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‘the redoubtable Margaret Foote of Lord’s Farm’ (1899-1983)

Margaret Foote

Margaret Foote (24 Jan 1983)

The (undated) photo above almost certainly shows Miss Foote in her garden. A brief obituary appeared in the Eynsham Record 1 (1984):

‘Margaret Foote, a member of the Eynsham History Group for many years, had a love for local history, and an especial awareness of the historical importance of her home, Lord’s Farm. It is entirely in character that she has bequeathed the latter, with adjacent cottages and barn, to the Oxford Preservation Trust; her Abbey relics to the County Museum at Woodstock; and her history notebooks and files to the EHG. The latter include notes taken at about 30 of our meetings between 1959 and 1977.’

The OPT undertook substantial restoration to Lord’s Farm in 2016 but plans ‘to convert the adjoining two storey stone barn into a two bedroom dwelling with single storey link extension and associated private amenity space’ were lodged with WODC in 2019 and approved in November 2020.


Edward Hibbert provided a longer tribute in the Eynsham Record 9 (1992) pp 34-42:

Margaret Foote was born in Oxford and educated at Somerville College, where she read English. Her obituary in The Roundabout records that 'her father was an army chaplain; and her mother an artist who spent some time in the Canadian wilderness - train drivers would drop her, all alone, at some remote spot in the morning and she would spend the day painting Indian chiefs and their people, and the train would pick her up in the evening! Margaret inherited this adventurous and indomitable spirit - which must have been enhanced in 1914 when she found herself inside Germany at the outbreak of the First World War; her story of the journey home was quite hair-raising'. Margaret left her mother's collection of oil paintings of American Indians, made in 1895, to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

Margaret Foote and the Bible VanDuring the Second World War she worked for the YWCA and subsequently devoted a great deal of her energy to the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society. On behalf of the latter organization she was regularly to be seen selling bibles from an old bread van outside St Leonard's, where she ran the church bookstall for 30 years. This photo probably dates from the 1980s

The old horse-drawn bread van, originally belonging to Biggers, had become Margaret's trademark. Discovered derelict in the village, it had been repaired, repainted, fitted with shelves, and stocked with bibles and other Christian texts. For many years it took part in the annual carnival procession through the village streets to the playing fields. In the 1955 carnival it was hauled by the vicar, the Revd Stuart Blanch (later Archbishop of York), and the Baptist minister, the Revd RJ Hamper, both dressed as Benedictine monks. The front of the van bore the inscription: 'To the Glory of God and to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of the birth A.D.955 of AELFRIC, Bible Scholar and the first Abbot of Eynsham'. The van was redecorated several times during the next 27 years but this inscription remained: read more in the Eynsham Record 22 (2005).

More recently, the van was lovingly restored by John Pukaniuk, as shown in the video below:

Margaret held regular bible study meetings at Lord's Farm, and when she retired as secretary of the Eynsham Bible Society the vicar, the Revd Peter Ridley wrote 'it has been part of her vocation to befriend university undergraduates from overseas and to share with them the Word of the good news of Jesus Christ ... what an example she has given to all of us of faithful Christian service over so many years'.

In his report on the Church Restoration Appeal, Charles Caine said, 'I cannot help being reminded of those staunch friends of the Appeal whose lives have run their course - Margaret Foote whose Morris Minor was the star attraction of our first Treasure Sale, indomitable in her faith and charity ... Joan Weedon described her as 'one of Eynsham's most illustrious inhabitants ... she devoted her life to the propagation of Christianity'.

Margaret Foote was a woman of many and varied interests - Bible study, her church, local history and architecture, the Council for the Protection of Rural England, the Eynsham Society and, not least, Lord's Farm and her garden. There she nurtured and cherished a profusion of wild and cultivated plants, regularly on view during the village's annual 'Open Gardens' weekend.

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