Local historian Miles Green shares his knowledge of interesting history.

Many of you will have noticed the clay caricature on the ridge of the gable of The Elms, a house on Elm Road facing the front common. It is a caricature of William Gladstone who was the Liberal Prime Minister for some 14 years between 1868 and 1894. It is a very good likeness, but in a fool’s cap with a rat’s body.

I have always assumed that it must have come from Rayners where it would have advertised Sir Philip Rose’s political hostility to Gladstone who was the great political rival of Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory leader and Prime Minister.

I have always wondered how it ended up on The Elms and said as much when giving a talk at Rayners a few years ago. After the talk, I had a note from Margaret Birch, who had been at the talk, to say that her grandfather, Henry Wheeler, who built The Elms in 1931, was friendly with Mrs Editha Lancaster Rose who was married to Bateman Lancaster Rose a brother of the second Sir Philip Rose. The ‘ Lancaster Roses lived at the White House just up from the Horse & Jockey. The ridge tile was a gift from Mrs Lancaster Rose to Henry Wheeler which she could well have claimed when Rayners was sold to be a schoo I in 1919.

However, I heard recently from John Bennett of the Wychwoods Local History Society. He had spotted the photograph of the Gladstone caricature on our website and wroteto say that they have a very similar figure atop a house in Milton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire (midway between Oxford and Cheltenham). He had also found two other versions, one in Luton and one in Taplow, so it may be that there was a thriving business in these caricatures as a political statement.

I have asked him for any photos of these other versions.

Miles Green, Village Voice, May 2025