HARDY'S BIRTHPLACE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 44, 20 August 1938, Page 26

HARDY'S BIRTHPLACE

Thomas: Hardy's birthplace, an old thatched cottage at one end of the harplet of Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, has been sold by Lady -i Hanbury to Mr. P. F. Far sons, who has been .the tenant at Bockhampton Farm for 13 years. Lady Hanbury ■is disposing of -her estate in that district. The cottage stands ori the edge ofj Puddietown Heath, the stretch of wild] moorland that Hardy called 'tEddon Heath" iri his novels. , The eight-room-ed house with cob walls was built -by Hardy's great-grandfather: Hardy, the son of; a builder; was born there on June 2, 1840,' and in it he wrote "Under the Greenwood Tree", and "Far From the! Madding Crowd.'" ' ■ • • < Many pbople visit the spot each year, and in 1931 a column of granite, erected, outside the cottage by American admirers; of the novelist, was unveiled I by Professor John Livingston Lowes, of Harvard and Oxford. .Hardy did not want the cottage to become the resort of sightseers, and the late Sir Cecil Hanbury once stated : __"l -\yas asked by Hardy, shortly before he died, to -■ give him -my word that tiie cottage would, so long as I. or my heirs held it, be maintained just as if he were still alive —that is, with an ordinary jlocal labburer living in it in an: ordinary labourer's way, paying a few shillings a week, taken no., particular notice of by anyone, i certainly not by sightseeing tourists."