Cottage industry
For the priest Thomas Wright, writing in 1898, broom squires such as the guide in our app trail George Mayes belonged to a ‘picturesque race of aborigines who get their living by the poetical fashion of working the landscape into brooms’. In truth, the inhabitants of the Devil’s Punch Bowl that he described with such easy condescension were neither all indigenous to the area, certainly not in Wright’s primitivist sense, nor did they make their living exclusively, or even primarily, from this craft.
Yet while we shouldn’t exaggerate the economic importance of broom-making for the residents of Highcombe Bottom, they had long been very strongly associated with it. Census returns indicate that at least some of them did declare this as their occupation. In 1841 one broom maker is listed, three in 1851, four in 1861 and two in 1871. A contemporary of Wright’s, the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould, was probably closer to the mark when he wrote, in his 1896 novel The Broom Squire, that people like George “pastured their sheep, goats and cattle on the side of the Punch Bowl, and added to their earnings the profits of the trade they monopolise – that of making and selling brooms”.
By 1925, as George points out in the trail, broom making, using birch and heather for the heads, with handles of hazel or chesnut, was a dying craft, but there were still at least 8 cottages in the Punch Bowl and up to 50 people living there. Their cottages – some of them, including George’s, in ruins today – are visible in the 1920 Ordnance Survey map used for the trail.
As for George Mayes himself, we know he was in his sixties in 1925, and died in 1939. Census documents show he was the son of Frances, from Frensham, and George, a farmer originally from Norfolk. Always unmarried, he appears with a number of occupations over his life. In 1891 a gamekeeper, in 1901 a farmer’s son, in 1911 a farmer. In 1921 he also worked as a labourer at Hill Farm near Thursley. The image below was taken in Highcombe Bottom in 1907, showing George with milk pails.
References
Christopher K Currie and Neil Rushton, “An Archaeological and Historical Survey of the Hindhead Common Estate”, 2 vols. Report to the National Trust, 2005.
Thomas Wright, Hindhead, or the English Switzerland and its Literary and Historical Associations (London, 1898)
Sabine Baring-Gould, The Broom Squire (London and New York, 1896)