building plots. Tom’s Field was first used for casual camping in the late 1950s, when part of the land was a smallholding.

Tom and his father developed the site and had some interesting and innovative ideas. There was Tom’s venture into pre-erected tents. This was in the mid-1970s when the concept of tent camping as an inexpensive family holiday faced increasing competition from caravans, both static and touring. Cheap package holidays in Spain were enjoying a massive boom with the advent of Laker Airways and other such all- inclusive operators. In France there were large sites that operated tents for camping holidays with the holidaymakers travelling over to the Continent by coach. It was in this environment that Tom thought that if others could do this sort of thing, why should it not be possible at Tom’s Field?

He obtained a few suitable frame tents, four to six person size. To make them comfortable, he laid down wooden sections made of demolition floorboards and sheets of ply. These were then covered with groundsheets that were tacked down. The tents were duly erected. At this time, a company called Caramarine, based in Dorchester, supplied equipment to fit out holiday caravans and Tom with camping goods. Tom asked Graham Windsor, the then owner of Caramarine, to provide interior furnishings for the tents. Each one was equipped with a camping kitchen, table, two burners and grill cooker, gas bottle, cutlery, plastic plates, bowls and mugs, pots and frying pan, bucket, bowl and cooking utensils. Tom was then ready to commence operations as a “rent-a-tent” operator. He did not spend much on advertising this venture; indeed, he always advised us to use only the free entries in camping literature, but to start with he met with some modest degree of success. However, it soon became apparent to Tom that the operation required a lot more attention than he could manage in the busy season and to cap it all he was losing quite a lot of equipment from the tents when they were not occupied.

Other campers would enter these tents under the cover of darkness and remove valuable items such as cookers, beds and other bits and pieces, to the extent that Tom decided to call it a day and sold off most, if not all, of the equipment.

There remains an example of one of the items used in the pre-erected tents. Tom ordered some orange plastic chairs that came ready to be assembled – an early type of flat-pack. A few of these survived for many years. Tom used to sit on one outside the shop, passing the time of day for varying periods. If in a particularly communicative mood, Tom could hold a passer-by’s attention for quite a while. We still have – and use – one of these orange chairs.