Ridgeway is named after Bishop Frederick Edward Ridgeway who was Salisbury’s Bishop from 1911 to 1921.
The National Portrait Gallery has pictures of him here: Frederick Edward Ridgeway (1848-1921), Bishop of Salisbury.
Sadly I don’t know very much at all about Bishop Ridgeway, apart from the following bits of trivia.
Bishop Ridgeway and Thomas Hardy catching a cold
In Michael Millgate’s book ‘Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose’, 1, Mr Millgate reports that Thomas Hardy attended the opening of the Swanage War Memorial Children’s Hospital in October 1919.
Thomas Hardy subsequently caught a cold, and his wife Florence complained that this was because he had to ‘make a little speech of thanks to the Bishop, and also to stand with his hat off in a cold N.E.[North East] wind while the Bishop prayed’
Hardy later spoke of the weather as afflicting the ‘overworked and worthy’ Bishop Ridgeway.
Bishop Ridgeway on the status of women
According to Ruth Newman’s article in the 2002 Sarum Chronicle 2, Bishop Ridgeway spoke about the changed role of women during the First World War.
At a 1915 meeting at the Bishop’s Palace, the bishop said that many women would have been amazed at the occupations that they had taken up. He wondered whether they would want to ‘go back to those quieter paths in which they had worked before’
Ridgeway Road – named after the Bishop rather than a Ridgeway
Finally on Bishop Ridgeway, I’m fairly confident that Ridgeway Road is named after him.
The obvious alternative is that its named in reference to the hill that Ridgeway Road is on – the hill is very much like a ‘ridge’.
However, as far as I know the hill is not known as ‘the Ridgeway’ – it’s old name was actually ‘Mizmaze Hill’.
More persuasively still, perhaps, are the names of the surrounding roads – Moberly, Donaldson and Wordsworth were all Bishops of Salisbury.
Footnotes
- Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose By Thomas Hardy, Michael Millgate Contributor Michael Millgate Published by Oxford University Press, 2001 ISBN 019818526X, 9780198185260 [↩]
- Sarum Chronicle : the history of Salisbury and its district. Issue 2, 2002 Published East Knoyle, Hobnob Press, 2002 ISBN 0946418098 [↩]
I was pleased to see these anecdotes. I do happen to know quite a lot about him because his grandparents, parents and sisters are all buried in Woodbury Park Cemetery in TunbridgeWells and the Friends of WPC have done a little research on their lives as part of a dossier we are building up about the Tunbridge Wells Victorians buried in WPC. . One of his brothers was Bishop of Chichester and another was Sir Joseph West Ridgeway who did all sorts of statesmanlike deeds after having gone off to make his fortune in India aged 16. They were the bright offspring of a hard working clergyman in Tunbridge Wells who besides diligently caring for his local flock was a very active evangelical and among other things ran the publications of the Church Missionary Society. He is said to have worked himself to death. His newly ordained his son Frederick nursed him through his last illness, having just arrived to be his father’s curate, like 2 of his brothers before him . There is a biography of him by his domestic chaplain Ernest Cross of which I have a copy.
Many thanks for your comments. What you said is interesting – especially in the sense that he seems to have had such an archetypal Victorian background, and in a sense that Victorian archetype was perhaps starting to decline during his time as Bishop. His comments about women going back to their ‘quieter paths’ perhaps reflects that in a small way.
I’d like to do some more research on Bishop Ridgeway at some stage – I didn’t find out as much about him as I would have liked.
Thanks again
Matt