Driving out of Basingstoke westwards towards Dummer and the M3, you cannot escape the great changes here since Hatch Warren and Beggarwood were built, and now the former golf course is full of new builds.
A bit further on is a development called Hounsome Fields. But why this name?
Harold Hounsome was born at Freefolk in 1890, the middle of three children.
He left school at age 13 and worked, as did many of his family, at Portals Mill.
His parents had both been in service to the Portal family at Laverstoke Park. His father, Henry, had been a blacksmith for the estate but he died on a hot August day ‘dropping dead in the harvest field’ and has a gravestone just at the doorway to St Mary the Virgin Church in Freefolk.
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His widow, Amy, had been in service since age 14, firstly close to her home in Dorset and for some years at Laverstoke, where she was possibly housekeeper.
After her widowhood, Lord Portal found her work in the post office and eventually re-marriage to another Portal’s mill worker, a widower called James Hassell who had seven children. (He had a partially severed arm, a not uncommon injury among paper mill workers using paper guillotines).
Bere Mill is nowadays a desirable residence but back then it became the home of Amy and James Hassell and their large family. The building had been a corn mill, built by James Deane.
In 1906, at age 16, Harold became an apprentice at Wallis & Steevens at their premises on Station Hill and, like many young men, acquired a motorcycle as his means of transport.
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He worked for a while in the planning department at the Royal Air Force Factory in Farnborough before enlisting in 1916.
His interest in vehicles led him into business. He took over a garage at the bottom of Sarum Hill from Grover, Smith & Willis – Percy Grover was his brother-in-law and he too had done his apprenticeship at Wallis & Steevens.
Harry William Edward (Ted) Willis later was in business with John Smith with a garage on London Road near the White Hart.
The Sarum Hill garage was sold in 1936. In 1920 Harold had bought his first lorry for £300 and six years later, he bought Kempshott Hill petrol station for £190, which with the rise in motoring and its location on the very busy Kempshott Hill, expanded to sell 200,000 gallons of petrol a year.
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Esso acquired it in 1954 for £14,000. In 1949 he bought Kempshott House, and all the out-buildings left behind by the Army and built a bungalow there which he occupied until 1970, retiring to Bournemouth with his daughter, Mollie until his death in 1981.
Kempshott House had been used during WW2 by British and Canadian troops for experimental flame-throwing weapon research, leaving the ground contaminated.
When Harold purchased it the house was almost derelict and he began a grain-drying business.
Grain was collected from local farmers, dried in the huts left by the Army and then stored on the ballroom floor of that former mansion.
Kempshott House had once been a very grand house, used by the future George IV when he was Prince of Wales for hunting and entertaining his mistress and then for his honeymoon after he had married Princess Caroline of Brunswick.
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In 1796 it became the home of General Sir Guy Carleton, later 1st Lord Dorchester – a title he was awarded for his successes in the American War and as Governor General of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
We know that Jane Austen actually attended a ball in Kempshott House, a grander affair than the Austen sisters usually went to.
Harold had married Amelia Weaver, daughter of the Head Gardener at Oakley Hall and they had a son and a daughter.
Their son, Harry was killed in WW2, flying with 15 Squadron RAF in Lancaster bombers.
On 5 November 1944 he was part of a bombing raid on Solingen, Germany and was killed, probably in a ‘friendly fire’ incident when another bomber above dropped bombs that struck his aircraft, causing it to crash with the loss of all the crew.
He is buried in Rheinberg War Cemetery with a memorial in Dummer church and on the Bomber Command Memorial, Lincoln.
The value of education and hard work is evident in his life. I wonder what he would make of ‘his’ new estate?
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